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Chapter Text

New York City
present day

Ned Sang wasn’t usually late for his classes, particularly the ones in the Eastern Arts that were his current obsession. And he was never late for a meeting with his favorite professor, Dr. Sarah Chen, who taught specialized graduate-level classes in Chinese brush painting.

Not that he’d been called to many meetings. His work was, he knew, exceptional. He’d already turned in the final assignments for her class. There was no need for anything like remedial tutoring sessions or necessary faculty interventions. Nor was it time to discuss his thesis. And yet today he had a meeting with Dr. Chen.

And he was late.

He hadn’t been sleeping well, waking up in the middle of the night with weird dreams about people who were sort of familiar until he woke up and couldn’t remember any of them. The places the dreams happened, however, were engraved on his memory, and had been the subject of several of his recent watercolors.

He burst into the room, two minutes late for the meeting, already saying, “I’m so sorry . . .” He stopped in mid-burst. What? The fuck?

Instead of one professor, there were three, lined up like an audition or a tribunal, all on the same side of a long folding table. Doctor Chen was seated in the center. She was flanked by Dr. Lan, who taught ancient history and also the science of color theory, and Dr. Fitzgerald, who was the head of the Department of East Asian Art and History. Because, of course, the white guy would be the department chair.

“Mr. Sang,” Dr. Fitzgerald drawled.

Ned narrowly avoided the instinct to cringe, wishing he had something to hide behind. Like a painted fan, maybe. And where had that idea come from? Instead, he stopped in front of the table and made an elaborate bow, of the sort that people made in Chinese dramas and probably nowhere else. It was perhaps not the best introduction.

Dr. Chen pushed a stray hair back into her bun and cleared her throat. “We have concerns about your final assignment for my course.”

That was completely absurd. Ned thought, no, he knew, that he was by far the best in the class at the delicate watercolor techniques that Dr. Chen was teaching. He picked them up like they were the easiest thing in the world. He was even modifying some of them, sure that they could be further perfected.

Dr. Fitzgerald had been looking through a stack of paper, shaking his head. Ned recognized one of the watercolors he’d submitted for his final assignment, along with some of his earlier work. The professor was frowning deeply. And not in a good way.

There was a small stack of books on the table between Dr. Fitzgerald and Dr. Chen. Ned recognized the textbook of watercolor techniques that they had been using—and largely ignoring—for Dr. Chen’s course. There were also a few coffee-table Chinese art books and catalogs from various museum exhibits. In front of Dr. Fitzgerald was a thin, ancient-looking book which was titled “Fan Painting Through the Dynasties” by someone named Nie Huaisang. Ned reached for that book, unaccountably excited.

Somewhat belatedly, Ned realized that the title was written in Chinese. He knew only a few words of Mandarin, and didn’t actually know any Chinese characters except the ones he’d been taught in a calligraphy course last year. But he was absolutely sure that was the title.

Ned withdrew his hand and looked up from the book to find Dr. Fitzgerald eyeing him balefully. “So, you do know this book,” he stated, as though this was somehow objectionable.

“Um . . .” Ned said. “I can read the title?” This might not have been the best thing to say, but he was a little stuck on the fact that the title was truly written in Hanja, which against all expectation, were as clear to him as English.

“You’ve read more than that,” Dr. Fitzgerald accused, voice still ice. “You copied it for your assignments.”

“I . . . what?” Ned hadn’t copied anything except, maybe, a dream. He had never seen that book before, had he? He couldn’t have copied something he’d never seen. Right? Then how did he know what it was? And that it contained at least one chapter entirely on painting birds?

Dr. Chen, looking both mildly annoyed and sympathetic, pulled the book in front of herself and opened it to a page marked with a sticky note. She stared at the page as though it had betrayed her, then turned it so Ned could see it.

It was a full-page color print of a delicate watercolor, faded but still somehow vibrant. Perfectly rendered along the folds of a paper fan, was a mountain partly hidden behind clouds. Showing through the clouds were a few waterfalls and some precariously perched buildings. And . . .

And. Oh, shit. That was the Cloud Recesses, before the fall of the Lan Sect. And how did he know that? The calligraphy at the bottom of the page, which he could now read, stated that the artist was unknown and probably from the Tang Dynasty.

It was also an exact copy of the piece he had submitted for his final project.

Through the screaming, “No. No, no, no,” in his brain, the only thought that surfaced was the entirely unhelpful notion that his new watercolor was better. It was, after all, not faded at all. Which made sense because he remembered painting it, just last week, in his dormitory room. He also remembered painting it while seated in an airy pavilion, overlooking the Cloud Recesses. And again, seated at a stunningly carved table in someone’s Imperial Palace . . .

Feeling a bit lightheaded, he leaned over the table and pulled the offending book toward him. Dr. Chen let him have it. He paged through it, careful of the aging pages even though he seemed to be trembling. Page after page of lovely ink and watercolor paintings; not all by Nie Huaisang, but all were somehow engraved on his memory. As were the artists. They had been his teachers and friends and, a few of them, his students. Which was impossible because the dates on the illustrations spanned centuries.

And page after page of Chinese writing was not only readable but completely familiar, like he’d pored over it numerous times. But Ned had never seen this book before. He’d never studied it.

No. He hadn’t studied it, he realized dizzily; he’d written it. Over a hundred years ago, daring to use his real name on a book which had seemed to him at the time to be merely a celebration of Chinese culture.

His real name. Which was, in fact, Nie Huaisang. Ned Sang’s American step-father had shortened it when he’d married his mother. He hadn’t minded. Lots of things in grade school became easier when everyone could pronounce his name.

The Nie Huaisang who’d written the book a hundred years ago had enjoyed brief popularity, until the book was suspected of supporting the old Imperialist Empire, and Nie Huaisang had been forced to try to emigrate to . . . Well, it didn’t really matter, did it? It had ended with Nie Huaisang’s . . . death?. . . on a boat heading for somewhere that wasn’t China.

Ned, who was also Nie Huaisang, had been born in Sacramento, a few years after his parents had emigrated from Beijing. His father had already been ill, and died before Ned was born. His mother, practical and determined, had married a Californian.

Ned remembered the other Nie Huaisang’s desperate flight from Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party. He remembered the crowded boat, and the disease that spread through the passengers. He remembered dying. It was not particularly pleasant. But it seemed that he had made it to somewhere that wasn’t China after all.

That wasn’t the only time he’d died. He remembered dying of illness in a bed in his room in the Nie fortress, surrounded by people pretending to mourn the passing of their Chief Cultivator. And again of some sort of poisoning in a bed in Qinghe, and again of a sword wound in Yiling. . . He was feeling a bit queasy, and needed to stop remembering now.

It was clear, though, that this was not his first life. He’d been reincarnated possibly over a dozen of times. This was his twelfth? fourteenth? reincarnation. The world was spinning a little. He’d figure it out later.

Meanwhile, he let himself slip to the floor in a faint.

It had worked before, right?

Chapter Text

Ned was not, in fact, unconscious. As soon as he hit the floor, his body remembered that it had a golden core, weak but serviceable, and began healing him. Nie Huaisang ignored it, in favor of remembering his first life.

Avenging his brother’s murder by encouraging a depressed young man to sacrifice himself in order to resurrect Wei Wuxian had not been Nie Huaisang’s first plan. Nor his second or third. It had, however, worked. Sort of.

He had counted, correctly, on the support of Lan Wangji. In the sixteen years after Wei Wuxian’s death, the man had been nearly invisible, hidden behind a wall of silence and stoicism. Most people assumed that Lan Wangji was meticulously enacting the perfect Lan, in regret for his momentary lapse of supporting the Yiling Patriarch. He was both hated and admired for it.

But Huaisang recognized mourning when he saw it. He figured out almost right away that Lan Wangji had never gotten over his schoolboy crush on Wei Wuxian, even when Wei Wuxian had become a demonic cultivator, the antithesis of all the righteous Lan Precepts. Lan Wangji did not regret supporting the Yiling Laozu. He regretted failing to support him enough.

The plan had gone almost exactly as Huaisang intended. Lan Wangji had stuck to the resurrected Wei Wuxian like a lover, and the two had handily brought Jin Guangyao to justice. Wei Wuxian had turned out to be a bit less bloodthirsty than Huaisang had thought. So it had been Lan Xichen who dealt the actual fatal blow. That had been fine with Huaisang. Xichen had stood back and watched Jin Guangyao’s murder of Nie Mingjue unfold, without ever loosing his insipid smile.

It was the aftermath that had gone awry.

Nie Huaisang thought that Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian had spent their entire investigative journey making out like the rabbits in the back mountains of the Cloud Recesses (though without the proliferation of baby bunnies that had populated the entire meadow). Afterward, Lan Wangji should have immediately left the Lan Clan and its four thousand rules behind, to live with Wei Wuxian. Instead, he’d become Chief Cultivator. And Wei Wuxian had left him.

Sixteen years of mourning Wei Wuxian had done nothing to improve Lan Wangji’s impression of demonic cultivation, despite his insistence that Wei Wuxian himself was “good.” Sixteen years of being dead had not improved Wei Wuxian’s ability to follow rules. Subsequent years of encouragement by Nie Huaisang did not do anything except intensify the pining. He’d even provided them the appropriate porn, drawn in later years by Huaisang himself. After a great deal of research, of course. Though he was always observing, never participating.

The two of them never got together. Oh, there were some good reasons for that. Hanguang-Jun, the only person who could be Chief Cultivator, was required to keep his stellar reputation. And Wei Wuxian never stopped using irregular cultivation techniques (and inventing new ones). The Lan sect clearly didn’t intend to help. The rule, “Marriage between two men is prohibited,” was added to the wall of shame at Cloud Recesses, to accompany, “Do not go near Wei Wuxian.” No other sect seemed ready to welcome the man who had broken every rule in the book in order to save them. But, Huaisang told himself, two not-lovers who could avoid a relationship for so long didn’t really want it in the first place.

Lan Wangji cultivated nearly to immortality then gave it up and went into seclusion. Nie Huaisang became Chief Cultivator in his stead, claiming to be horrified by the very idea. In actual fact, Huaisang had been planning to take over for more than a decade. He wasn’t actually useless. He’d been running his sect for a very long time, while simultaneously pretending to be useless, which in fact made it harder.

It turned out that Lan Wangji had given up cultivation when it became obvious that Wei Wuxian would never be able to reach immortality with him. It seemed that Wei Wuxian didn’t have a golden core. This explained quite a few things about Wei Wuxian’s inferiority complex, along with his continued use of demonic cultivation.

(Nie Huaisang did eventually find out what had happened to Wei Wuxian’s core. It had been one of Huaisang’s most dangerous investigations. Jiang Cheng had been very drunk and very, very angry. Zidian left scars.)

As far as he knew, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian both died virgins. Huaisang didn’t know for sure, because he’d died first, after only twelve years of pretending to be reluctant to boss people around as Chief Cultivator. Some of the inks he’d used in those days were just as toxic as cultivating with an angry saber. Who knew?

Nie Huaisang also hadn’t known that he was on the Heaven’s Shit List until he got nearly to the gates of the Naihe Bridge, the bridge leading to reincarnation. There, instead of having his memories of his past life wiped away by drinking Meng Po’s Soup, he was given a stern talking-to by a person who looked disturbingly like Jin Guangyao, but wasn’t. He was sent on his way with his memories free to emerge at the appropriate time.

The Heavens, it seemed, had planned the whole ‘force a coreless cultivator to learn to cultivate resentful energy’ thing. The self-trained demonic cultivator was then supposed to get his core back in his next life, aided by an immortal righteous cultivator. But Nie Huaisang had interfered with the cycle of reincarnation and resurrected Wei Wuxian too early, while his core was still trapped inside Jiang Cheng. And Lan Wangji had refused immortality.

Nie Huaisang was supposed to make it right. Though he wasn’t exactly sure how. He thought he needed to reunite Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian so they could finally cultivate together. Perhaps the Heavens wanted righteous Lan Wangji and demonic Wei Wuxian to become immortal cultivation partners, balancing Yin and Yang in a loving tension between Qi and resentful energy. Together they would bring about a shining age of cultivation. Or something.

A very immature and cynical part of Nie Huaisang thought that the Heavens didn’t actually care about bringing about some sort of golden age. They merely wanted to try out the concept of Dual Cultivation between dark and light. He was pretty sure they wouldn’t actually watch, but you never know.

* * * * *

In his second life, Huaisang was born once again in Qinghe. The Nie were a prosperous merchant family with a small army of highly trained martial artists as guards. By the time Huaisang came of age and his memories of the past had solidified, fifty more years had passed since Wei Wuxian’s second death. The cultivation world—the Jianghu—had diminished in numbers, but there were still Lans at the Cloud Recesses in Gusu and Jin in their golden tower in Lanling.

But the strongest sect was the Jiang. Because Jiang Cheng had channelled all his feelings—grief and anger, or whatever it was— about Wei Wuxian’s two lives and deaths into cultivation, and had managed to cultivate to immortality. With Wei Wuxian’s core.

There was one other immortal too. Sort of. Wen Ning wasn’t actually alive. Whatever Yin/Yang balance the Heavens wanted now depended on the righteous Jiang Cheng’s abiding rage and the undead Wen Ning’s eternal passivity.

It worked. More or less. At least the world hadn’t ended yet.

(It was also possible that the Heavens merely wanted to mess with Nie Huaisang.)

The diminished Nie clan still had ties to the Jianghu. Though they no longer did much cultivating, they had a kick-ass martial arts program, and often hired out their less-well-trained disciples as bodyguards.

Huaisang set about learning anything he could about the other sects. It wasn’t much. He heard rumors of a promising young cultivator among the Lan, but had no excuse to go to Cloud Recesses. He heard a bit about the Immortal Jiang and the Ghost General, but most people were too afraid of Jiang Cheng’s anger and Wen Ning’s reputation as an undead demon to talk much about them. People acted as though gossip could be over heard by the Immortals. As though immortality granted powers of long-distance mind-reading. Which it did not. Probably.

Despite the knowledge and experience brought to him by the memories of his first life, Huaisang was sixteen before he even managed to convince his family to let him go to Yiling. Once there, he established a very successful foundry, which smelted metal mined in Qinghe and sold it for vastly increased prices to Yunmeng artisans.

He also found a seventeen-year-old Wei Ying, who had survived a harsh childhood on the streets of Yiling in any way that he could. This included raising dead animals, mostly dogs, to protect him and provide distractions while he stole food. He had seemingly been born with this ability. It was pretty obvious to everyone that this was demonic cultivation, which was still frowned upon. The town governors had no idea how to get rid of the problem, and were very happy to let Wei Ying go to Qinghe with Nie Huaisang for “training” with the Nie.

Now the only problem was to re-unite Wei Ying and Lan Zhan.

It took three years for Nie Huaisang to raise the status of the Nie Sect enough for it to rejoin the Jianghu. It took another three years for him to arrange for a cultivation conference in Qinghe.

During that time, Wei Ying received his courtesy name of Wuxian. He was an incredible, borderline-dangerous nuisance. He learned to read astonishingly quickly, and was good at archery and hand-to-hand combat, but he was unable to meditate, let alone develop any kind of core. He used resentful energy without even knowing what it was, drawing talismans from the air seemingly by instinct. With his knowledge of Wei Wuxian’s past life, Huaisang could only assume that he’d retained much of his previous ability to manipulate resentful energy. Huaisang was not going to let him anywhere near a saber.

During the entrance ceremony to the first Nie cultivation conference in decades, Huaisang made sure that Wei Wuxian was by his side as a guard, properly dressed and on his best behavior. Sadly, he had not managed to get all of his hair into his topknot and he seemed to have a tiny undead hummingbird in his sleeve. Huaisang knew this because Wei Wuxian had given him a very unprofessional wave and proudly allowed him a brief glimpse. Huaisang so did not have time to fix any of this.

But at least there was a Lan Wangji among the Lan Sect contingent. Huaisang actually recognized him. He was as beautiful as he’d always been, a jade statue of propriety and practically glowing with power. But there was a coldness about him that Huaisang had only seen before in the presence of Jiang Cheng, whom he’d never forgiven for abandoning Wei Wuxian.

Huaisang saw Lan Wangji’s eyes fall on Wei Wuxian and go impossibly colder. Behind him, Huaisang felt Wei Wuxian go very still. There was a pause, though likely no one other than Huaisang recognized it as momentous. Then Lan Wangji bowed with complete precision and turned away, radiating disdain for the entire proceeding.

Huaisang assigned Wei Wuxian to guard duty outside the courtyard where the Lan Sect were being housed.

“Who me?” Wuxian said, pretending astonishment. “Guarding the most righteous of Lans?”

“Don’t offend Lan Wangji,” Huaisang said.

Wei Wuxian narrowed his eyes as though he, too, knew this was a bad idea, then laughed.

Of course, two nights later Wei Wuxian offended Lan Wangji. Three Lan disciples left with Lan Wangji the next morning.

“What did you do?” Huaisang asked, not sure he actually wanted to know. He and Wei Wuxian were meeting privately in the small basement cell where the other guards had dragged Wei Wuxian after finding him passed out near the gate by which the Lan contingent had just exited.

“Nothing,” Wuxian said, predictably.

Huaisang just waited. He noticed that Wuxian had not tried to shift the blame to Lan Wangji or anyone else.

“Well, it was boring, you know,” Wuxian said. “So I snagged a jar of wine from their front room.” Wuxian’s eyes went wide with distracted enthusiasm. “It was the best wine! Really! It came from Gusu! I’ll have to go there some day.” He noticed Huaisang’s unimpressed gaze and drooped a little. “Okay. So Lan Zhan caught me. He said that drinking was prohibited, so I asked him why they’d brought something prohibited with them, and he said the Emperor’s Smile was supposed to be a gift. And that makes no sense because why . . .”

“Wuxian,” Huaisang interrupted. He used his best disappointed voice. Surprisingly, it worked.

“Right. So when I tried to take just one more sip, he hit the bottle with his sword. It’s a really fine sword, all shiny and white, and I don’t think he meant to break the bottle, but Lan Zhan is just too powerful . . .”

“Wuxian.”

“Well, obviously he wasn’t going to drink with me so I asked him if he liked rabbits, and he actually lowered his sword and said ‘Yes’ very quietly. So I raised a little bunny for him. I think he liked it because he his eyes went wide for a minute.”

Huaisang put both hands over his face. He had not taken to holding a fan in this life, which was just as well, because hiding behind a fan would be completely inadequate here. He could imagine Lan Wangji being fascinated until he was overcome by the sheer horror of an undead bunny.

“Then it bit him,” Wei Wuxian said. He sounded puzzled. “So Lan Zhan killed it, and sent all kinds of talismans at me until I couldn’t move. Well, I couldn’t move much. I still had another jar of Emperor’s Smile, so I drank it after he went away. It’s good stuff! Really good stuff!” He trailed off. “I’ve heard of Emperor’s Smile somewhere, haven’t I? Why didn’t I have any before?”

“Why are you calling him Lan Zhan?” Huaisang asked, because they'd never been given a birth name. Though at this point it really didn’t matter.

“What?” Wei Wuxian said. “Isn’t that his name?”

Lan Wangji refused any contact with Wei Wuxian after that; refused even to come near Qinghe. The cold anger with which he turned down all invitations indicated a sort of unrequited something, but perhaps that was just wishful thinking on Nie Huaisang’s part.

Wei Wuxian talked about Emperor’s Smile all the time, but never went near Gusu to drink it again. He talked about Lan Zhan all the time, too. He followed Lan cultivators and hoarded gossip about all things Lan, but never tried to approach Cloud Recesses.

Lan Wangji became ever more distant as time went by. He was revered and hated in equal measure. There was no way anyone would consider him for Chief Cultivator. He was even passed over as Lan Sect Leader. Rumor said that he had been near immortality for his entire life, but never attained it. He went on increasingly dangerous night hunts, always alone. There was no rule against it.

Wei Wuxian was retired as a Nie guard. To keep him out of trouble, Huaisang gave him a workshop and every book he could find about talismans. The Nie became even richer on the profits from Wuxian’s new talismans and inventions. Wuxian drank most of his own profits, often shrouded in resentment and bemoaning his own uselessness.

They did not stop Wuxian when he wanted to teach his methods, not to cultivators but to the common people. This, Huaisang thought later—much later—was part of the reason for the eventual waning of the Jianghu.

But that was centuries away, yet. At the time, Nie Huaisang focused on his failure to reunite the two not-lovers. They were utterly opposite in disposition: scrupulously neat vs. constitutionally messy, unnecessarily silent vs. irritatingly noisy. But it seemed clear that, without Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji would become an ineffectual, rule-following ice cube. Without Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian would have no one to balance his demonic cultivation or curb his worst ideas.

Huaisang couldn’t help but think that, if the Heavens wanted two people together so badly, they really should have chosen people just a tad less incompatible. Clearly the two were deeply drawn to each other. Huaisang was pretty sure that both of them would be willing to die for the other. But. The wrong things ignited whenever they first met.

Huaisang thought that, with the goal of Wei Wuxian cultivating to immortality now completely impossible, the Heavens would relent and let him pass on normally. But, no. The Heavens were well and truly pissed off. His punishment, apparently, was to be reborn repeatedly, possibly until he was able to reunite Wei Wuxian with both his core and Lan Wangji. Which could never happen while Jiang Cheng—the fucking Immortal Jiang Cheng—had Wei Wuxian’s core.

The two not-lovers were always reborn around the same time as Nie Huaisang, and under the same names. Wei Wuxian never had a core but always had an affinity for resentful energy. Lan Wangji’s core got stronger with every life, even once he’d stopped deliberately cultivating. But he never attained—or possibly never accepted—immortality.

Huaisang was the only one who had to keep his memories with each new life, though.

Chapter Text

The Nie Huaisang who had been accused of plagiarizing his final class assignment by rediscovering his own work—which was downright unfair—woke up in a hospital bed attached to an IV and a variety of monitors. He blinked and looked around fuzzily, then stopped pretending to be confused when he realized that there was no one else in the room.

To be fair or, rather, less dramatic, Nie Huaisang knew exactly where he was because he’d actually been pretending to be semi-conscious for most of the past day. The exception was the rather good nap, aided by a lovely dose of IV narcotics, from which he’d just awoken.

Likely he wasn’t going to be able to fake illness much longer. He’d complained of a terrible headache, so they’d assume he’d hit his head when he fell. But he couldn’t fake an actual concussion on the CT scan. The next person who came into his room was going to make sure he got sent home. He hoped they hadn’t called his parents.

He groaned aloud. His parents were going to be so upset. Well, his American step-father would probably be fine with anything. But his mother was going to be upset. She was pretty fierce when necessary. Nie Huasiang, the reincarnated one, paused to wonder if she could possibly be the reincarnation of Nie Mingjue. But no one with his brother’s soul had been apparent in any life, so it was unlikely. And his mother, while demanding, was not going to do anything worse than be disappointed.

His mother wielded disappointment like a saber, though. It was nowhere near as dangerous as Nie Mingjue’s had been. But it was, actually, a lot more effective. He did not want to disappoint his mother, not because he feared her, but because her approval was important.

Well, he’d deal with that when he had to.

Meanwhile, he needed to figure out what to do.

He was in America. Columbia University in New York City, to be exact. All his previous lives, except the one in San Francisco in the 1940’s, where he’d died in his teens of polio, had been in China. He might be off the hook for trying to unite the two not-lovers . . . unless they, too had emigrated to America.

Thinking about it, the fact that the Chinese history professor was named Dr. Lan, might be a clue. Maybe all the Lans had left China. The current government was not terribly friendly toward religion, if he remembered correctly.—He was an Art Major. Politics wasn’t his thing.—But almost two hundred years ago, the Lan Clan, reduced as it was and no longer really cultivating anything except discipline, had hidden within some of the more strict Buddhist temples. Maybe they’d had to leave.

Wei Wuxian, though, was always born in Yiling. And abandoned on the streets in childhood. At least twice, he’d died there. Probably. It was possible, since Wei Wuxian gravitated to resentful energy by default, that one of those deaths had been during the Immortal Jiang’s purge of demonic cultivators. It didn’t matter. Records weren’t kept on orphans in those days. Obviously, Nie Huaisang had not gotten the two not-lovers together in those lifetimes.

Nor in any other, really.

So maybe he had to go to China?

He really wanted to finish his MFA first. Huaisang didn’t want to financially depend on his parents forever. His American father had been at the right place at the right time to cash in on the tech industry, so they were fairly well off. But they probably didn’t have a fortune that would fund an indefinite trip to China. Once there, he might be able to find some of the gold he’d hidden away in previous lifetimes, but it was not likely that any of it had survived the various revolutions.

He wondered if the three professors had come to any conclusions about his supposed copying for his class assignments. It wasn’t like it was his thesis or anything. It was just something for a course. But the university rightly had zero tolerance for plagiarizing.

Had he been accused of plagiarizing? Would it count if he was actually plagiarizing himself? Then again, how exactly would he prove that?

With a sigh, Huaisang disconnected his monitors and climbed out of bed. The panicked nurse who came to check on him found him in the bathroom taking a shower. To be fair, he’d really had to pee. To be unfair, he’d removed the IV himself first.

The person who came to take him home was Dr. Chen, the professor for his Chinese brush painting course. She was a petite woman who wore long, black hair in a bun. She wasn’t full Chinese, but her eyelids crinkled into lovely crescents when she smiled. It was her course that he would fail, if they really thought he was plagiarizing. She told him that they hadn’t yet come to any decision, but they had granted him a two-week “mental health probation.”

He was terribly relieved. He was also grateful for the ride. The trip to his apartment in Brooklyn—because who could afford to live near Columbia?—involved two subway lines and a bus. Dr. Chen had a car, and lived in a house somewhere near Queens. Ned’s apartment wasn’t exactly on the way but it was close by New York City standards.

The hour-and-a-half drive could have been awkward. But Ned . . . Huaisang now had centuries of experience to draw upon. He liked Dr. Chen, and nothing he remembered from being Nie Huaisang changed that. She was kind and fair and a very good teacher. She was also a master at the art of watercolor, both Chinese and modern. He didn’t want to disappoint her any more than he wanted to disappoint his mother.

After some consideration, he decided not to bother pretending to be sick, and to instead be honest. Well, as honest as possible. He said, voice mildly apologetic, “If it helps, I did not photocopy that painting. I painted it myself.”

“We can tell that it is not a photograph.” Dr. Chen inched three car-lengths closer to the Queensboro Bridge. She said, “But you must have found a very good reproduction and copied it exactly. Then you submitted it as your own work.”

“I didn’t copy it,” Ned said. “I remembered it.”

Dr. Chen gave him a brief sideways glance that said that she thought this highly unlikely. “Why did you use it, then?”

“I guess I just didn’t remember that I’d seen it,” Huaisang mumbled. He definitely could not mention exactly where he’d not-remembered seeing it from. To distract her, he added, “Did you know that my Chinese name is Nie Huaisang.”

“So what?” She seemed unimpressed, or possibly confused at the change of topic.

Right. Dr. Chen was not actually from China. The only name she used was Sarah Chen, with no Chinese name or characters. Perhaps she didn’t know any Chinese at all. “The same name as the painter who wrote that book?” Huaisang said, “So maybe someone showed it to me when I was a kid?” This sounded unlikely even to Huaisang. And it didn’t explain how he all of a sudden could read Chinese. Of course, she didn’t know that he hadn’t been taught to recognize the Hanji for his name as a child.

Dr. Chen twisted her mouth in consideration. “I might believe that, but Dr. Fitzgerald won’t.”

“Yeah,” Huaisang sighed. “He seemed ready to expel me on the spot.”

Huaisang had meant to be exaggerating, but Dr. Chen nodded in agreement. That didn’t bode well for his chances of passing the course. They inched across the bridge in silence. It was totally unfair. The ancient Nie Huaisang was a better artist than anybody in the program at Columbia. Though Dr. Chen did know her way around modern techniques . . .

He didn’t want to let them get away with their false accusation. “What about Dr. Lan?” he asked, finally.

Dr. Chen actually snorted. “He’s the most uptight person I know, and completely impossible to read. It’s like he’s living by some sort of ancient code that no one else knows. I have no idea what he thinks about anything.”

Huaisang should have laughed at this ridiculous statement, but was frozen by his memories of his first time at Cloud Recesses. Instead, he blurted, “What’s his first name? Do you know?”

“Um . . .” Dr. Chen said, while Nie Huaisang chanted to himself ‘Not Qiren, Not Qiren.’ Lan Qiren was not always reincarnated with Lan Wangji. There was, after all, no shortage of distant fathers and overly strict uncles. “I’m not sure how to pronounce it. I think it’s something like ‘Cheering’ ?”

Oh, well. “Qiren?” Huaisang asked.

“That sounds right.”

He was doomed anyway. He might as well continue. “So does Lan Qiren have any kids?”

Dr. Chen said, “Shit!” which Huaisang thought meant he’d finally crossed some sort of line, but Dr. Chen had merely waited too long to merge onto the Long Island Expressway. She had turned on her left-turn signal but no one was playing nice. There was a pause during which there was more cursing and a near collision.

Huaisang thought she’d forgotten about Dr. Lan, but when traffic had lightened a bit, she said, “He raised two boys, but I think they’re his nephews.”

“Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen, right?” he asked, resigned, because of course that would be their names.

Dr. Chen shot Huaisang an unhappy look. “Yes. But I think the older one changed his name to something more American. Zeke, maybe.” Her expression sharpened to something like suspicion. “You know them?”

Oops. “Um . . . we might have met sometime. Maybe at summer camp?”

For some reason, that irritated Dr. Chen. “You did not,” she said, firmly. “Professor Lan would never have let his nephews go to camp. Were you following Lan Wangji?”

What? “Why would I want to follow him?”

“He was an internet sensation. He was famous.”

Huaisang blushed, which was a wasted effort because Dr. Chen wasn’t even looking at him. “Oh. Um . . . I’m sorry? I didn’t know.” ‘Internet sensation’ didn’t sound like the Lan Wangji he’d known. Wait. She’d said, ‘was’ as in ‘He was famous.’ As though he wasn’t anymore. He couldn’t be dead already, could he?

“Do not mention Lan Wangji to Dr. Lan,” Dr. Chen said. She was staring straight ahead, hands tensed on the steering wheel, in a way that they had not been when the traffic was worse. “Professor Lan is extremely protective of his nephews.”

Huaisang didn’t dare ask any more questions. He could not tell if she was angry or disappointed. Maybe he should have taken the subway.

He spent the rest of the ride staring out of the window at the sprawl of buildings that was Queens and then Brooklyn. Behind them, there was an occasional glimpse of skyscrapers beginning to be obscured by mist.

“I will re-do my final project,” Huaisang told Dr. Chen when she dropped him off at his building. “I will have it in two weeks.”

Dr. Chen gave him a long, doubting look and said nothing.

At home, he called his parents, because he really didn’t need them to fly to New York to check on him. He told them he'd hit his head, but was now fine. And that he had a lot of coursework to do. “You sound different,” his father said. “I’m fine,” Ned answered, trying to sound like a twenty-six-year old who wasn’t actually the umpteenth reincarnation of an ancient artist. “Professor Chen is helping me,” he added, hoping that was true.

Then he sat down at his desk, with his perfect brushes and beautiful, non-toxic inks, and painted the skyscrapers of Manhattan, towering out of the mist, as though they were the mystical mountains of China. He worked on the paintings for three solid days and nights. They were not masterpieces, but only because he restricted himself to the composition and brushstroke techniques included in the textbook they were using for the course.

After sleeping for two more days, and splurging on his favorite Korean Barbecue, he was ready for the internet.

The search for Lan Wangji was almost easy. There were a ton of discussion threads about the young musical prodigy. He’d been eleven years old when he’d recorded himself playing the piano part of a Schubert Violin Concerto, and then recorded over it, playing the violin part. His brother (who had named himself Zachary, not Zeke) had posted it, along with videos of him playing in recitals. It had been on YouTube, and TikTok, and Facebook.

But none of this was available any more, though there were still discussions about it. He had played flawlessly in competitions in Japan and China and the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Possibly too flawlessly. He’d supposedly not done well in his final competition almost two years ago. Huaisang couldn’t judge because Lan Wangji had disappeared. All recordings of his music—somewhere around fifteen years of performances—had been taken down. Zachary Lan no longer had any accounts either.

There were entire web sites devoted to Lan Wangji, including pages of posts about whether or not he was autistic. Those in favor of this theory pointed out the increasingly rigid perfection of his performances, and insisted that the lack of emotion in his music was the reason for his eventual decline. There were sites arguing that he was gay, though apparently he’d denied it and it wasn’t clear what his sexuality had to do with anything. There were more sites devoted to his disappearance, with ever more outlandish theories. None of the sites had been updated in the past year. The internet had presumably moved on.

Sighing, Huaisang switched his efforts to Wei Wuxian or Wei Ying. He found nothing, at least in English. There were no obituaries, which was a bit of a relief, but that didn’t mean much. He switched to Chinese, to see if he could access adoption records from Yiling. He couldn’t. Likely he’d need to enlist a Chinese hacker if he expected to get anywhere that way. Anyway, if Wei Wuxian was still in China, Huaisang probably wouldn’t be able to find him.

He switched back to English, looking for anything—parking violations, landlord disputes, hospital admissions, court cases of crimes or misdemeanors—for Wei Wuxian and Wei Ying, along with combinations of Xian, Shawn, Sean and Wei or Wu. He found no one that might be Wei Wuxian.

Then he tried records of mental health commitments. Wei Wuxian had been pathologically depressed and self-destructive in many of his lifetimes. So maybe somebody had forced him into some kind of program? He read down list after list of court cases, requests for 5150 commitments, filings for legal guardianship due to mental illness. It was a truly desperate idea, and of course he found no Wei-anythings there either.

But he did find a Lan Zhan. Lan Qiren had filed for legal guardianship a year ago. Then he’d committed his nephew to a facility in upstate New York.

Interlude: Two years ago

Two Asian men who looked like enough to be twins walked through Grand Central Station headed towards the Long Island Railroad tracks. They walked side-by-side in silence, precisely upright, almost in step. They did not look at each other, nor at anything else. One carried a violin case in one hand. The other kept a hand tucked in the small of his own back, as though reminding himself to be restrained.

From a side tunnel leading to the Subway came the sound of a flute.

The brother carrying the violin case stopped walking abruptly. His expression did not change, but he drifted off in the direction of the music, as though drawn. His brother did not notice.

By the time his brother turned around, the man with the violin had disappeared.

The flute player’s eyes went wide when he saw the man with the violin case. This might not have been in recognition. The violin guy was wearing formal black pants and a starched white shirt of the sort worn under a tuxedo. He was also truly gorgeous.

He just stood there, though, right in front of the flute player, rigid and immovable, and blocking the crowd. When the flute music stopped, he said, very quietly, “That was Mozart.”

The flute player smiled widely. He was also Asian, with long black hair in a messy ponytail. “Yup,” he said. “Concerto #1 in G major.”

“I think you did not play all the notes correctly,” violin guy said.

Surprisingly, the flute guy’s smile went impossibly sunnier. “Well, I don’t have to keep up with an orchestra, do I? Since I don’t have one.”

“Oh,” said the violin guy. “Can you play it again?”

The flute guy was staring at the violin case. “You know how to play that thing?”

“It is a violin.” There was a hint of stiffness about the answer, but any arrogance swiftly vanished. “I don’t have the music for that Mozart concerto.”

“That’s fine. Play something you know.”

It took a while to coax the violin out of the case, and then tune the strings. The small crowd that had assembled drifted off. A few people tossed a couple dollars into a bowl on the ground first.

The flute player’s eye went wide again when the violinist started playing. It was obviously a difficult piece, executed with precision. Runs of notes, fast then suddenly high and sweet, without a single alteration or hesitation. The flute player muttered, “Mendelssohn, huh. Wow. Okay.” After a minute or so, the flute joined in, winding around the violin line, poking at it to go just a little faster or slower, adding a resonance that hadn’t been there before.

People started gathering again. Unfortunately, one of the people was the maybe-twin brother, who came storming down the platform. The crowd parted for him uneasily. He said something in Chinese, voice pitched perfectly to carry to the musicians.

The violinist stopped abruptly. The flute took over the difficult melodic line, rather admirably but nowhere near precisely, perhaps hoping that the violin would resume.

Without a word, the violinist carefully replaced the instrument in its case. The flute ground to silence. The flautist watched the other man pack up his violin with a rapt expression, as though he was still stunned with music.

It wasn’t until the two brothers were disappearing up the nearest exit stairs that he yelled, “Find me again next week! Look for Wei Ying!”

He spent the rest of the afternoon playing the same piece the violinist had played. It got progressively wilder and different from the original, as though he was playing from memory alone, and wasn’t sure what it was supposed to sound like.

A week later, the violinist was waiting for him, seated awkwardly on one of the benches and holding the violin case in his lap.

The flautist, Wei Ying, smiled like the sun coming up. He had with him a small pile of papers, torn and creased music scores, and a music stand. “You can take these home if you need to practice,” he said. “Or. Can you sight-read them?”

The violinist took the papers and shuffled through them. “Easy,” he said. Then, later, “I am Lan Zhan.”

And for the next eleven months, travelers through Grand Central Station were treated to weekly duets of Vivaldi and Joe Hisaichi and Beethoven and Nobuo Uematsu and John Williams and, almost always, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E, which improved enormously after Lan Zhan brought his own sheaf of papers, neatly arranged in a notebook. Seemingly, Wei Ying could also read music—he just usually didn’t bother.

Then one week, Lan Zhan didn’t come. An elderly Chinese gentleman came instead. He spoke a few sharp words to Wei Ying, first in English then switching to Chinese. After that, Wei Ying didn’t come back either.

Underground, in the deepest now-abandoned tunnels, something that had been soothed by the music, stirred. Tendrils of antique resentment began to weave themselves back together, reaching ever outward along the paths of the subway system, nourished by the noise and stress and power of mass transit.

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Chapter Text

By Huaisang’s third life, the Nies had retreated to a mountaintop not far from Qinghe, and had once again become a successful cultivation sect with much wealth and dozens of well-trained disciples. Perhaps that was because they were no longer using half-sentient, resentful sabers. Nie Huaisang was the son of one of their top disciples. He discovered that progress made developing a core in his previous lives was easily recovered, but sadly still wasn’t enough to make him a very good disciple.

There was a Lan Zhan among the Lan in Cloud Recesses. He was a prodigy with a stronger golden core than anyone had ever seen, and generally known to be a stuck-up asshole. There was a Wei Ying on the streets of Yiling. He was a different sort of prodigy and a different sort of asshole. He could steal almost anything. The training he received from the Nie, once Nie Huaisang brought him to Qinghe at age ten, merely increased his proficiency.

The summer they were all twelve, Huaisang managed to get himself and Wei Wuxian to the Cloud Recesses, by whining to his father to take them both along on sect business. In the last life, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian had already been twenty-three the first time they’d met. Huaisang had decided that things might go better if they met much sooner this time around.

Lan Wangji was indeed a Lan disciple. But the introduction did not go well.

The Lans had embraced Buddhism and Confucianism, or possibly had invented them, and were even more focused on their thousands of rule and the endless treatises about those rules (one of which had apparently been written by the previous Lan Wangji). Lan Wangji was already the star of the sect, with a good number of the clan elders convinced (correctly) that he was the reincarnation of the great Hanguang-Jun.

Wei Wuxian had been cultivating haphazardly as a Nie disciple, and it was increasingly clear that he would not be forming a golden core any time soon. He couldn’t use a spiritual sword. His ability to manipulate resentment was, however, unparalleled and way too obvious. At least he had not, in this life, rediscovered the joys of resurrecting small animals.

Lan Wangji was fascinated at first. As was Wei Wuxian. But it didn’t last. Lan Wangji seemingly felt the resentment coming from Wei Wuxian as a personal insult. Wuxian tried to control it, but as usual, he didn’t try to follow the rules. Each failure drove Lan Wangji further away, and Wuxian further into mischief.

“Only twelve years old, and he’s already an old man,” Wuxian lamented, the night he rediscovered Emperor’s Smile and drank himself nearly unconscious. Huaisang had to agree. Lan Wangji reminded him far too much of Old Man Qiren, the nemesis of both Wuxian’s and Huisang’s first time in Cloud Recesses.

They were tossed out, still hungover, the next morning. Huaisang’s father arranged for them to stay in Gusu until his business was concluded. They were not invited to return. They were not invited to the lectures that started two years later. Still teenagers, they really had no way to overturn that decision. Huaisang’s father was not pleased, but he was often not pleased by his son and his son’s street-rat friend.

Huaisang would have to try some other way . . .

He developed his skills at inter-sect politics, until he became indispensable at meetings and discussion conferences. The street rat, though lacking a core, became a very useful spy, sneak thief, and night hunter. He could beat just about any swordsman by using a short wooden staff as a shield.

The duel that resulted the first time that Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian ended up in the same city, was legendary. But not for the same reasons that first duel in Cloud Recesses had been, during their first lives. This was no love match under the moonlight. It was short and bloody, and Wei Wuxian cheated with resentful energy.

The Jin still had discussion conferences at their golden tower in Lanling. Huaisang cleverly arranged for Wei Wuxian, who had come along to be one of his guards, to run into Lan Wangji at the Lanling market. This involved getting most of the other guards falling down drunk in the middle of the afternoon, because no one actually trusted Wei Wuxian to be a proper guard.

“Pay attention!” Huaisang said to Wei Wuxian, for the fifth time. They were both still a bit drunk, because all good plots require some sacrifice.

Wei Wuxian was staring wide-eyed at a stall selling meat buns, or perhaps at the comely shopkeeper. “I am paying attention,” he pouted. He was good at that in this life too.

“You’re supposed to be watching for assassins,” Huaisang said, scanning the rooftops, which were unsurprisingly clear of men in black. He wasn’t really expecting any foul play today, but he had worn unrecognizable plain robes just in case.

Wei Wuxian laughed. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that the chance of a random assassination in Lanling market was approximately zero.

This was why Huaisang missed spotting Lan Wangji, even though the cultivator was wearing glowing white and had a small bubble of space around him where people were carefully avoiding him. He actually exuded a ‘You are not qualified to be anywhere near me’ aura. It was a bit terrifying.

Wei Wuxian stared at Lan Wangji, momentarily transfixed. Then he altered his course very slightly in order to bump into him.

Lan Wangji responded by drawing his sword and immediately attacking. Huaisang was not to know until later that this was because Wei Wuxian had stolen the qiankun pouch containing his guqin from his belt.

(Wei Wuxian had also, quite possibly, repeatedly snuck into Cloud Recesses to leave alcohol and other embarrassing items lying around. Likely Lan Wangji knew exactly who was doing this. Nie Huaisang recognized, now, that suggesting to Wei Wuxian that Lan Wangji often guarded the walls of Cloud Recesses at night might have been unwise.)

Wei Wuxian laughed again, bright and airy, as he dodged the blow.

Lan Wangji’s expression went from stony to rigid. He attacked again and again, clearly not holding himself back in the slightest. Wei Wuxian dodged repeatedly but quickly lost his laughter. His smile turned to astonished confusion. His staff went flying. He was clearly badly overmatched, and had no idea how things had gone wrong so quickly.

A dozen strokes from Bichen had Wei Wuxian backed into a wall, with the sword already coming down on him.

Huaisang was never sure what happened then. He saw the sword freeze inches from Wei Wuxian’s upturned face, as Lan Wangji pulled the blow. But there was no time for Lan Wangji to withdraw it. Wei Wuxian’s eyes were already burning red. There was a surge of resentful energy. Wei Wuxian screamed, “No!” but clearly couldn’t stop the resentful attack he’d launched. Bichen flew away as Lan Wangji stumbled backwards and fell.

Wei Wuxian stood for another second with one hand outstretched, resentment dissipating around it. He looked devastated. “Hanguang-Jun?” he moaned, “No.”

Huaisang reached him and grabbed his arm. “What the fuck?” he said, an unhelpful repetition of the thoughts blithering through his brain. He’d felt the resentment in his core, the same pathetic core he’d had in his first life, now only slightly improved. Hopefully no one else nearby had the same talent.

Wei Wuxian pulled his arm away but continued staring at Lan Wangji, who was motionless except for the spreading red patch on his chest. Wei Wuxian’s eyes were no longer red. “I thought he was going to kill me,” he said, almost to himself. “Why? It was just a joke.” He dropped Lan Wangji’s qiankun pouch on the ground.

Nie Huaisang’s brain was still not providing helpful information. He said, “We need to get out of here. I’ll be blamed for murder.”

Wei Wuxian did look at him then. “But I didn’t kill him,” he said. He was possibly trying for defiance, but he actually sounded like he was begging for this to be true. Then, because he had not actually managed to dodge all of Bichen’s moves after all, Wei Wuxian collapsed.

That knocked some thoughts loose. Huaisang knelt beside Wei Wuxian. Faking tears, he pointed at Lan Wangji. “Why did the Hanguang-Jun kill my guard?” he moaned. Lan Wangji had not been called Hanguang-Jun in this lifetime, but Huaisang thought this might be a good time to start.

By the time the Lanling town guards arrived, many bystanders remembered that “the Hanguang-Jun” had attacked someone for no reason. No one believed that the skinny man bleeding out on the ground had been able to hurt such a shining cultivator. They took Lan Wangji away via sword. Huaisang could feel the strength of his core from ten feet away, and wasn’t worried about him.

Huaisang and his mysteriously powerful guard were carted back to the Jin’s golden tower in a carriage. They did not arrest Wei Wuxian, mostly because everyone thought he would die soon anyway. He had a long cut across his chest, a slice out of his left shoulder, and a deep stab wound in his thigh. Huaisang made them bandage him up first, which they did half-heartedly, and only because otherwise he would get blood in the carriage.

Lan Wangji survived, of course. Upon his return to the Cloud Recesses, he went into seclusion. He never emerged. Wei Wuxian survived too. When word of this got around, the Jin sent people to arrest him. Huaisang told them they were too late—he’d already tossed Wei Wuxian into the Burial Mounds. This was not true. In fact, Wei Wuxian had gone on increasingly dangerous night hunts. Alone. Until one day, he didn’t return.

Nie Huaisang got an uninterrupted twenty years of peaceful artistic pursuits. He surrounded himself with smart, vigorous people and held salons and dinners and parties. He set up trysts and affairs, though never for himself. It was . . . interesting.

On evenings when he had nothing to do, he missed his brother like there was hole in his heart. At those times, he thought that his oh-so-clever revenge plot had accomplished nothing at all. The Jin still had money and power; the wrong person had become immortal; and his brother was still dead. So he made sure there was always something happening.

He died young. They’d stopped using sabers for cultivation, but the paint was still just as toxic.

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Chapter Text

Huaisang pulled his new Prius into the parking lot of the Saratoga Springs Retirement Home. It was a very Lan parking lot, with perfectly graded black asphalt painted in absurdly accurate lines. The building itself was long and low, with columns on the front in the style of a Southern plantation house. It was not at all Chinese. It was very white, though, practically blinding where the sun hit it.

The elaborately-painted name on the sign out front calling the place a “retirement home” was obviously not entirely accurate. There were no doors leading to little outside patios or balconies. There were gardens, but no people, elderly or otherwise, using its walking paths. The front entrance was a single, well-guarded and warded glass door. The barred windows were reinforced by talismans. This was not a retirement home, or even a high-end nursing home. It was a very high-end mental health facility. For cultivators.

There was, in fact, a Gusu Corporation associated with the “retirement home.” Huaisang had not been able to discover any association with, or evidence for the existence of, a Lan cultivation sect. But from the level of spiritual protection around the place, there had to be cultivators involved somewhere.

By now he was absolutely certain that this was where Lan Wangji had been taken—either to be involuntarily incarcerated or voluntarily secluded—Huaisang didn’t know. He still didn’t know why, either.

Huaisang had styled his hair into an old-fashioned braid of the sort that white people who’d seen 1930s black and white films expected from Chinese gentlemen. He had added a tiny streak of grey at his temples. He was wearing a well-tailored, expensive suit and uncomfortable shoes that clicked when he walked.

He even had an appointment. Dr. Qiren Lan’s very good friend Nie Huaisang, who was not the student Ned Sang, nope, not at all, had arranged to visit Lan Wangji, in order to check on his progress. No one had to know that Lan Qiren had no idea that the visit was taking place.

Huaisang had spent days in email correspondence with one of the administrators of the facility, a young woman named Mianmian Luo. Huaisang was pretty sure she was a reincarnation of Luo Qingyang, who had been supportive of Wei Wuxian during several lifetimes. That she had appeared again now might be a sign that the Heavens had finally relented and decided to make Huaisang’s life easier.

Yeah, right.

He’d also needed to buy a car. He’d financed this by selling one of his “plagiarized” watercolors—which had been returned to him by a worried Dr. Chen—to a Chinese art collector. The collector recognized an extraordinary reproduction when he saw one and paid a premium price. Huaisang was pretty sure the man thought it was an original (which it kind of was), even though Huaisang repeatedly told him otherwise. He clearly didn’t believe that a young art student had painted it. It was easiest to let him think that Ned had unwisely sold a family heirloom. The money was more than enough to put a downpayment on the car, with a bit left over for the suit.

Ms Luo could not give private information to total strangers via email, but Huaisang had made some pretty good guesses and eventually convinced her that he was familiar with Lan Wangji’s case. He knew now that Lan Wangji had not spoken to anyone in the year since his uncle had gotten the courts involved, and won an involuntary commitment for evaluation of his youngest nephew’s mental status. Since Lan Wangji would not speak, that commitment had become permanent.

Ms Luo met Nie Huaisang at the front door. There was a vestibule there, in front of a second, locked door attended by a security guard and two video cameras.

Huaisang bowed, a shallow nod with his hands at his sides, respectful and not completely out of date.

Ms Luo said, “Welcome,” and held out a hand for him to shake. He took it.

“How is he today,” Huaisang asked, going for familiar professionalism.

She paused, eyes going oddly remote, before answering. It looked like she was actually trying to read his status from the doorway. She would still have a golden core too, and perhaps she could sense Lan Wangji from a distance. “Same as always,” she said.

Huaisang let his own core send out a thread of Qi. There was something resembling a miniature sun somewhere above and to his left. Probably Lan Wangji. “Ah! I see.”

She smiled. “You can sense it too, I think. He’s very powerful.”

“Are there other cultivators here?” This was a question which would make no sense to most people these days. But even when no one that he knew of was cultivating cores, there were always people who carried them from past lives. A facility for those who couldn’t manage the results of past cultivation and sanity at the same time, might be necessary in a society that actually cared for their mentally ill.

“None like him,” she answered.

Ms Luo led Huaisang to her tiny office. There, surrounded by books on modern psychology and ancient medicine, Ms Luo lost her smile. “I do not want to know the real reason for your visit,” she said. Huaisang opened his mouth, but she didn’t stop. “I wouldn’t have let you come here, except I’m getting desperate. He is getting worse,” she added. “He’s never said a word to me, but now he doesn’t eat, doesn’t move, barely breathes.”

“Inedia?” Huaisang said.

She looked at him, expression sharpening. “You know about that, then.” It was not a question. “You also know it doesn’t work for long.”

Huaisang knew that very well. Even the Immortal Jiang Cheng had enjoyed an occasional meal, and probably not just because he’d liked terrorizing waiters. Wen Ning didn’t eat, but he was, well, dead. He didn’t want to go into how much he knew about inedia, so he made an affirmative grunt and changed the subject. “You’ve tried music, of course.”

“He stopped playing before he came here. Sometimes he makes motions with his hands as though there are strings in front of him. But he hasn’t done even that for a while.”

“Why did he stop? Playing, I mean.”

“There were some bad reviews, I think, criticism that his music was too perfect, too robotic,” she said. “If there is another reason, his uncle won’t tell me.”

Huaisang was probably supposed to know that already. It did confirm what he’d already suspected: Lan Qiren knew something. Huaisang could only hope that the something did not involve Wei Wuxian.

“Where is his violin?” The piano wouldn’t be movable, but maybe they’d let him keep the violin.

“He won’t touch it. We keep it locked up, because it’s worth something like fifty thousand dollars.” She was looking suspicious, as if people sometimes came to her facility to steal a precious violin. Maybe they did.

Mianmian Luo sighed impatiently. “You don’t actually know him,” she said. “You’re not a musician. You’re not a doctor. What, exactly do you think you can do?”

This was a very excellent question. Huaisang didn’t answer right away, mostly because his ideas didn’t seem very promising in the face of Ms Luo’s frustration. He shrugged, hands open at his side. “I’ve studied cultivation? I speak Chinese?” Ms Luo’s dubious expression did not change. “I knew him at school. A very, very long time ago.” Huaisang added, giving her a tight, self-deprecating smile.

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you suggesting you have a connection from a past life?”

Huaisang shrugged, noncommittally. He successfully resisted the impulse to say, ‘So do you.”’

Ms Luo gave him a long look, while Huaisang tried very hard to keep his face open and trustworthy. She sighed again. “Don’t make me regret bringing you here.”

Lan Wangji was in a sunlit room with a tatami-mat floor and a rolled futon. The walls and ceiling were flat white. There was a lotus flower in a bowl on the windowsill, and absolutely nothing else.

Lan Wangji was sitting in a meditation pose in the center of the room, facing away from the flower. He was wearing loose white pants and a full-length robe with expansive sleeves, also white. It was close to the hanfu he’d worn in previous lives, but Huaisang realized that it was actually a linen bathrobe. His hair, neatly combed down his back, was like a void in a sea of brilliance. There was a white ribbon tied across his forehead.

He looked almost exactly like Huaisang remembered from their very first life. Jade-pale. Utterly controlled. Perfect. Huaisang wondered if the Lan ribbon still meant anything. He wondered if Lan Wangji always wore white, or if he was once again in mourning. It didn’t matter, really. He’d never been that motionless before. The man looked like a statue that would crack open and fall to pieces at the slightest touch.

“Lan Wangji,” Huaisang said. “Your brother misses you. And your music. Where is your violin?” When there was no response, he repeated it in Chinese. Only he substituted Xichen for brother, and guqin instead of violin.

Lan Wangji remained unmoved. Literally. This was far worse than he’d expected. All of Huaisang’s plans melted in the face of that impenetrable stillness. Except his last, desperate one. Oh, well. If he was going to fail anyway, he might as well fail spectacularly.

Huaisang drew a fan that he’d painted with the same scene from Cloud Recesses that had doomed his final assignment, and waved it lazily. “Lan Wangji. Lan Zhan. Hanguang-Jun,” he said. “How did we end up here? I don’t know; I just don’t know.” He was speaking the ancient dialect they’d known back then, with the Qinghe accent he’d unlearned later with great difficulty. “It seems like just a few years ago that we were all at the lectures together. Remember?”

There was possibly a deepening of breathing from the motionless man in front of him.

“We were such good friends. Well, probably you don’t think so. We did all get drunk that one night: Nie Huaisang—me—, Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian and . . . you.”

At the name Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji took a shuddering breath. Behind Huaisang, Mianmian Luo, who could not possibly understand a word of this, made a tiny gasp.

“We got in so much trouble. I never did pass, you know. And I was Chief Cultivator after you. I’m in good company too. Jiang Cheng cultivated to immortality even though he left when your uncle expelled Wei Wuxian.”

Lan Wangji took another deep breath and opened his eyes. His gaze landed on Huaisang’s fan, and an expression that might have been longing ghosted across his face.

“Aiya. Lan Zhan,” Huaisang sighed. “You do remember Cloud Recesses.” Golden eyes were trying to focus on his fan, so he stilled it and continued, “You must remember the rules? You were so very perfect at following them. But maybe you’ve forgotten.” He started reciting from the beginning, “Do not kill within Cloud Recesses. No fighting without permission. Do not go out at night.” Actually he might have already skipped a few. “Do not walk too fast. Do not laugh for no reason. Heh. Wei Wuxian was really bad at that one. And the one about no alcohol.”

Lan Wangji seemed briefly unsettled, but then schooled his face back to a frozen impassivity. He had always been too good at the least helpful of Lan rules; the ones that forbid excess emotion.

“How about, ‘Do not give up on learning,’” Huaisang said. “Or, ‘Embrace the entirety of the world.’ Are you doing that, sitting here wasting away?”

“Do not go near Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji said. That had been an actual rule during Wei Wuxian’s second life. Even after a year of silence, Lan Wangji’s voice was deep and melodious, which was just unfair.

“Do not mourn excessively,” Huaisang countered. “Nine hundred years is excessive.” He was still using a language that no one else alive actually knew. “But Wei Wuxian taught you that the rules are not always helpful. Remember your oath to fight evil, protect the innocent and live without regrets?”

“I have regrets,” Lan Wangji intoned.

“How can we help you? What do you need, Lan Wangji?” he asked, then repeated it in English.

Lan Wangji also switched to English. “I am waiting for Wei Ying,” he said.

Of course he was. He’d never stopped waiting for Wei Ying, except possibly that one time when he’d almost killed him. “Do you know where he is?” Huaisang asked.

Lan Wangji’s expression had not changed, did not change now. But his eyes drifted shut again. “He did not come.”

Huaisang said, “He wanted to.” He was absolutely sure about this. Even when the two had hated each other, they’d been drawn together, each a moth immolating in the other’s flame.

It made no difference. Lan Wangji was already gone, back into a meditation so deep that almost nothing could disturb him. Huaisang could feel his core, now a rigidly controlled explosion. Waiting.

So, the two had already met, and Lan Wangji had not been the one to break them apart. He was waiting for Wei Ying.

The only thing that could keep Wei Wuxian away from Lan Wangji, was Wei Wuxian himself. It was too easy to drive him to self-hatred. If Lan Wangji had not done that by sending him away, someone else had. Someone had, once again, convinced Wei Wuxian that he was worthless, or more likely, that his presence was ruining Lan Wangji. The people who could do that most effectively were the Jiang or the Lan.

Lan Qiren was especially good at it.

If he was going against Lan Qiren, the chances of Huaisang not being expelled for copying his final assignment had just gone to near zero.

Interlude: Four Weeks Ago

There was an unmoving lump of black cloth huddled in the corner of the entry to the Lafayette Avenue Starbucks. A well-muscled white man with dreadlocks only marginally covered by a tan Starbucks hat, came to a halt by the door.

“Shit,” he said, drawn out so that it made two syllables. This was not the sort of neighborhood that regularly expected sleeping people on its doorsteps. That was a couple of blocks away, in all directions.

The Starbucks employee drew a booted foot back, then seemed to change his mind. He leaned over the lump and poked at it.

The lump shuddered, then whined, “Just five more minutes. Please, gege?” in a voice suited to a middle-schooler who was often late for school.

“I ain’t your brother,” the employee said, not without sympathy. “Name’s Bryan, which you know.” He pointed at a name tag. “You better get your butt outa here. Christina’s boss today and she’ll call the cops on your ass for sure.”

The lump sat up. Large brown eyes appeared underneath a tangled mess of black hair. There was a mumbled, “Coffee? I need coffee?”

“If you still worked here, you could have coffee. But, no, you kept inviting in all kinds of vagrants, and . . .” He trailed off. The brown eyes were now staring past him in something between horror and resignation. Bryan the employee turned to look, but there was nothing there except empty sidewalk. At five-something AM, this was not unusual.

With a sudden surge of energy, the man in black leapt to his feet and headed in the direction he’d been staring. As he did, he reached behind him and loosened what looked like a cheap plastic flute from his belt. There was a torrent of terrible notes.

“And what happened to your real flute?” Bryan asked, more or less to himself. “You used to sound good.” He shook his head and went to open the Starbucks. “Probably gave it away like everything else.”

Ten minutes later, Bryan reappeared on the sidewalk holding an enormous cup with the words ‘Wei Ying’ written on it in magic marker. The music, if you could call it that, had stopped. Wei Ying had sunk to the ground next to the entry again. He looked drained. “Here,” Bryan said, holding out the cup.

Wei Ying looked up. His eyes were reddened. “Not mine,” he said sadly.

“Oh,” Bryan said. He was still holding the magic marker. He withdrew the cup, crossed out ‘Wei Ying’ and wrote ‘Laozu’ instead. “Better?” he asked.

The person who wasn’t Wei Ying anymore made a smile which showed the perfect teeth of a person who had received high-end orthodontic care as a child, but no actual joy. But he did take the cup. “Thanks, Gege. I owe you one.”
“You effing do not. I stayed on your couch for four months, back when you had a couch. Remember?” Bryan shrugged, as though letting go of an un-accomplishable burden. “Christina’s due in five minutes,” he said.

Bryan watched the man stagger away down the street. “Gege don’t count for nothin’ if you won’t let anyone help,” he muttered. Then he turned and went back inside to make more coffee.

.

Chapter Text

After their disastrous meeting on the streets of Lanling, Huaisang didn’t even try to get the two not-lovers together for the next couple lifetimes. He wasn’t sure how long that was, because there were competing calendars, and no way to accurately assess the passage of time between his reincarnations.

The world was functioning just fine with Jiang Cheng filling the role of grumpy, unapproachable Immortal, and Wen Ning taking care of the occasional ghost king. There were emperors vying for power now, with and without the backing of cultivation sects. Cultivators paid very little attention to common folk, but they did fight yao and evil spirits and the occasional fierce corpse in order to show off to each other. This, together with the talismans that craftsman made for funerals, were usually enough to keep resentful energy to a minimum.

Huaisang was in no hurry to get Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji together, really. Particularly if they were going to almost kill each other. Why should he be?

He didn’t care much about love, true or not. He had learned in his very first lifetime that approval from others was unnecessary. Or at least that he could get along just fine without it. It had been a hard lesson. What he wanted was beauty, in nature, in art, in the human body—wherever he could find it. He wanted to devote as many lives as he could to the pursuit of it.

There were times, admittedly, when this wasn’t quite enough. At those times he sorely missed his brother. He’d now had several parents and siblings, but none were the reincarnation of Nie Mingjue. No one had that fire, that incredible talent for love and battle. No one was able to love Huaisang, or hurt him, the way that Mingjue had.

Huaisang spent two lifetimes ignoring his mission in order to produce art. He painted fans, experimented with new pigments, developed better brushes, planted gardens (well, hired gardeners to plant gardens), and even tried ceramics. In a sort of ironic acknowledgement of the Heavens, he did a lot of images of Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian in various Heavenly surroundings. In his fifth life, he used less sublime surroundings, since he needed money, and pornography was quite lucrative.

In his sixth lifetime, Huaisang was born into a family that was almost poor. He didn’t realize it right away of course. Infant brains are not suited to adult analyses. He supposed he should be grateful that he didn’t have to live through each new childhood while possessing the memories of lifetimes as a full adult. It would be terribly boring.

It was the first lifetime where there was no money left over for artistic pursuits. Maybe the Heavens were trying to tell him something? But what could he do about it? It wasn’t like a poor child could get to Yiling or Gusu anyway.

When he was ten, his family encountered hardships and had suddenly to relocate from Qinghe to Yiling. Later he would figure that this was indeed the final evidence that the Heavens were trying to tell him something.

A ten year old boy, even with five previous lifetimes of wisdom beginning to emerge, could not produce food or money. Nor could a boy with still-developing coordination produce great art, even if he had extra ink or brushes or paper.

So Huisang did what all poor kids his age did—household chores and running errands and pretending to stay awake for those lessons his family could afford. He became very, very good at the errand-running thing, taking all manner of letters, verbal messages, and items all over the town. He specialized in running gossip, which wasn’t lucrative but was terribly fun.

Yiling was a big place. But eventually he did run into a bedraggled boy with a smile that lit up the world.

Unfortunately, the boy was carrying an enormous lotus seed-pod and pursued by an angry shopkeeper. The boy’s smile barely wavered as he threw the seed-pod to Nie Huaisang, then turned and ran. Huaisang didn’t hesitate. Lotus seeds were an expensive item this time of year—it had to have been stolen. He would also likely be in trouble if he were caught with it. Huaisang tossed the pod toward the shopkeeper, yelled “I’ll get him!” and ran after the boy.

Two barefoot ten-year-olds were no match for the shopkeeper. After a few streets, the boys were in no danger of being caught, but the smiling boy kept running. He was faster than Huaisang, but seemed to be waiting for him, taunting him. So Huaisang followed until the boy collapsed, giggling at the base of a dead tree, and Huaisang realized they were in the Burial Mounds. He bent over, panting.

The smile dimmed a little when the boy’s eyes fixed on Huaisang’s empty hands. “You didn’t drop it,” he said, with mock horror, clearly aware that any sane person would not want to be caught with stolen goods.

“Of course I did,” Huaisang said grumpily. “If you wanted it that bad, you should have kept it yourself.”

“But they wouldn’t have punished you, if they’d caught you.”

“They would have,” Huaisang insisted. He had never been severely punished for anything, so far, in this life. But for some reason he wanted Wei Ying—it had to be Wei Ying—to think that he, also, broke rules at every opportunity.

“Too bad,” Wei Ying said sighing. “Lotus seeds are best when you eat them straight from the pod.”

Huaisang wanted to protest that a boy living in the Burial Mounds and on the streets of Yiling, had likely never tasted enough lotus seeds to have an opinion on them. But he’d heard Wei Wuxian say that before, possibly as a joke. So Huaisang just nodded sagely and said, “Of course.”

It was the beginning of an odd friendship. The two boys ran into each other, often literally, with a frequency that made Huaisang think Wei Ying was doing it deliberately. Huaisang was, in fact, deliberately keeping track of Wei Ying.

Not that he could do anything with the information. Lan Wangji was so far away and so far above them that Huaisang wasn’t even sure he existed in this lifetime. The cultivation sects had become very secretive, interacting only with generals and emperors. There was no way for a poor kid in Yiling to inquire about a child possibly born on a secluded mountaintop near Gusu.

Wei Ying was constantly in trouble, always hungry and always trying to help those less fortunate, which happily wasn’t very many people. He spent most of his time scrounging for food. He had an uncanny knack for finding things in the Burial Mounds, too, but they were mostly broken and never edible. There was nothing Huaisang could do to help him—or anyone else either—his family barely had enough to eat themselves.

By age fourteen, Wei Ying had gathered a group of street kids, who ran in the streets without restraint and shared anything that stuck to them. They were just petty thieves and nuisances, but the ministry of Yiling declared them outlaws. Still, it all seemed like a game until the day the youngest, six-year-old A-Yuan, was caught.

“I won’t let them hurt him,” Wei Ying stated, and Nie Huaisang knew what he intended to do before Wei Ying told him.

Two days later they let A-Yuan go, and beat Wei Ying in the center of Yiling. He was terribly skinny and wearing the rags of children’s clothing, yet still looked ten years older than he had two days before. He smiled at Huaisang the entire time, sympathetically, as if sorry to make Huaisang witness such a messy thing.

There was a war in the North that year, or maybe that decade. The Song Dynasty had split into North and South, and there was a Jin Emperor somewhere too. There were always wars. Wei Ying was sentenced to join an army sent from Yunmeng to fight the barbarians for the Jin emperor. Or maybe the Northern Song one. Who knew? The emperors all blurred together after a while. The only thing Huaisang was sure of was that none of the interchangeable emperors actually had any mandate from Heaven. He knew what a mandate from Heaven actually looked like. But he knew better than to say that out loud.

Huaisang went to war too, because there was nothing else for a poor kid with no education or prospects to do. He figured that this was a pretty miserable life, devoid of any opportunity for art, and he might as well get it over with. But also he’d heard rumors that the army would be joined by a contingent from Gusu. Lan Wangji would maybe be old enough to be sent to war.

He never found out of this was true. Somewhere, well before reaching the front, a fever roared through the ranks. Wei Ying, already weakened by his punishment, died despite Huaisang’s care. Huaisang caught it from Wei Ying, and quickly followed. Though fever was a pretty unimpressive way to go, at least there wasn’t screaming or blood. And nobody poked him with any sort of pointy object.

After that disaster, Huaisang realized that he would never be able to rescue Wei Wuxian unless he was already positioned in Yiling, with money and power. He began planning further ahead.

He stopped feeling guilty for abandoning the martial path prescribed by his brother. His core had grown a bit stronger with each reincarnation, possibly because he was inadvertently cultivating through painting. But he would never be a swordsman. He worked instead on perfecting the fan as a weapon, as well as a form of art. With careful assembly and concentrated application of ink, he could imbue a fan with spiritual power. He never got as far as flying on a fan, but he could learn to fight more-or-less effectively by creating sharp edges and pointed tips.

Looking helpless remained a useful weapon. The fan worked best when it came as a surprise.

Not everyone was an enemy in those lives. He gathered people he trusted, people he could rely on. Of course that meant that he had to be reliable sometimes, but he could do that. He enjoyed occasionally revealing himself as a competent person instead of pretending to be a fool who didn’t know anything.

There were people he cared about; not necessarily connected to him by fate, but still important.

He even married, once, a marriage of convenience that really went quite well, after they figured out that neither of them had any interest in sex. Or at least, no interest in sex with each other. His wife—which one was she? Li Qian? Lu Ruomei? Or was that her maid?—came from a very well off family that had been associated long ago with the Nie Clan. She brought her own maid, with whom she had an ongoing and passionate affair. Huaisang didn’t mind in the slightest; was actually rather relieved.

It was . . . nice to have a family.

Of course that also meant that he became attached to people sometimes. He was devastated when Li Qian died. Lu Ruomei stayed with him, mourning together. That was comfortable.

It occurred to him that avenging your brother’s death by killing his murderers is not the same thing as mourning your brother. Lu Ruomei didn’t object at all when Huaisang added a tablet for his brother next to the one for Li Qian. It felt right to mourn Mingjue as an ordinary brother who’d made mistakes, not as a daunting, powerful general in a war where mistakes could not be permitted.

Anyway.

It took Huaisang three lives to reestablish a Nie Sect, move it to Yiling, and declare that the rescue of orphans was one of its prime precepts.

.

Chapter Text

On his return trip from Saratoga Springs, Nie Huaisang had a fair amount of time to think. Much of that time also involved inching his way across the George Washington Bridge which was backed up for construction despite it being nearly midnight. Why bother inventing cars and suspension bridges, if it was faster to just swim across? Sometimes he really missed traveling by sword.

He wondered if Lan Wangji could travel by sword; he certainly was radiating enough spiritual power to do so. He’d need a spiritual sword, though. Whatever had happened to his sword Bichen, anyway? The Lans were so obsessive that it was possible they still had it squirreled away somewhere. ‘Squirreled’ was not quite the right word, though. It wouldn’t be randomly stashed. He’d bet the Lan kept meticulous indexes.

And how could Lan Wangji control the enormous amount of spiritual power he currently had? Just how close to Qi deviation was he? Perhaps it would help if Lan Wangji had a sword to cultivate with? Except maybe it was just as well. He knew from experience that Qi deviation with a sword (or a saber) was a lot scarier than Qi deviation unarmed.

The Lan cultivated with music too. Maybe that would be better? Wangji had probably been cultivating with violin and piano, perhaps without realizing it, but he couldn’t be convinced to touch those now. Which led to wondering about Lan Wangji’s guqin, also once named Wangji. That had been his preferred instrument in several lifetimes. It probably didn’t exist anymore, since musical instruments have much shorter shelf-lives than swords.

When he finally reached his tiny apartment, Huaisang immediately emailed Mianmian Luo to recommend that a guqin be found for Lan Wangji.

Then he looked at the rest of his email.

Ned Sang had turned in his new final assignment to Dr. Chen, leaving the portfolio on the desk of her ‘mysteriously unlocked’ office one night. The following morning, he had taken off for Saratoga Springs. He was expecting to hear from her soon, but she hadn’t sent anything. Instead he had thirteen emails from Professor Lan, and three emails from an unrecognized, non-university account.

The emails from Lan Qiren were all terribly short, as though the man didn’t know you could put more than one sentence in an email. They all contained some variation of “Plagiarism must be punished,” “You are a horrible person,” and “You fail.” A normal person would have just written “Fuck you,” and left it at that. The reason for his sudden vindictiveness wasn’t clear. There was no hint that Lan Qiren was aware of his visit upstate, but what else could it be? Unless he’d somehow found out that Ned had sold the supposedly-plagiarized painting.

The unidentified emails were clearly from Lan Xichen. The first said, threateningly, “Stay away from my brother." The email was signed only “X.” The second said, "Meet me in front of the Lenfest Center at noon on Wednesday.” That was the Center for the Arts near the Columbia campus. It was easy to get to, and had a nice overhang in front, in case it was raining. The third email from the same address merely said, “Please.” Xichen must have learned emailing from the same person as Lan Qiren had, but it was a nice touch.

It was already 3 AM Wednesday morning.

Ned had intended to meet Dr. Chen at her office first thing Wednesday morning which, considering how late it was now, would probably have ended up being somewhere around eleven. That would obviously have to wait. He had to assume that Lan Xichen was acting as Lan Qiren’s representative, though he had no idea why he would need one. But if certainly wouldn’t help Ned’s Masters Degree to blow off one of Lan Qiren’s nephews.

He spent the rest of the night meditating with the new fan he’d taken to Saratoga. Some day, he might look for one of the fans he’d cultivated in the past, but it probably would be far too much work to steal it from whatever museum it might have ended up in. He was not much better at meditating than he’d used to be, but there seemed to be no point in trying to sleep.

Waiting in the plaza in front of the Center for the Arts the next morning—an unseasonably lovely fall day with no need for shelter against rain—Huaisang realized that he had no idea what Lan Xichen might look like. Even though he was the reincarnation of a person Huaisang had known, there was no guarantee that he’d look the same. Huaisang had brought his new fan, but it was even less likely that the current Xichen would recognize the painting.

Huaisang needn’t have worried. At precisely noon, a tall man with a long black braid strode into the plaza. He looked like an older copy of Lan Wangji. He was wearing faded, ripped jeans and a black v-neck Uniqlo t-shirt. The look was so unlike Xichen that Huaisang wondered if he was deliberately trying to blend in; to pretend he was a student, or something. He was too old to pull that off, really.

The man headed straight for Huaisang, as though he knew exactly who he was looking for. Come to think of it, he’d probably just looked for Ned Sang’s photo on line. It was in the student registry. Huaisang tucked the fan back into his backpack and went to meet him.

Xichen smiled. It was the same uncertain half-smile that he’d always worn when dealing with his enemies, but it was laced with something like real anger. It seemed he had learned, over lifetimes, to have real emotions under that mask of a smile. Good for him.

Not so good for Huaisang, however. Xichen had come to meet a graduate student named Ned Sang, but he’d have no reason to be so deeply angry with one of his uncle’s students. He must know about the visit to Saratoga Springs. There was no benefit to hiding. Huaisang took a deep breath and extended a hand. “Hi. I’m Nie Huaisang,” he said.

A brief surprise passed across Xichen’s smile. “Not Ned Sang today?” he asked. He shook Huaisang’s hand anyway. “Well, then. I’m Lan Xichen.”

Huaisang suppressed a desire to retrieve the fan so he could hide behind it. He waited.

Xichen said, “You visited my brother.” A statement of fact, not a question.

Huaisang made a sympathetic face. “If you know that, you also know that Wangji spoke to me.” He saw Xichen’s face go slack with shock, and knew that he’d guessed wrong. Xichen knew of the visit, but had not, seemingly, talked to Ms. Luo. Ah, well. There’d been no lifetime where Xichen had not wanted the best for his brother.

Xichen said, “No. My . . . friend at the Retirement Home only said that someone visited. The name he gave and the name on his ID were different.” His angry calm was gone, replaced by a sort of annoyed confusion. And slight embarrassment.

Ah, right. Ned hadn’t actually made a full legal name change. The door guard must have been paying attention when he gave that cursory glance at Huaisang’s ID. And that guard was involved with . . . maybe even dating? . . . Xichen. “Professor Lan didn’t send you, then?”

“What? No!” Xichen said. His horror seemed genuine. “I haven’t told Uncle anything. I usually take care of . . . unwanted intrusions myself.” He met Huaisang’s eyes, in challenge or perhaps threat. “But he will find out. He owns the place, or at least the Lan Sect does.”

Oooh! That was a threat. There was still a Lan Sect, presumably in New York and powerful enough to keep its own secret mental health facility upstate. And Lan Qiren was involved in it, if not the actual Sect Leader. Ned Sang would be hopelessly outclassed at this point. But Nie Huaisang was not. He let his eyes fill with fear, as though he thought a Lan Sect might be some sort of Chinese mafia, and he knew he had defied it.

“Tell me about my brother,” Xichen said firmly. He grabbed Huaisang’s arm as though expecting him to run off. As though there was any point in running.

Huaisang stared at the hand holding him. There was a fair amount of spiritual power behind Xichen’s grasp, but Huaisang pretended not to notice and kept his own Qi, such as it was, very quiet. “O-okay,” he said.

Huaisang did not give Xichen the whole story, of course. He left out the part where he was the umpteenth resurrection of an ancient cultivator looking to unite Wangji with his eternal soulmate. Instead, he hinted that there was a Nie Sect, and that it might be interested in Lan Wangji’s potential as a musical cultivator. He refused to reveal the name of the person who’d helped him. But he did not hide his ability to speak multiple Chinese dialects or his extensive knowledge of ancient cultivation.

He didn’t translate most of what he’d said to Wangji, most of which wouldn’t make sense to someone with no knowledge of his past lives anyway. He just said that he’d quoted some old Confucian principles and showed him a picture of the ancient Lan home.

The painting on the new fan he carried made Lan Xichen’s eyebrows go up. But not because he recognized the Cloud Recesses. It seemed that a similar painting was in the Lan archives. Xichen waved it away. “What did my brother say?” he demanded.

Huaisang said, “Lan Wangji said nothing except, ‘I am waiting for Wei Ying.’”

At this, Xichen closed his eyes and said, “Shit!” Then he added, almost to himself, “Zongzhu will go into Qi deviation if he hears that name again.”

“So Lan Zongzhu is keeping Wei Ying away?”

Xichen shrugged.

Huaisang thought, ‘You are going to have to choose sides, for once, Xichen,’ and said, “Well. Lan Wangji’s core feels like a sun about to go nova. I think you will have a bigger Qi problem if Wangji doesn’t see Wei Ying.”

Xichen said nothing. His silence was almost an accusation, like he’d long since given up on Wei Ying.

“Do you know where to find him?” Huaisang asked. Silence. Perhaps guilty silence. “Fuck. Are you hiding him? Did you kidnap him?”

That apparently was too much for Xichen. He sighed. “Wei Ying does not exist. That was the fake name of a street performer Wangji met. His real name is possibly Wei Wuxian or Jiang Wuxian, since he seems to have been adopted from China by a Jiang family.” His voice was wooden, resigned. “And, no. Lan Zongzhu found him once. I have not been able to find him again.”

Damn. A man with resources and possibly a whole sect behind him, could not find Wei Ying. If Wei Wuxian was gone or already dead, the rest of Lan Wangji’s life was going to be short and possibly involve a rather unpleasant level of uncontrolled Qi. Though, possibly things would be even more unpleasant if Lan Zhan did see Wei Ying again. Either way, the Lan would likely blame Huaisang.

Huaisang did not ask Xichen if he was still looking, or what he intended to do with Wei Ying if he found him. He said, “Wangji said that Wei Ying ‘didn’t come.’” He made air quotes with his fingers. “Did your sect send him away?”

Xichen sighed. “Wangji was playing music with him in Grand Central Station. Wangji refused to stop meeting him.” He sounded aggrieved, as if every sane person would want to stop their brother from playing music in the subway. “Uncle Qiren said it was polluting his music, playing in the subway tunnels with an undisciplined person.”

“Was it?”

“Probably. Uncle certainly told Wangji and Lan Zongzhu that. He might even have told Wei Ying.” Xichen sighed. “It doesn’t matter. Wei Ying stopped playing in the tunnels. Wangji kept running away, on the days they’d used to meet. He was easy to find, standing alone on some random subway platform, waiting with his violin case . . .” He trailed off, perhaps remembering that he was telling these things to a suspicious stranger.

“Is that when he stopped playing?” Huaisang asked, doing his best to look young and innocent. It didn’t work. He watched Xichen put his enemy smile carefully back in place.

“Why do you care?” Xichen said. Which was answer enough. “Why are you doing this?”

“Hmm. . . Let’s call it my fate.”

“Very funny,” Xichen said dryly. “Let’s call it stupid. If you bother Lan Wangji again, failing to get a Masters Degree will be the least of your worries.”

So Xichen did know about that. Probably Qiren used Xichen whenever he had problems with his computer. Xichen must have access to all of Columbia University’s secrets. He probably had access to all of the Lan Sect’s secrets too. He might even be the heir to the Sect Leader . . .

It hardly mattered what power or connections Xichen had. If he wasn’t going to help Lan Wangji meet Wei Wuxian, Huaisang would move on without him. It wasn’t the first time that Xichen had misunderstood his brother. Just because he wanted the best for Wangji, didn’t mean that he always knew what that was.

He had, however, given Huaisang some valuable clues. Since there was now probably no hope of graduating, he might as well follow them. He had to find Wei Wuxian, even if it meant being expelled for . . .

Okay. Being expelled for plagiarizing himself was just embarrassing. But it wouldn’t be the first unfairness visited upon him.

.

Chapter Text

In his tenth lifetime, Nie Huaisang grew up with Wei Ying as a fellow disciple in the Nie sect. As per the precepts of the sect, Wei Ying had been adopted from the streets of Yiling, at age four. Huaisang was an orphan too, but his grandfather was one of the Nie elders.

By the fifteenth century, the Jianghu had scattered to the literal ends of the earth. The sects secluded themselves on unscalable mountaintops or unreachable islands. The distance between them seemed to enlarge as ever more of the world was populated by common people with no interest in cultivation.

The common people were interested in warfare, though, which meant many people desired training in the martial arts. Numerous branches developed competing teaching techniques, all supporting different emperors or even different dynasties. Huaisang didn’t even try to keep track of them.

There were rumors of near-immortal elders living on a mountain near Qinghe. Those rumors were false. Nie Huaisang had started them himself to make the Nie look good. The sect was actually just a huge training compound on the edge of Yiling.

Young Nie Huaisang was terribly enamored of the chaotic, undisciplined Wei Ying. Really, what ten-year-old wouldn’t want a mate who laughed as he stole loquats and lotus seeds (and, later, alcohol), and then actually shared them?

Huaisang hadn’t had many childhood friends in his many lives. Gaining past memories had a tendency to alienate the kids who didn't suddenly develop an interest in things like ancient brush techniques. Actually, so far, Wei Wuxian had been his only friend, unless you counted Jiang Cheng at Cloud Recesses in his first life. Which perhaps made Wei Wuxian the only friend he’d ever actually liked.

There were discussion conferences and lectures, because that too was built into the new Nie Sect too. The Jiang were still at Lotus Pier, and the Jin in Lanling were probably wealthier than any emperor. The Lan were still a major sect too, ensconced on their mountains near Gusu. All of them of course brought their best disciples to the Yiling Nie conferences.

The first time Huaisang and Wei Ying were old enough to attend, Wei Ying, convinced that he would disgrace the sect because he hadn't developed a golden core, ran away to the Burial Mounds three days before the lectures.

Lan Wangji helped find him, disdainfully, as though he felt that finding a lost disciple was beneath him. He ignored the jokes and bravado of the other boys, keeping a frozen expression on his face and occasionally spouting an appropriate but unwelcome rule. Possibly he was bothered by all the resentment in the Burial Mounds. Or maybe he was just a bitch.

He was even more bothered by the fact that Wei Ying was, literally, playing with resentment when they found him. Lan Wangji’s eyes went wide with a sort of awestruck horror. He drew his sword, and said, “Do not consort with evil.” Wei Ying froze in guilty horror, letting the resentment drift away. He clearly expected to be run though on the spot.

In a sudden white rage, Nie Huaisang hit Lan Wangji with his fan. He connected solidly, surprising himself as much as Lan Wangji. Fortunately, he used the folded edge and not the sharpened metal tips, and caused very little damage. Lan Wangji turned on Huaisang, then mastered himself with visible effort. It probably helped that Huaisang was looking particularly helpless, cowering behind the fan. Lan Wangji gave Wei Wuxian a look of deep regret, sheathed Bichen, and stalked away in the direction they’d come.

Nothing the other boys said could convince Wei Ying to come back with them. He disappeared deeper into the Burial Mounds. He didn’t return.

Years later, there were rumors of a cultivator in black who spoke to the dead. They called him the Yiling Laozu, a title which Huaisang gave him when he passed on the rumors. No one remembered the first Yiling Laozu anymore. Eventually Lan Wangji, who had been night-hunting alone and obsessively, went into the Burial Mounds. He didn’t return. Huaisang imagined that the two of them were finally cultivating dark and light together, in the way the Heavens intended.

And maybe they were.

But in his next lifetime, Huaisang once again grew up with Wei Ying and chaos. This time Wei Ying started experimenting with resentful energy early, in increasingly dangerous ways. He was tossed out of the sect long before any Lans came to visit for any reason. For a while, Huaisang brought food and necessary items to the cave that once again was named Demon Subdue Cavern. But one night there was an explosion heard all the way through Yiling, and the next time Huaisang visited there was no sign of Wei Ying.

Obviously, it was time to try a new approach. There was no way that a high-born man with one of the strongest golden cores ever was going to get together with a resentful street-rat with no core at all. Even if the two of them were soulmates.

It was time to visit Jiang Cheng.

* * * * *

No mere Nie Sect disciple could ever hope to approach an Immortal like Jiang Cheng, so Huaisang waited until he was an accomplished elder in his early fifties. It didn’t take actually having a strong core anymore. Fortunately. It just required crafting a reputation and carefully avoiding fights Huaisang couldn’t win. His wit and his fan were equally sharp. But intrigue was so much less messy.

There wasn’t much need for cultivators anymore. Talismans and inventions, many originating with Wei Wuxian, had been in common usage at funerals for centuries, now. People got used to random hauntings and swirling resentment as the world got more crowded. The occasional fierce corpse or yao that went unnoticed until it got strong enough to need skilled hunters, was quietly taken down by either the Immortal Jiang or the Ghost General.

The Ghost General had been spotted occasionally over the years, and it was generally agreed that he had some sort of manor in a cave in the Burial Mounds. This was certainly possible, but Huaisang knew that Wen Ning was a very quiet person, who nobody noticed unless he needed them to. He probably had a house in Yiling.

No one had seen Jiang Cheng for decades. It was presumed that he had retreated to some mountain somewhere, as Immortals were known to do. Nobody had actually tried to find him, since he had a reputation of being both very strong and eternally angry.

Nie Huaisang figured that the Jiang Cheng he knew would not stray far from his sect. He therefor headed for Yunmeng, and began asking for rumors of lakes where strange things happened or places that were not on maps because nobody ever went there.

Lotus Pier was now an integral part of the enormous, and enormously prosperous, port city of Yunmeng. The Jiang were a strong sect, very skilled in archery and swordsmanship. They were even better at trade negotiations. Officially, no one cultivated there anymore, but Huaisang suspected that some of the inner disciples still managed to develop powerful cores. For all their martial prowess, they’d managed to stay out of the worst of the wars.

The current Jiang Sect Leader was a tiny woman named Jiang Lin. She carried a sword that was almost as big as she was. It flashed with purple sparks. For a few awful moments, Huaisang thought she might be a reincarnation of the terrifying Yu Ziyuan, but if so, she had grown a lot. She was firm but gentle, and Huaisang couldn’t imagine her ever actually hitting anyone with her sparking sword.

They sat over tea in an elegant pavilion overlooking a sea of lotus blossoms, and the last centuries might not have passed at all.

“I need to find Jiang Cheng,” Huaisang said quietly. “I’m an old friend.”

One elegant eyebrow rose. “I see,” Jiang Lin said. Her expression said ‘Jiang Cheng does not have friends,’ but she of course wouldn’t dare suggest that he was lying.

“Actually I was the friend of his brother, Wei Wuxian,” Huaisang added. Jiang Lin froze just for a second when she heard that name, so he added, “In my first life.” Admitting that might mark him as some sort of madman, but supposedly all the sects knew about reincarnation, and would have to believe him.

“Wei Wuxian is long dead,” Jiang Lin pointed out. Since she actually knew the name, presumably he was not completely long-forgotten.

“That is true,” Huaisang admitted. He leaned in closer to Jiang Lin, as though reluctant to impart a great secret. Which he kind of was. “Wei Wuxian has reincarnated several times along with me, and has, almost every time, died young and alone in the Burial Mounds.”

The next morning Jiang Lin arranged for a boat from one of Lotus Pier’s many docks, which she sent, with a tiny burst of Qi, in what looked like a random direction. Nie Huaisang was the only passenger. The boat moved against the current and was eventually swallowed up by an unseasonal mist. On the other side of the mist was a still river winding among tall, impossibly thin mountains. A small but elegant house was placed artistically between the water and a high cliff.

Jiang Cheng was leaping between the mountains, balancing on tiny clefts in their sheer sides. Occasionally he let loose a kick or a sword swipe, and a few pebbles would tumble down, bouncing off the cliff edges or through the sparse vegetation. He seemed no angrier than usual.

If someone had asked Huaisang what Immortals do with all their spare time, he might have said that they meditated and did long, slow martial arts routines. Maybe they played calm music, or read philosophy, or did something requiring extreme patience, like growing Bonsai trees. Obviously, Jiang Cheng was not particularly suited to any of those things.

Huaisang watched another tiny landslide click its way to the bottom of a cliff. The cliff face left behind was tall and thin, with a well-placed collection of vegetation remaining in artistic little crevices. Maybe Jiang Cheng was sculpting Bonsai mountains.

Whatever he was doing, it was probably best to stay in the boat until he was done.

“Why the fuck aren’t you getting out of the boat,” Jiang Cheng shouted.

Ah. Nothing like a polite invitation. Huaisang climbed onto the shore and bowed. He invented an elaborate bow with his fingers laced together in an inverted triangle. He and Wei Wuxian had spent an afternoon, once, inventing silly ways to bow.

Jiang Cheng did not bow. He rolled his eyes. “Is that how they’re bowing these days?” he asked.

“No,” Huaisang admitted.

Jiang Cheng gave him a look of puzzled disdain. Probably no one had dared to joke with him in centuries, and he’d forgotten how to respond. Well, actually he’d never known how to respond to anything without anger. Which, come to think of it, Wei Wuxian had been a grandmaster of molding to his advantage. Or disadvantage.

Huaisang gave a long look over Jiang Cheng’s shoulder at the weird rock formations and said, “Bonsai mountains. Nice statement.”

Jiang Cheng sparked purple along his right arm, then growled, “Why are you here?” There was barely any anger behind the question at all.

It came to Huaisang somewhat belatedly that Jiang Cheng was the first person he’d talked to in ages who wouldn’t by necessity forget all about him by his next life. Perhaps he should have been more polite. Not that careful politeness had ever made a difference to Jiang Cheng.

Huaisang bowed again, properly this time, and said, “I’m Nie Huaisang. Yes, that Nie Huaisang.” He pulled opened his fan and ducked briefly behind it saying. “I don’t know; I just don’t know.” Then he straightened and faced Jiang Cheng without flinching, in the way he’d learned as Chief Cultivator and in so many lives since. “I’m here to talk about Wei Wuxian.”

A shadow passed over Jiang Cheng’s face and, just for a second, he looked lost and very young. Then he drew anger around him like a cloak and pointed the fist holding Zidian at the boat. “Get. Out.”

Huaisang had wondered if Jiang Cheng had come to terms with his feelings for Wei Wuxian; left them behind on his path to immortality. But how could he, when he still held Wei Wuxian’s core? Perhaps immortality was another unwanted gift that Wei Wuxian had bestowed upon Jiang Cheng without his consent. “Why should I?” Huaisang said. “When I am the only other person alive who remembers?”

Jiang Cheng deflated, then. And invited him to sit down for tea. Huaisang pulled a wine jar from his robes and offered it instead.

It wasn’t Emperor’s Smile—they’d stopped making that at least a century ago when Lan traditions, including abstinence from alcohol, spread to the surrounding countryside—but it did just as good a job at lubricating an awkward conversation.

Drunk Jiang Cheng, after telling yet another story about Wei Ying as an annoying child in Lotus Pier, collapsed on Huaisang’s shoulder, sobbing.

Drunk Huaisang patted him on the arm that was not sparking with Zidian’s power, and said, “You still miss him.” This was a dangerous guess, but Huaisang would not tell him about Wei Wuxian if Jiang Cheng was going to track him down to kill him. As he had in Wei Wuxian’s first and second life.

Jiang Cheng sat up again and wiped his face angrily. “He promised to stay . . .”

Huaisang interrupted letting his own anger seep into his voice. “It was a long time ago. And you know why he didn’t keep his promises.”

“Immortality sucks,” Jiang Cheng said. “This should have been his.”

Huaisang looked around at the deformed mountains, and said, “He would be bored too.” But not so lonely, Huaisang thought. Even if he didn’t have Lan Wangji to bother, Wei Wuxian wouldn’t isolate himself so.

Jiang Cheng followed Huaisang’s gaze. He made a small noise that might have been a sob or a laugh. Then he reached underneath the dock they were sitting on and brought out a bottle, chilled by the river. “Wen Ning makes this. Says he got the recipe from the northern barbarians, but I think the Wen made it in the Burial Mounds.”

Huaisang offered his bowl, took a small sip, and gagged. It burned terribly, but the taste was immediately replaced by a very pleasant floaty feeling. He took another cautious sip.

Jiang Cheng raised his bowl, then drained it. “Only way to get an Immortal truly drunk,” he muttered.

Huaisang was still debating with himself exactly what to tell Jiang Cheng, but the new drink cleared away all his doubts. It seemed possible that Wei Wuxian’s relationship with Lan Wangji was not the only thing the Heavens wanted Huaisang to fix. “Jiang-xiong,” he said, as though a weak-cored cultivator could actually be a martial brother with an Immortal, “Wei-xiong needs your help . . .”

Jiang Cheng suddenly looked a lot less drunk.

“Oh, not right now,” Huaisang continued blithely. The alcohol sloshing around in he brain was making him feel giddy. “He’s dead. But how many times, exactly, do you want him to die horribly?”

“You little . . .” Jiang Cheng growled. He had grabbed Huaisang by the front of his robes and was shaking him. “What did you do to him?”

“Oh, I’ve been trying to help,” Huaisang gasped. “But orphans left on the streets of Yiling often die horribly.”

Jiang Cheng’s face was now almost as purple as the sparks gathering in both of his hands, sparks that were clearly about to be transferred to Huaisang.

“If you kill me now,” Huaisang smiled serenely, “Wei-xiong and I will probably both be reborn in a couple of decades at most. He won’t remember the past, but I will.” Then he let his eyes roll back and passed out, because Jiang Cheng had a very tight grip on the neck of his robes and that was making it really quite difficult to breathe.

* * * * *

When he woke later, he was back in the boat, floating somewhere. He felt awful. He was a bit surprised to wake up at all, actually. It took him several hours—well, it felt that long, anyway—to raise his head above the edge of the boat, where his blurry eyes found him within reach of Lotus Pier’s docks. There were already disciples running to pull him ashore.

He wasn’t terribly grateful that Jiang Cheng had let him go, at least for the next two days, during which he had the worst hangover of his many lives.

Somewhere in there, he remembered that he hadn’t mentioned Lan Wangji. Oh, well. Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji had barely tolerated each other at the best of times. Jiang Cheng would certainly not be moved out of his weird little immortal world to do anything for Lan Wangji.

But maybe, just maybe, somewhere deep down, Jiang Cheng actually cared for Wei Wuxian. Perhaps the Heavens wanted to repair the broken bond between Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng too.

Nah.

.

Chapter Text

Back in his apartment after the almost complete waste of time that was his meeting with Lan Xichen, Ned flopped onto his bed. He did this as dramatically as possible, even though there was no one there to witness it. He was somewhat hampered in this effort by the fact that the bed was only about two feet smaller than the room.

The bed was a king-sized monstrosity with red satin sheets. It had never been used for anything except sleeping. But nobody else had to know that.

Ned wanted company. He’d been sadly absent from his friends since the fateful meeting with the three professors. He’d gotten some texts when he failed to show up at an end-of-October party that he, himself had arranged. But nothing since. He’d been out of commission, what, three weeks? Was no one else capable of throwing a party? Or had he really disappeared from everyone’s social register so fast?

Maybe they really didn’t want him around. Heh. Now he was reminding himself of Wei Wuxian.

He scrolled through his phone contacts, considering. And realized that he really didn’t particularly want to see any of them. It was partly that, now that he was aware of his past, they all just seemed so terribly young. The ancient, great artist Nie Huaisang had very little use for a bunch of modern twenty-somethings. But also the young Ned Sang really didn’t want to talk about his impending expulsion.

He didn’t want sympathy. He didn’t want to have to explain why getting kicked out of a masters program really didn’t matter much. Except that it did. He couldn’t properly explain the irony of the accusation of plagiarism.

And he certainly couldn’t tell anyone why he had visited Professor Lan’s sorry nephew.

Actually, some sympathy would be nice. But he wasn’t going to get it.

He sat up with an impressively loud grunt, as though getting out of bed was some sort of difficult martial art move. No one appreciated the drama of that moment either.

He had a bunch of new emails from Professor Lan, but nothing from Lan Xichen. He also had two emails from Dr. Chen. He couldn’t bring himself to open any of them. He was pretty sure there was nothing he could do that would make Lan Qiren hate him more. He was fine with that. But he liked Dr. Chen. She was a good teacher and an even better artist. Huaisang had a brief daydream about trying to arrange some sort of gallery show for her . . .

Ned started with YouTube and TikTok, looking for flute and violin duets in the subway. He actually found a few tourist recordings, mostly bad quality, of two young Asian men playing on subway platforms. It looked like Lan Wangji and Wei Ying had indeed played, mostly on the 4-5-6 Line or the new LIRR track platforms beneath Grand Central Station.

In the best video, Lan Wangji looked almost transcendent in his focus on the music. The man who had to be Wei Ying wore his hair in a messy topknot under a Starbucks employee cap. They were playing a very strange arrangement of a Mendelssohn violin concerto. It was quite wonderful. At the end, Wei Ying beamed a smile that was exactly how Huaisang remembered it.

The two also had been recorded playing the ancient Lan music to calm spirits and lay ghosts to rest. Were they actually cleansing the subway? Had they been assigned to do it, or was it unintentional? Ned had never been bothered by ghosts on the subway, but he hadn’t known to look for them. Or perhaps his latent, temporarily forgotten core had sent them off without his knowledge. If there were still sects, perhaps someone had taken over cleansing the city.

More likely, uncontrolled restless ghosts were just part of the charm of mass transportation.

Looking for Wei Wuxian on the streets of New York City was far more absurd than looking for an orphan on the streets of Yiling. Manhattan alone was far bigger than Yiling, and there was no guarantee that Wei Wuxian would live there. In fact, he likely couldn’t afford it. Huaisang would have to comb the entire city. Which was impossible.

And he had no guarantee that Wei Wuxian had even stayed in New York.

All he knew was that, until around a year ago, Wei Ying had played music in the tunnels of Grand Central Station with Lan Wangji. They’d somehow learned or reinvented ancient Lan cultivation scores. If the Lan knew about it, possibly they'd been intentionally cleansing the area. More likely, though, someone from the Lan had put a stop to it. Which meant that whatever good it was doing had also ceased. Sadly, it was not illegal to play on the subway platforms, so there would be no record of permits obtained, no way to trace musical subway maintenance. And no arrests for noise, or disorderly cultivation, or whatever.

But.

When he’d searched for Wei Wuxian before, it hadn’t occurred to him to look for Jiangs. There had been a few lifetimes where the Jiang clan had taken in the orphaned Wei Ying, but none where they’d actually given him their name. But Xichen had said that a Jiang family had adopted him from China.

The search for Jiang Wuxian (Wuxian Jiang, in English) found three speeding tickets, a web site advertising private flute lessons, and an eight-year-old graduation announcement from a very posh high school on Long Island. None of the contacts for music lessons were still active. But the high school’s alumni site seemed to think that Wuxian Jiang had gone to New York University for engineering, with a minor in music. There was no mention, there or at NYU, that he’d graduated from college.

A Jiang Ying had been evicted from an apartment in Brooklyn’s Bed-Sty neighborhood five months ago. Yeah. That sounded about right. Huaisang would bet that the Jiangs, whoever they were this time, had cut him off while he was struggling at NYU.

But finding a Wei Wuxian potentially homeless under any name in Brooklyn was not much of an improvement over finding a random street musician who was no longer playing at Grand Central Station.

Huaisang had no desire to visit the Jiang. In his experience, Jiang Cheng’s tendency toward anger seemed to be genetic. He could start with NYU and try to charm information out of someone at the music department. He could try the same ploy at Jiang Ying’s old apartment, hoping that some ex-roommate could help.

He ended up starting with the roommates. Wei Ying’s old apartment turned out to be only a mile or so from his own. He walked instead of taking his car, because who knew if there would be an open parking space.

“Do I look like a debt collector or something?” Ned asked the skinny woman who answered the door to Number 4C, and then immediately slammed it shut in his face. He’d told her that he was looking for Jiang Ying, which made her angry. But she’d buzzed him into the apartment complex when he corrected it to Wei Ying. He raised his voice to be heard through the door. “I’m a friend. Really. I think he might be in trouble.”

The door cracked open, now tethered by a chain. “He’s always in trouble,” the woman said. “If you’re from Protective Services, you’re too late.”

“I’m not a social worked either,” he said. “I’m an artist.” He held up a sketch he’d done the night before, drawn from the YouTube video of Wei Ying and Lan Wangji together.

“Oh, that’s really good,” she said. She seemed impressed, as though artistic talent was proof of honesty.

The door closed a little bit, but there was a clink of a chain being released. Then the door opened again. The woman yelled, “I’ll be right back,” to someone who presumably was still in the apartment. Huaisang was pretty sure there wasn’t actually anyone else there. Very cautious of her.

The woman locked the door behind her and pocketed the key.

“I’m Ned Sang.” He considered bowing, but instead held out his hand.

She didn’t take it. “You know he doesn’t live here anymore,” she said. Ned nodded. He had known, just hoped otherwise. She leaned close, as though she thought someone in the deserted entryway might hear her. “We had to get him evicted. He was a nice guy, but . . .”

“But?” She was clearly reluctant to go on. Ned tried his best to look trustworthy. He was getting lots of practice. “He was messy?”

She made a small smile. “Yes. But . . .”

“He couldn’t pay rent?”

“Well, yes. But that isn’t really why we had to kick him out.” She looked at the floor, then sideways up at Ned. “He was doing drugs.”

That was just about the last thing Ned expected. “What? Seriously?” he blurted. “Are you sure?”

“Well, what else makes a person suddenly get all angry and weird?”

“Umm . . .” Ned said. “I don’t know. PTSD? Bipolar?” He probably shouldn’t mention Qi deviation or uncontrolled resentful energy, right? “I’m an artist, not a psychologist.”

She sighed heavily. “It was bad enough last year when he stopped eating, and started playing this weird, horrible flute at all hours.” She sounded torn between anger and guilt. “But he was hallucinating; talking to things that didn’t exist. He’d be bleeding and wouldn’t let us take him to the hospital. We had to throw away his mattress . . . Not that he ever slept . . .”

“It’s okay,” Ned sympathized. “He’s always been a . . . difficult person.” Which was a bit of an understatement.

“It’s not okay,” she said. “He’s not okay.”

“I’m a friend. I want to help him.”

“Yeah. Good luck with that.” She turned to unlock her apartment door.

“Wait,” Ned said. “Any idea where to find him now?”

She didn’t turn around. “He used to work at Starbucks, the one on Lafayette.”

“Thanks,” Ned said, but the door was already closed.

On his way out, he noticed some strange graffiti in the hallway. He bent closer. It was done in red ink, possibly magic marker, but it was most definitely meant to be a talisman. It looked vaguely familiar, and he took a photo with his phone. There was another one in the next stairway landing down. Extending his still out-of-practice Qi, he realized that it was part of an array that protected the entire building.

It wasn’t new. But it wasn’t five months old either. Wei Wuxian was seemingly still protecting the people who lived in this place. He wondered what they needed to be protected from.

Outside, now that he’d woken up his tiny core, he could feel the effect of the array. There was a swirl of resentment in the outside air, small enough that it felt pretty much just like New York City. But maybe there was more than usual. Was it gathered just around this building? Or was there a general increase in resentment everywhere?

What was Wei Wuxian doing? And was he producing it or loosing control over it?

Huaisang checked his phone. The Starbucks was, of course, in the opposite direction from his apartment.

.

Chapter Text

The next time Nie Huaisang grew up enough to remember his past lives, the Nie clan was back in Qinghe. People were still telling the story about the time the Immortal Jiang had descended to Yiling and taken an orphan off the streets into the Jaing Sect.

Huaisang was the son of a distant cousin of the sect leader, but the family gained quite a bit of recognition when they realized he had a golden core. Very few people were actively cultivating cores, these days. Any core was cause for excitement. Most were satisfied with becoming superb martial arts experts, which only required channelling a bit of Qi in order to jump across rooftops and perform complex sword techniques.

Of course they were disappointed, once it became apparent that having a core was not going to help Huaisang become a great martial artist. He was able to convince them that, just perhaps, he could learn some minor marital art from the Jiang, like archery, maybe. So when he turned fourteen, he was sent to Lotus Pier as a guest disciple.

There weren’t as many rules as there supposedly still were at Cloud Recesses, but punishments were just as liberally dealt, and likely to be more . . . physical. Huaisang was an expert at avoiding both practice and punishment, though. It reminded him painfully of his brother, and he found himself wishing that he’d been a bit more cooperative with the training Mingjue had tried to instill in him.

How odd it was to find himself regretting making Mingjue yell at him.

He didn’t meet Wei Wuxian until he’d managed to get himself demoted to the lowest rank of archers, which took about three weeks because everybody expected someone with a core to be good at this stuff. Wei Wuxian was called Yiling Wei, and had been assigned to teach the failures, possibly because no one knew what else to do with him.

Rumor had it that Yiling Wei was a vast disappointment to the Jiang. It seemed that he had developed meridians but no golden core. The problem was that, when he called on his core, instead of reaching a reservoir of Qi, he found nothing there. Resentful energy rushed in to fill the void, resulting in some truly impressive misadventures.

Instead of giving up, as he’d been told to do repeatedly, Yiling Wei kept trying. The final time, he’d blown the roof off part of the disciples’ wing while, once again, trying to fly with a spiritual sword.

The Jiang Immortal was called from whatever lonely hole he had walled himself into, in order to dissuade him. Yiling Wei’s punishment, reportedly involving Zidian, was still spoken of only in whispers. Didn't Jiang Cheng realize that the lack of a core wasn't Wei Wuxian's fault? Perhaps Nie Huaisang should have been more specific about the core problem. Anyway, no one had seen Jiang Cheng since.

It was perhaps no surprise that Yiling Wei, despite his smiles, was not a happy teenager. He drank too much, often in Huaisang’s presence. He missed morning sessions, and mouthed off at the wrong people. He still played with resentful energy, though not with swords. He was often punished, sometimes for things that someone else had done.

But Wei Wuxian had always been an accomplished archer and that skill remained with him to be easily regained in this life. Huaisang discovered that he was also quite a good teacher. He teased and poked and corrected. He gave out encouraging smiles and disappointed sighs in equal measure. Huaisang called him Wei-Xiong, which made him dissolve into tears of laughter the first time. Huisang became a fair archer even though he was not trying very hard.

Huaisang had more experience with resentful energy than he did with archery. He learned more about that, too, inadvertently. He could tell that Wei-Xiong was actually getting quite good at chanelling resentment.

Then the Lan arrived with a selection of disciples for group training. There was no way they wouldn’t bring their star disciple.

It was a lovely late spring day, with lotus buds just showing their tips above the lakes. Everyone had been ordered to be present to welcome the visitors. Huaisang was hung over, but still able to enjoy the sunshine. Wei-Xiong was probably still drunk, but since he was always fidgety and inattentive, it was likely that only Huaisang could tell. He’d shared in the drinking bout, after all.

The Lan, as always, were perfect. Perfectly white robes. Perfectly straight posture. Perfectly blank polite faces.

“Stand straighter,” Huaisang whispered to Wei-Xiong. He added a delicate nudge with his elbow.

Wei-Xiong swayed ever so slightly. He was staring at the Lan contingent with the same rapt expression that had been, in his first life, reserved for Lan Wangji. But they were in the absolute last rank of Jiang, much too far away to see an individual person, let alone fall in love with them. Wei-Xiong whispered, “They’re like a wall of righteousness.” He sounded serious, reverent.

Huaisang thought maybe Wei Wuxian hadn’t fallen for Lan Wangji in spite of his rule-abiding uprightness, but because of it. Could a person who had so much trouble following rules himself actually be deep-down envious of someone who did it with gracious ease?

Huaisang also realized that Wei-Xiong had turned an inadvisable shade of green, like he was about to throw up, and was drawing resentful energy to combat nausea. There was a little stirring in the ranks of the Lan, as someone noticed the flow of wrongness and headed their way. That someone was probably Lan Wangji’s current incarnation.

The last thing he needed, if he was going to get Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji together in this life, was for Wei Wuxian to vomit on Lan Wangji and then pass out drunk. Lan Wangji would probably catch him, but he probably wouldn’t enjoy it. Or be impressed.

Huaisang did the only thing he could think of. He fainted first.

It was quite a good faint. It even fooled Wei-Xiong, maybe. At any rate, it allowed Wei-Xiong to kneel down by Huaisang, looking concerned and kind and calling him Nie-Xiong and Sang-gege.

Lan Wangji, because of course it was not some random Lan, knelt down as well. His expression had not wavered from its disinterested politeness. He put two fingers on Huaisang’s forehead, reading his Qi, which of course was completely normal. “Your friend will be fine,” he intoned. Then he turned and walked away.

Huaisang groaned dramatically and opened his eyes. Wei-Xiong was still kneeling by him, but was no longer paying any attention to him. His eyes were on the retreating back of Lan Wangji. He looked like he had just been introduced to a god.

“Get him out of here,” one of the head Jiang disciples said. It was unclear which of the two of them he was talking to. Indeed, it took all of Nie Huaisang’s skill to pretend that he needed Wei-Xiong’s help, rather than the other way around.

Later, they were both disciplined for public drunkenness and behavior inappropriate for a disciple. Wei-Xiong insisted that it had been all his fault, and he should be the only one punished. They doubled his punishment, unfortunately without cancelling Huaisang’s. Since the two of them had ostensibly insulted the Lan, the dual punishment was a public event.

Lan Wangji watched with a tiny crease of (possibly) concern on his perfect forehead, all of his attention focused on Wei-Xiong. He was, Huaisang thought, through his haze of fear, not quite as handsome in this life. But it hardly mattered. He radiated perfection, along with a massive amount of Qi.

Usually Wei-Xiong whined and complained during his punishments. He also usually freely channelled resentful energy to help him resist the blows. This time, he knelt very still, hands at his sides. He couldn’t channel resentment because the Lan had noticed its presence and sealed the area against it. His eyes met Huaisang’s in sympathy as they received blows in unison.

Wei-Xiong passed out before they finished. So Huaisang pretended to faint too. They got taken to the infirmary together. There, Huaisang passed out for real, because that shit really hurt. He had a very nice dream where . . .

Wait a minute, that really was Lan Wangji seated at a guqin by Wei-Xiong and playing the Song of Clarity—the correct version and not the one that, so many years ago, Jin Guangyao had used to kill Nie Mingjue. It was . . . nice. And kind of hot.

Apparently Wei-Xiong did not like the music as much as Huaisang did. “Stop that!” he moaned from the bed next to Huaisang. The guqin halted instantly, and Lan Wangji was at Wei-Xiong’s bedside.

“You are still poisoned by resentment,” Lan Wangji said. He was holding two fingers over Wei-Xiong’s wrist. He was also tenderly holding Wei-Xiong’s hand. Perhaps his righteousness required something to protect, and here was Wei-xiong clearly in dire need of protection.

“It hurts,” Wei-Xiong complained. He made a half-hearted movement to detach his hand from Lan Wangji’s.

Lan Wangji tightened his grip. “Of course it does,” he said, not entirely without sympathy. “Resentment corrupts the body. I can’t even feel your core.”

“I don’t have a fucking core,” Wei-Xiong said. He stared at Lan Wangji for an endless few seconds, perhaps daring him to protest this.

Then he twisted his hand away by force. The two of them stared down at the gap between their hands in shock, as though witnessing the end of the world.

Perhaps it was. Lan Wangji packed up his guqin and left the room without a word. The next day he left Lotus Pier, but a group of elders arrived in his stead, to cleanse Wei-Xiong of resentment.

They would not let Huaisang stay in the room, possibly because both he and Wei-Xiong fought and cried and begged them not to do this. Huaisang had long suspected that Wei Wuxian needed resentment to survive, at least while he had no core. He was correct.

A Jiang healer who’d assisted told Huaisang about it years later. He was still having nightmares.

It took the elders two full days to fully cleanse Wei-Xiong of resentment. They had to call in Jiang healers to immobilize him, and then knock him out. Wei-Xiong never woke up. He lasted two days without resentment, unconscious. Then his meridians collapsed and he died.

Lan Wangji made his sect punish him severely for suggesting that Yiling Wei be cleansed. He didn’t die. Huaisang didn’t die either, but found that he’d lost all tolerance for cultivators. He moved to Yiling and made a career selling paintings. His paintings of cultivators in compromising positions, sold in secret of course, were the most popular.

* * * * *

Wei Wuxian must have reincarnated almost right away, because after only a few years, the Immortal Jiang reappeared on the streets of Yiling to pick up an orphan named Wei Ying. He dropped him once again into the Jiang sect. By that time, Nie Huaisang was no longer a teenager.

In due course, Nie Huaisang resumed contact with the cultivation world and arranged for an extended visit with the Jiang. Sixteen-year-old, coreless Wei Ying was once again teaching archery. He was a passable swordsman even without a core. He still had a bright smile and an unmatched selflessness, but he had already discovered alcohol and the joys of troublemaking. And he was supplementing his martial skills, with resentful energy.

Huaisang could not actually sign up for the archery classes—he was over forty, and too old for that— but he was able to help with them. Amazingly, the archery practice he’d continued doing on his own had helped. Who knew? But they were too far apart in age to realistically become friends.

Instead, Huaisang suggested that he could try to keep the young Wei Ying out of trouble by teaching him talismans. No one else appreciated how terribly inappropriate it was for the talentless Nie Headshaker to be teaching the Yiling Laozu talismans. Actually neither of them knew much about talismans, yet, but there were copies of the Laozu’s old manuscripts in the library. Wei Ying picked up the concepts almost faster than Huaisang’s artist’s hands could reproduce them.

Not long after, the Lan arrived for a conference, and the same scenario was poised to play out once again.

Except this time Lan Wangji was no longer a teenager. He had gained maturity and a small tolerance for misbehavior. But he had built up a hatred of resentful energy that nearly matched Jiang Cheng’s. This was balanced by a near-obsession with the boy whose death he’d contributed to years ago.

Lan Wangji recognized Wei Ying right away. Huaisang wasn’t sure how. Though he had to admit that Wei Ying’s mischievous exuberance stood out almost as well as Lan Wangji’s shining uprightness.

So when, inevitably, hungover Wei Ying passed out during morning training, Lan Wangji was right there to catch him. He noticed the resentful energy right away. Wei Ying threw up on him.

Lan Wangji was looking at Wei Ying with the same little crease of concern in his forehead and perhaps something a bit desperate in the width of his eyes. His expression did not change as he used a bit of Qi to clean his robes. Then he carried Wei Ying to the infirmary. Huaisang followed.

Lan Wangji was now a highly-placed member of the Lan, and no one opposed him when he tossed everyone except Huaisang out of one of the infirmary rooms and sealed the door. He placed Wei Ying gently on the bed and set up his guqin. It wasn’t the same one he’d had before. Huaisang was pretty sure this one was a restored Wangji, the guqin that Lan Wangji had used in his first life.

Huaisang didn’t bother to pretend that he didn’t know what was going on. He leveled a stare at Lan Wangji and said flatly, “Why do you think this will end any better than it did sixteen years ago?”

Lan Wangji returned the stare. “Practice.”

Great. “So you’ll be able to kill him faster, this time?” Huaisang said.

“No,” Lan Wangji said. “It will work.” He sounded very sure of himself. Perhaps Lan Wangji had found some sort of instruction manual in the Lan library for healing someone who had been overcome by resentment. The first Lan Wangji had almost certainly done that a lot for Wei Wuxian during the now-forgotten Sunshot Campaign.

Huaisang rolled his eyes, but asked for no explanation. He watched as Lan Wangji drained his considerable power by rotating Songs of Cleansing, Clarity and Healing. At first, it seemed to be working. Wei Ying woke up, and obediently assumed a meditation pose. He trembled and leaked resentful energy during the cleansing part, then relaxed during healing. He spent the entire time gazing at Lan Wangji with almost embarrassing intensity.

But the positive effects didn’t last. If anything, the resentment was slowly thickening. Wei Ying’s gaze turned dark and hollow. Lan Wangji merely looked a little bit uncertain.

When they both collapsed, Huaisang removed the seal from the door to let the Jiang healers inside. He left when the arguments about calling in additional Lan healers started.

The following morning Wei Ying had disappeared. Accounts of his leaving were inconsistent. He’d walked past the guards, shrouded in resentful energy. They’d shot at him, and one archer claimed to have hit him. He was talking to things that weren’t there, and claimed they’d told him he was the evil Yiling Laozu. There were sightings of restless dead in Yunmeng, but it was not clear if this was intentional or an unfortunate side effect of Wei Ying’s escape.

Huaisang had no doubt where Wei Ying was going. If the dead were really talking to Wei Ying, they’d send him to the Burial Mounds. Huaisang decided that he should go there himself, in secret, but he probably wouldn’t get far if he went alone. Even if Wei Ying wasn’t raising ghosts to cover his retreat, he would have defenses. So he and Lan Wangji went together.

They found Wei Ying wild-eyed, weak and disheveled on the road to the Burial Mounds. They’d gotten there a half day sooner than Wei Ying, despite leaving two days after him. They waited in the rain, sharing an umbrella.

Wei Ying was barely able to walk. He was bleeding from his nose and mouth, and from an arrow wound in his chest. The arrow was still in it. But he would not stop. He raised his sheathed sword, which was nothing special, just a fairly well-crafted piece of metal, and threatened to fight Lan Wangji if he got in his way. He seemed to expect Lan Wangji to kill him. Possibly he wanted Lan Wangji to kill him.

Lan Wangji said, “Wei Ying,” a tiny sound of dismay. He did not draw his sword.

“Yiling Laozu,” Wei Ying corrected.

Lan Wangji’s expression had frozen in mild disapproval, but rather than step out of the way, he said, “I will go with you, then.” And he did, moving to support Wei Wuxian under one arm. Nie Huaisang could do nothing except go with them.

The dead crowded around Wei Ying, expectantly and possibly a bit worshipfully. They made it to the cave he had partially tamed for the Wen, in another life, but the dead were increasingly unhappy about the intrusion. Huaisang thought it likely that the only reason they’d gotten through at all was that the dead of the Burial Mounds recognized the Yiling Laozu, at least a little. But Wei Ying didn’t have the black flute with which the old Wei Wuxian could raise the dead, nor the experience at using resentful energy to command them.

Wei Ying started to put up wards in front of the cave. Huaisang had brought paper and ink, and recognized the work that Wei Ying intended. Lan Wangji’s calligraphy had always been excellent, and he was very quick to catch on. The three worked together to finish the wards. Huaisang noticed that Wei Ying was working in blood and resentment, but chose not to point this out.

By the time the wards were done, Wei Ying looked half dead and all the way insane. Resentment crawled around him, and blood was running freely from his nose and eyes. Nie Huaisang had never actually seen Wei Wuxian when he was losing control, but this must be what it looked like. He worried briefly that Wei Ying would attack them, but he collapsed instead.

Lan Wangji played Clarity and Healing while Huaisang stabilized the arrow with bandages torn from strips of robes. When that didn’t work, Lan Wangji passed him Qi until he was utterly depleted. That didn’t work either. Lan Wangji gathered Wei Ying in his arms. For a brief moment, Huaisang thought that they were going to kiss. Or, preferably, dual cultivate. They didn’t.

Huaisang wondered, later, if Dual Cultivation would have saved them.

He was able to keep the wards up for a while by himself, though there really was no point to it anymore. He couldn’t fight his way back to safety through the dead of the Burial Mound; not carrying two unconscious cultivators. He tried anyway, running in circles around the wards, replacing talismans as fast as he could. Which wasn’t fast enough.

As the wards collapsed he thought he saw the Ghost General tearing his way through the assembled fierce corpses, tossing them aside like it was nothing. But there were too many of them, and they were not under anyone's control. Wen Ning managed to carry all three of them nearly to the edge of the Burial Mounds before the dead tore all of them apart. Including Wen Ning, though that may have been a hallucination.

The next thing Huaisang knew, he was on the Naihe Bridge once again waiting to be reincarnated with his memories undisturbed.

At least this time they’d all died together.

.

Chapter Text

A hundred or so years after they’d all died together in the Burial Mounds, Huaisang found himself being hauled off to Lotus Pier by Jiang Cheng himself. He was thirteen, had just remembered some of his past lives, and was busily trying to forget them. The arrival of the Immortal Jiang made that impossible.

He’d been having a perfectly fine life up until then, with parents who were not poor, and loved each other and their children. Huaisang even had an an older brother who often berated him for laziness and disapproved of the Arts. After some observation, he decided that this brother was not a reincarnation of Nie Mingjue. Wanting a younger brother to be physically strong was not an uncommon trait, really. If his brother truly had been Nie Mingjue, Huaisang would have absolutely refused to go with Jiang Cheng.

That probably wouldn’t have ended well. No one would dare refuse a legendary Immortal, even though he had absented himself for enough years that no one had actually believed he existed until he showed up on Huaisang’s family’s doorstep. But there were no legends at all about a Ghost General.

The family lived in Yiling, on the edge of a ravine which everyone knew surrounded a massive graveyard. Legend had it that the Immortal Jiang had created it somehow, possibly out of pure anger. Stories had sprung up to explain what he was angry about, but none came close to Jiang Cheng furious that he’d been too late to save three cultivators and one Ghost General from the Burial Mounds.

It was one of the things Huaisang tried not to think about too much.

The cultivation world was in terrible disarray. Or maybe it was just the world in general. China was learning that there were other powers in the world, by fighting and loosing wars with the newly rediscovered West. Martial arts and cultivation were proving not terribly helpful against guns and cannons.

Huaisang barely recognized Lotus Pier, once they got there. The graceful piers were gone, replaced by vast, ugly stone docks which could hold enormous ships. There were still graceful pavilions over the water in the Jiang compound, but Yunmeng was dominated by multilevel brick and stone buildings with rows of tiny windows.

“It’s a hospital,” Jiang Cheng told teenaged Nie Huaisang, pointing at one of the ugly buildings. “We have gathered texts on cultivation and medicine from all over China. We have doctors from all over the world. We even have a surgeon from Britain.”

Isolated out in Qinghe, Nie Huaisang had never heard of Britain, but he would soon. It was 1856, as measured by the British, and China was about to loose another war over the opium trade that would eventually end the Qing dynasty and change China’s relationship with a wider world.

“If there had been better medical care, back then, my sister would have been well. And she would have been the Jiang Sect Heir.” Jiang Cheng still had the smooth skin and dark hair of a man in his thirties, but in that moment he looked much older. He waved a hand at Lotus Pier and, perhaps, the world in general. “And all this would never have happened.”

Young Nie Huaisang stared at him with wide-eyed incomprehension. Somewhere around nine hundred years as an Immortal, and that was where Jiang Cheng thought things had gone wrong?

“Don’t look so worried, Nie Zongzhu,” Jiang Cheng said, bowing sarcastically, as he had when Nie Huaisang actually was the Nie Sect Leader. Possibly no one had used that bow for centuries. “We are also researching Core Transplants. If it could be done once, it can be repeated.”

Huaisang didn’t have fan and so was unable to hide his utter shock.

Jiang Cheng said, “I’m tired. I’ve used Wei Wuxian’s core for too long. It’s time to return it to him.”

That . . . that . . was an intriguing idea. Memories came flooding back, of Wei Wuxian unable to cultivate another core, Lan Wangji perhaps deliberately failing at immortality, over and over. Maybe that would break the cycle?

No, it was a terrible idea. Assuming they could figure out how to do it, transplanting a core that had been cultivated for nine-some centuries into a young, core-less body . . . sounded dangerous. Even if that young man had previously owned that core. It was Jiang Cheng who had cultivated to immortality, right? It had to be mostly his by now. It couldn’t end well.

“Nie Gongzi?” Jiang Cheng was looking at him, concern written on his face. Concern. Huh. Not anger.

Huaisang’s thoughts swirled out of control, impossible hope mixed with certain doom. He tried to make sense out of it, but all he could do was try to remember the last time that Jiang Cheng hadn’t looked angry. He had to go all the way back to when they were students at Cloud Recesses, and even then Jiang Cheng had looked angry most of the time.

Turns out that you don’t have to fake a faint if you faint for real. Useful information, that.

* * * * *

This time around, it seemed, Jiang Cheng had decided to stay with the sect and watch over Wei Wuxian himself. He’d picked up the orphan in Yiling at age six, and given him the courtesy name Wuxian.

Wei Wuxian was already at Lotus Pier, a core-less disciple whose fully-formed meridians were swirling with resentful energy that brimmed over into mischief. Most of the time, no one seemed to mind. Jiang Cheng treated him like he had during the lectures at Cloud Recesses, and practically encouraged Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang to skip training, play pranks, and go drinking. It was not unusual for Jiang Cheng to join them for all of that, especially the drinking part.

It was perhaps odd that an immortal and a guy with hundreds of years of memories could enjoy acting like clueless teenagers. Then again, they hadn’t gotten to act like teenagers when they’d been the proper age. So maybe they were owed a chance to make up for lost time.

There were other disciples at Lotus Pier who trained in martial arts and sometimes joined in their parties. But no one was trying to cultivate a golden core. After that first conversation, Jiang Cheng would not even talk about golden cores, not even when he was drunk and angry. Wei Wuxian seemed blissfully unaware of any problems regarding his, or anyone else’s, core.

Huaisang enjoyed it immensely. No one made him do sword forms or archery. He was allowed to purchase whatever art supplies he needed. He hired musicians to teach him guqin, and wasn’t at all surprised that Wei Wuxian excelled on the flute. He attended plays and, as he got older, hosted intellectual soirées and elaborate parties. He had interesting friends and two people who were so close to him they were nearly family.

If only their interactions hadn’t included so much physical . . . abuse? Jiang Cheng still hated demonic cultivation, and didn’t seem to understand that channelling resentment was the only way Wei Wuxian had to maintain his meridians. He also kept forgetting that Wei Wuxian couldn’t heal instantly. To be fair, Wei Wuxian goaded him more or less continuously.

As the years progressed, the drunken “brotherly” fights between Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian became less frequent but more violent. Wei Wuxian smiled and insisted that he deserved it, as he had always done. He said he was fine, even as Huaisang dragged him off to the newfangled hospital. The only sign that he was not fine was the thickening of the resentment around him. By the time they were in their twenties, resentful energy flowed forcefully through Wei Wuxian’s meridians, often overflowing and clouding him in smoke and self-loathing. He started hearing things, which Huaisang was pretty sure were ghosts, but which Jiang Cheng wouldn’t acknowledge. He would get terribly angry when Wei Wuxian’s attention strayed.

“You’re going to kill him, one of these days,” Huaisang said to Jiang Cheng. Both of them had been banished from the “treatment room” where one of Jiang Cheng’s Western doctors was sewing up a long gash on Wei Wuxian’s arm. Wei Wuxian had been the one to suggest—insist, actually—that a duel with naked swords was called for. The shallow cut on Jiang Cheng’s thigh had already healed.

“I know,” Jiang Cheng said, quietly. “I think we’ll be this way forever. Or at least until he has his core back.” The steadiness of his voice took Huaisang by surprise. Clearly Jiang Cheng had not given up on the core-transfer project. “The doctors are almost ready.”

“But, then, you will . . .” Huaisang said.

Jiang Cheng interrupted. “And then, I’ll be mortal, just like he is, and I won’t owe him anything anymore.”

Maybe that was part of the problem. Wei Wuxian was Jiang Cheng’s most loyal servant, and his biggest regret. Wei Wuxian had always outshone him, and had never done what he was supposed to. Instead, he’d followed his own genius and done impossible, unwanted things—things like giving away his golden core and becoming a demonic cultivator—which Jiang Cheng barely understood, and resented.

If, indeed, Huaisang’s job was to get Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji together to dual cultivate, he would need a solution for the core problem. Without a core, there was no good way to control the resentful energy. Perhaps Lan Wangji’s music would help a little, but Wei Wuxian had been harmed more often than healed by it. Anyway, Lan Wangji was unreachable in this life, so far. The Lans were so secluded that they might as well not exist.

It was another three years before the doctors were ready for their great collaboration between Eastern cultivation science and Western medicine. Or maybe it was Jiang Cheng who needed to be ready. Or maybe it was Wei Wuxian, who vehemently refused the transfer even after Jiang Cheng explained repeatedly that the core had been Wei Wuxian’s to begin with. In the end, Jiang Cheng just kept saying, angrily, of course, that he was sick and tired of taking care of Wei Wuxian’s core for him. And he was going to give it back now whether or not Wei Wuxian wanted it.

They did not let Nie Huaisang into the “operating room” for the procedure. Doctors had discovered some things about contamination in the surgical field, and were determined to use the most advanced techniques. They had also, fortunately, made some advances in anesthetics. Huaisang waited in an uncomfortable room nearby. One day passed. Then one night. Huaisang had taken up fans as a spiritual weapon again, and spent the time imbuing his latest attempt with Qi by meditation. It was oddly successful; a fan of little beauty but with an astonishingly sharp edge when opened. He fell asleep in an uncomfortable chair.

In the morning, Nie Huaisang woke to screams. He followed them into the sunlit room they called the “recovery room” at a run, to find Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng literally at each other’s throats. The surgery was over—both wore bandages across their abdomens. But it looked like the waking up part had not gone well. The door to the operating room slammed as the two surgeons retreated behind it. A nurse who had not been so lucky was sprawled on the floor.

Qi bounced uncontrolled between them in visible strands as Jiang Cheng deflected Wei Wuxian’s attempts to return it to him. Resentful energy boiled darkly around Wei Wuxian. There were depressions in the brick walls where, presumably, bolts of energy had bounced off. Huaisang deflected a bolt of Qi away from the nurse, with his new fan. It shattered the window as it flew away. He started chasing after the stray energy in the room, both Qi and resentment, sending it away to hopefully dissipate outside.

He could do nothing about the two men who seemed determined to finally kill each other. Both of their faces were turning purple, but there was no way he could pry them apart. Jiang Cheng collapsed first, sagging to the floor.

Wei Wuxian immediately let go, staring at Jiang Cheng in horror, as though he hadn’t expected to be able to actually hurt him. But now Wei Wuxian was the one with a core. Jiang Cheng’s neck was bruised and blood was soaking through the bandages on his abdomen. Within a few seconds, the bruises at Wei Ying’s throat had healed. He made another incoherent scream, louder now that his airway was not being crushed.

The nurse staggered to her feet and ran from the room.

Both Qi and resentment still streamed from Wei Wuxian. Qi seemed to be peeling off the golden core in golden waves. Resentful energy was curling uncontrolled from his meridians, wrapping him in smoke. Wei Wuxian was able to contain enough resentful energy to counter some of the loose Qi, wrapping it in strands of darkness and sending it flying out the window after the bolts that Nie Huaisang was still deflecting.

It seemed that Wei Wuxian’s meridians had not been prepared for the massive influx of Qi. It was displacing the resentful energy that had flowed there, but there was too much of both. The excess energy had nowhere to go. Wei Wuxian seemed intent on getting rid of all of it.

Huaisang suspected, with something bordering on panic, that if Wei Wuxian rejected all the Qi, he would reject the core along with it.

“Wei Wuxian!” Huaisang shouted. He was trying to sound like a martial arts instructor expecting instant obedience. Wei Wuxian didn’t seem to hear him. He wished briefly that they had somehow gotten Lan Wangji involved. Wei Wuxian would pay attention to him.

Lan Wangji wasn’t there. So Huaisang whacked Wei Wuxian across his chest with the new fan. Even folded, it left a mark. At that, Wei Wuxian finally looked at him, eyes wide and aggressive. Instead of retreating, Huaisang called on his own Qi to grab on to Wei Wuxian’s arms. “Don’t let it all go!” Huaisang instructed. He had no idea, really, what to do, but he couldn’t let Wei Wuxian destroy the remains of his core. “Control it. Meditate, or something.”

But Wei Wuxian’s eyes had found Jiang Cheng. He slumped to the floor, screams subsiding into sobs mixed with moans of “Jiang Cheng!”

“I’ll take care of Jiang Cheng,” Huaisang said though, honestly, he wasn’t sure there was much he could do there either. He deflected one last Qi bolt away from Jiang Cheng and out the window, then added, “You have to take back as much of the extra Qi as you can.” Huaisang remembered something Wei Wuxian had said long ago, in class at the Cloud Recesses. Lan Qiren had been furious, but Wei Wuxian had been correct. “You know how to do it. Qi is just energy. Remember? Just like resentment. You can use it.”

Something like sanity crossed Wei Wuxian’s face, and he straightened into something like a meditative pose. He closed his eyes and sat, motionless. For a while nothing happened, then strands of resentful energy began wrapping around the Qi and drawing it back into Wei Wuxian’s body.

Huaisang sat down by Jiang Cheng, heart in his throat. Wei Wuxian would totally lose it again if Jiang Cheng died. On some level, they all knew that his death would be the eventual outcome. But not here. Not now. And not at Wei Wuxian’s hands.

Jiang Cheng was still breathing, though shallowly. His pulse was too fast. His meridians were undamaged, but there was a terrible emptiness where his core had been. Of course. That had been the whole point of the operation. Huaisang sent a little Qi from his own core into Jiang Cheng’s throat, and his breathing deepened. He was pretty sure that some of the enormous amount of Qi in the room was making its way into him also.

It felt like hours before Huaisang could hand Jiang Cheng over to the doctors, and more hours before random strands of Qi or resentment stopped escaping from Wei Wuxian. In fact, there was still sunlight coming through the now-broken window when Wei Wuxian opened his eyes. “I can’t get it all pure,” he said. “But I can make it work.” Then he fell over sideways and slept for five days.

Jiang Cheng was out for only a few hours. The bruises around his throat had started to heal, but the incision where the core had been removed had opened and looked a bit red. It never quite healed. He spent his time complaining about everything: pain, cold, fatigue, stomach aches and, when he wanted to make Wei Wuxian feel bad, neck cramps. He alternated this with complaining that Wei Wuxian had managed to hide the fact that he didn’t have a core through the entire Sunshot Campaign.

In addition to hearing ghosts, Wei Wuxian could now talk to them. He did this so irritatingly often that sometimes Huaisang was convinced that he was making it all up. Except there were occasional haunted looks and sudden disappearances that ended in nosebleeds on his return, if they were lucky, and three-day naps if they weren’t. People started calling him the Ghost Laozu. Wei Wuxian didn’t like the name. Huaisang had the impression that he wanted to be called by a different name, but couldn’t quite remember it. Jiang Cheng certainly remembered, but never said a word about him once being the Yiling Laozu.

Wei Wuxian never managed to purify his core or meridians, though, and continued to circulate both Qi and resentful energy. He used one source or the other in no pattern that Huaisang could discern. Sometimes he used both—a swirling gold and black cloud of pure power.

There was much less violence between them now. Possibly this was because Jiang Cheng didn’t have the energy to be angry all the time. Or possibly because he couldn’t afford to fight now that Wei Wuxian was the one who was practically indestructible. But mostly because they finally seemed to be acting like civilized brothers.

It was pretty great, actually.

After some argument—which Wei Wuxian lost because he was not, as he claimed, older than the now-several-hundred-year-old Immortal Jiang—they called Jiang Cheng ‘Da-ge’ and Huaisang ‘Er-ge.’ Wuxian was ‘San-ge.’ Huaisang felt a little weird, calling someone else the same name he’d called Mingjue, his real older brother. But, shit, it made the two of them so happy when he did it. He’d rarely done anything just to make someone else happy before.

Then war broke out in the south, a rebellion against the Qing, claiming to bring peace. It was far away, but refugees came as a trickle, then as a stream, then a flood, up the river from Guangzhou and Nanjing, fleeing the British, or the rebels, or the Imperial armies. They brought their ghosts with them, restless and unmourned and furious with the memory of violence.

The ghosts mobbed around Wei Wuxian. He learned to chase them away temporarily with music, but that sent his levels of resentful energy soaring. He tried cultivating Qi with Jiang Cheng’s sword, Sandu, but he could barely lift it. He rarely ate, and when he tried to sleep he woke screaming from dreams of war. Huaisang thought the memories from the ghosts were probably mixing with his own supposedly-forgotten memories of the Sunshot Campaign. Wei Wuxian lost his cheer, then his smile. Resentful energy clotted around him like dried blood. Even non-cultivators could sense it, and kept away from him.

Nie Huaisang wondered if Lan Wangji would know what to do. The ancient Lan had music to quiet restless spirits, appease them or suppress them or make them vanish. Lan Wangji had the Song of Clarity, which might help stabilize Wei Wuxian’s control. Maybe cleansing wouldn’t kill him, now that he had a core.

Huaisang wondered If Lan Wangji and his music would make things better. Or worse.

He was about to find out.

.

Chapter Text

Given the choice between going on a likely-pointless trip to a Starbucks and going home to an empty apartment to mope, Huaisang chose Starbucks. At least there would be other people there, and fancier coffee.

It was a long walk, but presumably Wei Ying had made it every day while he was working. Huaisang refused to be outdone by a person who was, if past actions were any indication, talking to ghosts.

He hadn’t paid much attention to the background resentment in New York. It was just part of the scene. But the second he reached the sidewalk in front of the Starbucks, he felt a sharp decrease in resentment. The Starbucks was heavily warded by a complex array likely set from both inside and outside. Parts of it were new, set within the last week or so. He took more photos, and made one copy of a talisman by hand, just in case. It was almost certainly Wei Wuxian’s work, unless someone else had learned his talisman designs.

Perhaps Huaisang would find Wei Wuxian after all. And reunite him with Lan Wangji. And they could finally stop living variations of the same life . . . Yeah. The sudden drop in resentment was a tad exhilarating.

Inside, there was a line for coffee and every table was filled, even though it was mid-afternoon and not prime coffee-time. People were chatting happily, and showing none of the usual impatience with either the wait or the lack of chairs. It was likely that, whatever else the wards were doing, the effect was large enough to lift the mood even of non-cultivators.

Huaisang joined the line. He was in Brooklyn, a place where talking to strangers was often frowned upon. He said, to the person in front of him, but loud enough to be overheard, “Have you seen Wei Ying?”

The person turned to Huaisang with an expression that reminded him of all the reasons it was unwise to talk to strangers. But a young woman seated at one of the chairs said, “Oh! Do you know Wei Ying?” She seemed almost breathless with excitement.

The older woman sitting with her said, “Hush, girl. You gotta stop crushing on that dude. He’s trouble.”

Huaisang said, “Chinese guy? Used to work here? Plays the flute?”

And someone at another table said, “Oh, right. Wei Ying. Nice smile. He hasn’t been around lately.”

From behind the counter someone said, mournfully, “Christina fired him.”

And someone, presumably Christina said, “Don’t matter how nice your smile is, if you always get orders wrong and freak out about stuff that isn’t there.”

This effectively ended the conversation.

But when Huaisang got to the front of the line, the cashier said to him, quietly, “Sometimes I find Wei Ying asleep in front of the door when I open in the morning. But he’s not quite connected with reality these days. He calls himself ‘Yiling Laozu’ and says he’s battling evil. But he’s loosing a battle with himself. He won’t get help.”

Great. It was never a good sign when the Yiling Laozu took over. But at least that probably meant he was living in a graveyard somewhere. Which didn’t help all that much, since New York City had dozens of graveyards.

The decaf latte was good though. Maybe the best he’d ever had. Which was a low bar, since he’d always preferred tea. Or alcohol.

Before he left, swallowing the last dregs of his latte, he gave a note to the cashier. “Bryan,” he said, because that was what was on the guy’s name tag, “Call me if you see Wei Ying again. I’ll come as fast as I can.”

* * * * *

It was a long slog back to his apartment. Inside Starbucks, Ned had almost convinced himself to splurge on a rideshare, but he had a car now. Which sadly was at his apartment where he’d left it. Parking spaces were not easy to come by. And once he was outside, the hopeful mood dissolved. His precarious financial situation, bolstered by the likelihood of being expelled form school, caught up to him.

It was getting dark before he got back to his apartment. Once there, he began working on talismans for wards, using the phone photos for reference. He felt more comfortable sitting on the floor and working on the low table in front of his couch, so he moved ink and paper to the table. The talismans were very like the ones Huaisang had drawn repeatedly, desperately trying to survive the Burial Mounds. But they were not exactly the same. Huaisang was willing to bet that they were improved.

He hadn’t gotten very far when someone rang his apartment buzzer. The tinny voice on the speaker phone said, “Mr Sang, you haven’t been answering your email.” It was Dr. Chen. Chen Laoshi, his new knowledge of Mandarin supplied. He buzzed her in.

She wasn’t alone. She was with another petite Chinese woman who looked like a more severe version of Dr. Chen. Her make-up was restrained and impeccable, where Dr. Chen had a tiny streak of ink on her chin. Her black hair was up in the same style of bun as Dr. Chen’s, but didn’t have the constantly escaping strands.

The new person made an elaborate bow, not copied from a C-drama, but a real, historical cultivator bow. Ned returned it precisely, and she raised one sculpted eyebrow.

“This is my colleague, Dr. Baihe Song,” Chen Laoshi said. “She is an expert on the history of cultivation in China.”

“And you are . . . ?” Dr. Song said to Ned. It was clearly a challenge.

It was fairly likely that Dr. Song was connected to the modern cultivation world. Clearly, some form of the Jianghu had to exist. Huaisang just hadn’t uncovered its secrets yet. He had no way to know if she was a friend or an enemy, or even if such distinctions were necessary. But he wanted to trust Dr. Chen. Chen Laoshi. “I’m Nie Huaisang,” he said.

“Excellent,” she said, smiling. This made her look only a bit less forbidding. “You can call me Song Zongzhu.” So she was not only connected, but an actual sect leader, and she wanted him to know it. She turned to Chen Laoshi. “Sarah,” she said, “I think we will need the tea.”

Chen Laoshi drew a small bag of tea from her purse. In fact, Huaisang had several varieties of quite good Chinese tea, but he didn’t mention it. He pointed to his tiny kitchen, where there was a hot pot and a lovely porcelain tea set. Ned Sang didn’t have a lot of money, but he did have good taste.

Song Zongzhu sat down on Huaisang’s couch. She made it look elegant, even though the couch sagged lower than expected with her weight.

“So, Mr Huaisang,” she said.

“Mr Nie,” Huaisang corrected.

She smiled as if that had been another test which he had passed. “Mr Nie. I wanted to meet the person who has gotten the Lan Sect in such an uproar.”

Uproar? Really? “Lans don’t get upset,” Huaisang said.

“Ah, not usually, no,” Dr. Song said. “They have been having a bad year, since their most promising disciple stopped working. It is perhaps the worst time possible to present Lan Zongzhu with a perfect picture of their ancient sect seat. And painted, perhaps, from a repressed memory.” She smiled.

So Huaisang had guessed correctly. There was a Lan Sect, and now their Sect Leader, whoever he was, had joined the small parade of people upset with Huaisang or Ned or both. But they wouldn’t be that upset about the painting, would they? Someone besides Xichen must have found out about Huaisang’s visit to Lan Wangji, and be using the painting to cover the real reason for his anger. The Lan had to have gotten some sort of notification from Saratoga Springs by now.

Huaisang had taken too long to sort through everything. Song Zongzhu’s smile had become dangerously sharp. “And what sect do you come from, Nie Gongzi?”

Shit. More ancient Chinese honorifics. Did the sects still use them? Or did she suspect he was more than a twenty-something art student? She might know about his visit to Lan Wangji . . .

“I don’t have a sect,” he said. It wasn’t a lie.

“And yet, here you are, writing the talismans for a . . . protection array?” She studied the talismans, still drying on the table, and added, impressed, “A rather advanced protection array.”

Huaisang shrugged. He couldn’t deny being a cultivator, but he wasn’t sure yet how much he could tell these two women. Song Zongzhu had already given away a bit of information to a person she could really know very little about. Likely she thought that Huaisang knew more than he actually did. Well, hiding what he did and did not know was a game he’d had lots of experience with. He wished for a fan, but he did not move to pick one up.

Chen Laoshi arrived with a teapot and three cups balanced on Huaisang’s nicest cutting board. His finances did not extend to a proper tray. Huaisang stacked the driest talismans to make room for it. She sat next to Song Zongzhu, and took her hand. “Just tell him,” Chen Laoshi said, in modern Mandarin.

Dr.Song—Song Zongzhu—gave her a long look and sighed, giving in. She also switched to Mandarin and said, “The level of resentful energy in this city has been climbing steadily as the population increases. The New York branches of several sects have always shared in any necessary cleansing, and in suppressing any ghosts and yao that arise. But for the past year the resentment has been rising out of control.” She looked at Huaisang, who was doing his best to pretend he knew this already.

Chen Laoshi poured the tea, and gave each of them a cup. It was perfectly brewed.

Song Zongzhu took an elegant sip from her cup. “My sect, the Song, takes care of Queens and all the bridges. Traffic jams gather resentment particularly well.” She made a small gesture toward the street outside. A car horn honked obligingly. From a few blocks away came the wail of a siren. “The Yu have their hands full with Hart Island, Woodlawn Cemetery and the Bronx. The Jiang have Brooklyn. The Lan are holding everything north of Central Park. But the Jin, who are supposed to be clearing downtown Manhattan have the worst problem.”

“Trump Tower?” Huaisang said, without thinking.

“Very funny.” She scowled. She had switched to English for all the American names. “They do have to cleanse that pretty regularly. But no more than the Stock Exchange, the Empire State Building, and the Twin Towers Memorial.” Her tone suggested that he really should know better than to joke about cleansing Manhattan.

“My apologies, Song Zongzhu,” Nie Huaisang said in Mandarin. He put his teacup on the table and rose to bow to her, using the proper form for one sect leader to another.

Her eyebrows rose at the bow. “You said you don’t have a sect,” she said, voice tightening with anger. She put down her tea cup with a small but definitive clink.

Chen Laoshi put a restraining hand on Song Zongzhu’s arm. “Lily,” she said gently, and Huaisang remembered that her name, Baihe, was the Chinese world for lily. “Let him explain.” Chen Laoshi refilled their cups and smiled at Huaisang. “I am not a cultivator, in case you were wondering. But I seem to be married to one.”

“There are eight million people crammed into this city,” Song Zongzhu said, voice still crackling. “Resentment is expected, but it has been tolerable. Until now. We do not know what is happening. If the Nie Sect is hiding somewhere, we need them.”

Oh. He shouldn’t have made that bow. He’d really only wanted to make sure she didn’t dismiss him. “My apologies again, Song Zongzhu,” he said. “I do not currently have a sect. There may be a Nie Sect somewhere, but I don’t know.” I don’t know. I just don’t know, he thought. But now was not the time to play the Headshaker. Huaisang was tired of that game.

Obviously there was more going on than Huaisang’s personal failure to get two ill-starred soulmates together. And his personal crisis about plagiarizing himself. The cultivation sects had been diminishing for centuries, and it seemed that now they were just barely hanging on. He wondered what would happen if they failed. Maybe they needed Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji more than ever.

He said, “But I do know that Lan Wangji and Jiang Wuxian were regularly performing cleansing and suppression as street musicians in the MTA subway stations. Until a year ago. That’s when Jiang Wuxian stopped performing and Lan Wangji was declared mentally incompetent by his uncle.”

The two women were looking at him in puzzled silence. “How?” Song Zongzhu asked.

Huaisang stared back at them. They hadn’t asked ‘who’ so likely they were familiar with both names. “There are videos on YouTube,” he said helpfully. He tried to look innocent.

“Of Lan Wangji?” Chen Laoshi gasped, as though videos on YouTube were more astonishing than cultivating in the subway.

Huaisang nodded. “With Jiang Wuxian.” He wanted a fan to hide behind. No, he wanted to go back to being Ned Sang, a graduate student whose worst problem was that he was going to be expelled before finishing his degree. He didn’t want to know that New York City was filling with resentful energy; going to Hell, or Daiyu—probably literally—to be lost along with Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian.

He wanted to call his parents, who would be enormously sympathetic and supportive. He could move back home, become a caterer or a used car salesman or something. He could do art forgery on the side, so that he could afford nice clothes.

It would be a lie.

He sighed, then added, “The two of them together should be enormously powerful.”

“And how do you know that?” Song Zongzhu said, slowly as though puzzling it out, “You have memories of the Cloud Recesses. You hinted that you were a Nie Sect Leader. You know ancient Chinese artists and talisman design.” She was not accusing, just wondering. “You watch YouTube. Just how old are you, Nie Zongzhu?”

“Older than I look,” Huaisang said.

“Are you an Immortal, then?”

“Heh. I wish. Dying is totally not fun.” He did not want to have this conversation.

But Chen Laoshi, apparently not interested in Huaisang’s past, said, “You told me you do not know Lan Wangji.”

Oh, he had, hadn’t he. And a couple weeks ago, it would have been true. And now, he was caught in a web of misdirection that he hadn’t intentionally set. It was likely that he’d told the wrong things to various very important people. He needed to either get very inventive, very quickly, or tell the truth.

Huaisang had always schemed alone before. Except for enlisting Jiang Cheng’s somewhat dubious help, he had never, ever told anyone his secret or asked for any assistance. But in this lifetime, he’d had enough years unencumbered by memories that he didn’t want to cut all ties to his life.

He’d come into the game way too late to make a difference on his own. Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian were already well along the path to destruction. And this time it looked like a whole city might be effected when they fell.

He said, “I found Lan Wangji. His uncle had him committed to a facility upstate.”

Sarah Chan gasped. “Dr. Lan wouldn’t do that!”

“He wouldn’t, maybe,” Song Zongzhu said. “But Lan Zongzhu would.”

“Well, somebody did,” Huaisang said. “I saw him.”

“You . . . What?” Chen Laoshi sputtered. She settled on, “Is . . . is he OK?

“For now,” Huaisang said, with a tiny shrug to make it seem less ominous.

Song Zongzhu gave him a long, appraising look. “So that’s why Lan Qiren was so upset. Sarah and I didn’t think he would be so . . . concerned about your painting, even if he does think he owns the original.”

Interesting. Huaisang almost laughed. So that’s how Lan Qiren had recognized it so quickly.

Huaisang vaguely remembered the first time he’d painted that image. It had been from memory even then, several generations after his unfortunate student experiences. Had he given it to the Lan sect? How had it survived? Never mind. He was getting distracted. He said, “Lan Wangji will probably not recover unless we find Jiang Wuxian.”

They spoke simultaneously. Chen Laoshi said, “Oh, no!” and Song Zongzhu said, “I fail to see how that could possibly help.”

He wanted to trust Chen Laoshi and her wife, and he very much wanted them to trust him. He took a deep breath. “So,” he said, “What do you know about the Tragedy of Hanguang-Jun and the Yiling Laozu?”

.

Chapter Text

The Lan arrived toward the end of the exodus from Guangzhou and the East; what was left of them, anyway. There had been rumors that Cloud Recesses had been attacked, the disciples accused of being heretical adherents to a false religion. No one knew whether the attack had been instigated by the invading foreign clerics or by their own government seeking someone to blame for the war.

They were perhaps a bit less bedraggled than the other refugees. Their move had been carefully planned, considered. They had ancient scrolls in qiankun pouches, along with paintings and priceless jade. They had robes and silk and fine embroidery. They had ancient spiritual weapons and musical instruments in profusion. But they didn’t have any food, and there were only a sect leader, three elders and less than twenty disciples.

The second son of the sect leader was named Lan Zhan. Lan Wangji was the name of the first son, who had been lost—or left behind; it wasn’t clear—when the sect had been uprooted from their ancestral home in the Cloud Recesses. It was clear that the lost Lan Wangji had been the favored son, and the remaining son, Lan Zhan, was not considered capable of anything at all.

Despite being as pristine as the rest of his sect, Lan Zhan somehow looked young and frantic around the edges. But his power beamed from him like a beacon, or perhaps, a lighthouse, warning everyone away from dangerous shores. Ordinary people avoided him in the streets as though they might be burned. Cultivators treated him with a fearful deference. Lan Zhan himself seemed afraid of his own power. His frozen demeanor was not icy disdain but the paralysis of a person who suspected the world would explode if he merely touched it.

The Lan had been giving the courtesy name of Lan Wangji to their most powerful cultivator for generations. Huaisang had always assumed that they were aware that they were giving the name, each time, to the reincarnation of the original Lan Wangji. It seemed that, this time, they’d gotten it wrong.

Jiang Cheng no longer seemed to have any interest in his disciples or hospitals. He was visibly aging, and couldn’t run around with Wei Wuxian anymore. He’d built a small house on a pond near Lotus Pier, and planted lotus flowers around it. He spent his days watching the lotuses grow. He could not be bothered with the arrival of the Lan, particularly once he’d learned that their Lan Wangji was not with them. Huaisang didn’t tell him about the mistake with the names.

Wei Wuxian took one look at Lan Zhan and decided to get as close to him as possible. His dark mood improved. He popped up on every possible occasion with a shout or an exaggerated wave. Huaisang was surprised at the number of times this occurred, since Yunmeng was not a small town anymore. Lan Zhan mostly ignored these overtures, though once Huaisang saw him look sideways in mild irritation, which was probably the current Lan code for an eye roll.

“Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian yelled, waving across the crowded market in Yunmeng.

Shoppers froze in shocked silence then began to move on to other business rather more quickly than usual. The slim figure in pale blue also froze and turned toward Wei Wuxian. Huaisang sighed.

“Over here!” Wei Wuxian yelled.

Lan Zhan turned his head to give Wei Wuxian a long, judgmental look. Then he fixed his gaze straight ahead and continued his measured pace along the street.

Wei Wuxian huffed, then plastered a smile on his face. He had an irresistible smile in this life too. Then he bounced after Lan Zhan and grabbed one of his long, trailing sleeves.

Lan Zhan stopped again. Nie Huaisang felt the entire street pause warily, as if waiting to see which direction would provide the best escape. But Lan Zhan merely reached behind himself and, without looking around, gently tugged the sleeve from Wei Wuxian’s grasp.

“Awww . . . Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian pouted. “It’s a beautiful day and there’s still plenty of time to finish today’s chores. Why not stop and have a drink with us?” He swept his hand to indicate a small but well-appointed tea house not far down the street.

Huaisang loosened his fan from his belt and opened it in front of his face. It was probably time to pretend he didn’t know this obnoxiously forward person. Then he lowered it again as Lan Zhan, without any change in his position or expression said, “All right.”

Neither Lan Zhan nor Wei Wuxian paid any attention to Huaisang, but he followed them into the tea house anyway. Somebody had to make sure they didn’t do anything inappropriate, like forget to pay their bill or destroy the place.

Lan Zhan sat stiffly at a table near the back of the room. Wei Wuxian looked longingly at a table near the front window, as though he wanted to be seen hanging out with this Lan disciple. But he seemed to sense just how far he could push Lan Zhan, and so sprawled in the seat next to the one he'd chosen. Huaisang tried to sit at the next table, but Wei Wuxian waved for him to join them.

After a few minutes, the tea house owner approached them, reluctance written in her every movement. Likely, she assumed that Wei Wuxian was playing some kind of trick on this very important person. But she could not afford to offend any of these men. Huaisang gave her his friendliest, most harmless smile. “Tea, please,” he said. She scurried away.

There was a silence while Wei Wuxian stared, stunned, at Lan Zhan, and Lan Zhan stared, frozen, at the opposite wall. Neither of them touched the tea when it appeared. Huaisang sighed and poured for all three of them. Oh, this was going to be just . . . great.

Huaisang took a sip of tea and cleared his throat. He’d been in awkward situations before. The best way out was to start a conversation about something of interest to everyone. Like . . . what? Cultivation theory? How to keep white robes clean? How many thousand rules the Lan must have by now? Huaisang certainly didn’t want to talk about Why Resentful Energy is Bad, which had been their most frequent topic in past lives. Maybe . . .

“I heard the Lan are experts at musical cultivation,” he said, finally. He really, really didn’t want Lan Zhan to try cleansing Wei Wuxian again, but there was just nothing else.

Lan Zhan nodded.

Wei Wuxian’s eyes went wide. “Oh, wow! That’s really cool,” he said. “Do you use music to cultivate? Or maybe you can use music to channel energy.” The words were tumbling out, and not really directed at anyone any more. “I mean, I should have thought of that, but I bet you could. I bet it would work with both Qi and resentful energy. I wonder if you need to use different instruments . . .” He stopped because Huaisang had just leaned across the table and hit him with his fan. “What?” he said to Huaisang, aggrieved.

Huaisang flicked a look to Lan Zhan, and raised an eyebrow.

“Oh,” Wei Wuxian said. He emptied his teacup, then said to Lan Zhan, in a conspiratorial whisper, “What instrument do you play?”

“Guqin.”

Huaisang was not at all surprised by that, though he was a bit surprised that Lan Zhan had said anything at all. In every life that Huaisang had been able to confirm, Lan Wangji had been a master of the guqin.

“Wow! That’s really cool,” Wei Wuxian said. “I bet you’re good at it.” He sighed dramatically. “I bet you’re good at . . . everything.”

Lan Zhan took a tiny sip of tea. Finally. Was he a little pink around his ears? “Not good at talking,” he said, to his tea.

That didn’t seem to bother Wei Wuxian at all. It never had, actually. He beamed a smile at Lan Zhan, then nudged him with his shoulder. “Then you’ll just have to play for us,” he said.

“All right.”

Wei Wuxian was enraptured by the qiankun pouch from which Lan Zhan drew his guqin. Wei Wuxian was enraptured by the guqin. So was Nie Huaisang. It seemed to be Lan Wangji’s original guqin, that had once also been named Wangji. Wei Wuxian was enraptured by the music, something Nie Huaisang recognized as a difficult composition written at least two centuries ago. At least it wasn’t anything meant to cleanse resentment.

But mostly Wei Wuxian was enraptured by Lan Zhan. He stared at Lan Zhan open-mouthed in wonder, as though the moon had descended and given him the finest gift; Emperor’s Smile, maybe, or his sister’s long-gone lotus soup.

Only Huaisang noticed that there was a bubble of awestruck silence around the three of them. People had stopped to listen, smiling. He didn’t think Lan Zhan was putting any spiritual energy into the music, but he was weaving a spell nonetheless.

When Lan Zhan stilled the strings, Wei Wuxian sighed and said, “Again.” And pulled a flute from his sleeve. He had nothing with him except an old bamboo dizi that he’d carved one day when he was bored. “Please?” he added.

So Lan Zhan started over, each note exactly as it had been the first time.

It became almost a different song when Wei Wuxian’s flute joined in. He messed with the original, speeding up or slowing down as if fighting the tempo. He wove a counterpoint melody around the original, that lightened the mood. Lan Zhan looked briefly annoyed, then seemed to understand what Wei Wuxian was doing. The guqin just . . . loosened a little bit, went with it, as though willing to let the flute lead it along, but comfortable that it would not be allowed to stray too far away.

Lan Zhan began weaving just a little spiritual energy into the song, and so did Wei Wuxian. Huaisang could not tell which of them had started it. Perhaps neither of them were even aware of the Qi and resentful energy that coiled around them. Huaisang could see tendrils of resentful energy, though, pulled out of wherever it was gathered—in people, buildings, under the ground—and drifting away on the breeze.

And the music was sublime, an old, familiar melody infused with new life, played with just the right amount of imperfection. Huaisang had never heard anything like it.

But then again, Huaisang had never before heard Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian play together. Yes, he’d heard Lan Wangji play Healing and Clarity in an attempt to bring Wei Wuxian onto the righteous path of cultivation. But that had been closer to Lan Wangji attacking with music, while Wei Wuxian tried more or less desperately, to survive it. This was totally different, a cooperation both spiritual and musical. Both of them seemed to relax into the music, Lan Zhan becoming less frozen and Wei Wuxian gaining focus.

It was not silence that greeted them when they finally stopped playing. It was laughter, and the happy conversation of people who had just noticed that they were all together, out on a sunny day with no particular reason to worry.

Wei Wuxian laughed, loud and bright. Lan Wangji almost smiled, but then looked around in alarm. He practically jumped to his feet, hiding the guqin in the qiankun pouch. As he moved away from the table, Wei Wuxian grabbed his sleeve to stop him. “We have to do this again,” he said, voice brimming with expectation and excitement.

Lan Wangji focused on Wei Wuxian’s hand holding his sleeve. He made no move to detach it. Something ghosted across his face like light shining through a barred window, a mixture of longing and fear, quickly suppressed. “Yes,” he said.

And so, for the next month, the people of Yunmeng were treated to various impromptu concerts as Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan played anything and everything in random teahouses and pavilions and old temples. Yunmeng seemed to have particularly good weather that season, though in actuality it was no different from the usual. Everyone was in an extraordinarily good mood.

Wei Wuxian began using his flute to help channel his chaotic mixture of Qi and resentful energy. He seemed to be learning how to do this during his musical sessions with Lan Zhan, though neither of them ever exchanged a word of instruction. At some point, they must have incorporated the Lan songs to lay the dead to rest, because Wei Wuxian began to look less haunted. He seemed happier, more or less in control, most of the time.

But the Lan elders were not happy that their young disciple was comporting himself inappropriately by letting just anyone hear his music. Not to mention, failing to properly perform said music by not sticking exactly to the ancient notations. Huaisang did not know it at the time, but they feared that Lan Zhan’s immense power would become destructive if not precisely controlled. They had helped Lan Zhan build a wall of rules to restrain himself, and would rather have him die than escape it.

And so, one day, Lan Zhan failed to arrive at an inn where he was expected. Wei Wuxian was disappointed but not terribly bothered by this. But after a week, he was frantic. He stormed the compound where the Lan were settling in and beginning to establish themselves as a crafting guild, specializing in weaving, calligraphy, and musical instruments. No one would speak to him, let alone permit him to see Lan Zhan.

Huaisang took a somewhat gentler approach, but it took him another week. He had to pose as a calligraphy master to gain entry to the Lan compound. There were several precious books in the Lan library that required copies, and their usual disciples were unavailable. Huaisang had hoped to find Lan Zhan in the library, and spent a few tedious days copying texts which appeared to be commentaries on earlier commentaries of the original four thousand Lan precepts. It was far worse than Lan Qiren’s lectures.

Lan Zhan never appeared. Eventually, after some very polite inquiries over some very good tea, a hapless young disciple admitted that Lan Zhan wasn’t there. He’d supposedly insisted on going back to Cloud Recesses to bring some more ancient books to safety.

Wei Wuxian went after him, a full two weeks later, strolling off as though there wasn’t still a war in that direction. He was already beginning to lose control of his energy. The dead were beginning to follow him around again, whether he wanted them to or not. His moods were mercurial and increasingly inappropriate.

Years later, Huaisang learned that the elders had told Lan Zhan that his brother had been spotted, held captive in Guangzhou, which was not quite in the opposite direction from the Cloud Recesses in Gusu. Huaisang never found out if that story was true or, if not, which elder had invented it. But he believed that Lan Zhan would indeed instantly head off to rescue his brother, if someone told him where he should go.

Neither Lan Zhan nor Wei Wuxian returned. Huaisang was left behind with an aging and oddly subdued Jiang Cheng.

.

Chapter Text

“He always chose Lan Wangji over his family,” Jiang Cheng complained. He and Huaisang were well into their third jar of something, and talking about Wei Wuxian. It had been over six months since he'd gone off to follow Lan Wangji. Huaisang missed him too. It was much easier to get Jiang Cheng drunk these days, since he no longer had a core.

Huaisang was just drunk enough to think that this was a very unfair statement. “Of course he did,” Huaisang said. “Lan Wangji is his soulmate.”

“I’m his brother,” Jiang Cheng whined.

“You were his brother. Once. And, when you were, your family never treated him as an equal member.”

Though Huaisang said this as mildly as he could, Jiang Cheng reacted as though he had been punched. Zidian lay oddly quiescent on Jiang Cheng’s wrist. In the old days, it would have been sparking by now, but there was no Qi to awaken it anymore.

There was a silence, and a haunted expression stole over Jiang Cheng’s face. He took a large swig from the wine jar. “Everybody thought that I killed him, the first time,” he sighed.

Huaisang had never found out what happened on the cliffs at Nightless City the day Wei Wuxian had died the first time. Only Jiang Cheng, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian had been there, at the end. But Huaisang was pretty sure that Lan Wangji hadn’t been the one to kill him. He said, carefully, “You never said you didn’t.”

Jiang Cheng gave him a baleful look. “I missed,” he said.

“On purpose?”

“I don’t know,” Jiang Cheng’s expression softened, and Huaisang thought for a minute that he was going to cry. “Jiejie was . . . gone . . . and A-Xian had just leveled a whole army with his fucking amulet and I was so fucking angry . . .”

Huaisang had never heard Jiang Cheng call him A-Xian before. Perhaps he had in childhood, but never later. Wei Wuxian always used the childhood name Jiang Cheng, a weird form of disrespect that spread to everyone and which Jiang Cheng never protested. But Jiang Cheng always stuck to Wei Wuxian’s formal name.

Had Lan Wangji been the one to kill Wei Wuxian after all? “Where was Lan Wangji?” Huaisang asked.

Jiang Cheng took another gulp of wine, and a deep breath. When he spoke, there was no expression in his voice or on his face. “A-Xian jumped off the cliff, or maybe just fell, but Lan Wangji grabbed him by one arm. A-Xian was staring up at him like he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t already dead. There was no way to save him. Lan Wangji was an idiot. I wanted to kill them both.” Jiang Cheng’s voice hitched, just a little bit. “I missed.”

So, after Wei Wuxian had destroyed his amulet and, with it, half the cultivation world, he had killed himself, either in despair or to stop himself from causing further destruction. It made a kind of horrible sense. Wei Wuxian had, in every reincarnation, been careless of his own life.

Jiang Cheng wasn’t finished. “Part of me wanted to grab his other arm and save him. But he was too far gone. I knew it was impossible.” Jiang Cheng’s voice went high and mocking—“Do the impossible; that’s what Jiangs do right?”—then back to completely flat. “But there was no time to decide. He pulled out of Lan Wangji’s grip and just let himself fall. He was smiling.” Jiang Cheng smirked. “The asshole was smiling.”

And then, Huaisang thought, Jiang Cheng had gathered his anger around himself like a shield, and lived inside it for centuries, an effective but lonely existence. Lan Wangji had walked away missing half his soul and presumably never forgiving himself for letting go. Huaisang had never considered the possibility that Wei Wuxian was the one who got the best deal from Nightless City. Wei Wuxian merely died.

"I needed him," Jiang Cheng said, not whining, merely a statement of fact.

Huaisang dared to pat him on one shoulder. "You did great without him," he said.

Jiang Cheng gave him a long skeptical look. "Maybe," he said, finally. "But I did better with him." He closed his eyes.

Huaisang was not sure that was always true, but he let it slide because there had been no anger in that statement at all.

The failure of letting go followed Lan Wangji into all of his lives. He held his incandescent power tight behind a wall of rules, always waiting. Wei Wuxian had gotten reincarnated, over and over, as a brilliant, doomed teenager with a tendency toward self-destruction and an inability to recognize how that might effect anyone around him. Nie Huaisang had helped make that possible by bringing him back too soon. No wonder the Heavens were so annoyed with him. Two of their favored people had been tied in a cycle of regret for way too long.

But, hey, maybe it was okay now. Maybe the two of them had found each other and were together, traveling and musically cleansing each other and the countryside. And, hopefully, dual cultivating.

In a war zone. Yeah, right.

Jiang Cheng died in his sleep a few months later, as though that final confession had freed him.

Huaisang spent the next several years writing a historical novel about two young men who destroyed themselves in a complicated war between ancient cultivation sects. He called it the The Sunshot War, or The Tragedy of Hanguang-Jun and the Yiling Laozu. It was a masterpiece of loyalty, betrayal and loss. It questioned the tragedy of war, the impermanence of love between brothers, and the fine line between good and evil. It was a one-hundred-percent accurate retelling of the events of the now-forgotten Sunshot Campaign. Well, maybe only eighty-percent.

Okay, sixty percent. The many scenes where the evil Laozu and the righteous Hanguang-Jun pined for each other were probably his own invention. The single kissing scene, in the Xuanwu Cave, almost certainly was.

The Tragedy of Hanguang-Jun and the Yiling Laozu, published anonymously, was very popular for a while. It was a gem among the stories of love between men: brotherly, martial and otherwise. People cried when the man who had saved them all with his evil ways, threw himself from a cliff as his brother and lover failed to save him. But the book went out of favor when the intrusion of Western ways taught people that they should be horrified at the notion of love between two men.

Neither Lan Zhan nor Wei Wuxian ever returned to Yunmeng. Apparently they had not been doing whatever the Heavens wanted, because once again, Huaisang found himself being reborn again, with his memories.

Interlude: The past few weeks

It might have been a tree, once; a tree that had lived hundreds of years before being cut down to build yet another modern convenience. Perhaps it had once been majestic and beautiful. Perhaps the Native people had met under it for centuries, gathering and trading and making treaties. Perhaps when the tree had been cut down, its huge trunk and roots had been left to fester. Perhaps it had been buried entirely to make way for the new underground subway system.

Either way, in the darkness and silence, it bathed in the anger and resentment of the people who passed by. It followed them through the tunnels and under the rivers until it had nodes in every borough of the City. Periodically it concentrated enough resentment to raise a rat yao or animate a body that had died in one of its stations. When people noticed, which wasn’t very often, a cultivation sect would be sent quietly to deal with it. But no one noticed the deeper problem.

It had been lulled to sleep for a while. But now there was more construction and it was awake. And curious.

It felt its way along the transit tracks, poking and prodding through the soil. One the other side of a river, it found a place where huge numbers of humans lay sleeping six feet under the ground. Grumbling, the dead began to awaken.

The dead complained about it, of course. They spoke English and French and Italian and Portuguese, but not Chinese or any of the Native languages, because this had been a graveyard where the rich Europeans had been buried. No one heard them.

Except for one skinny young man in black rags. He wasn’t the sort of person they’d been used to dealing with. But he heard them. And when he spoke to them in a language they’d never heard before—a mingling of thought and music—they understood him. He said that he would come to help.

It took a while for him to get to the graveyard. He didn’t walk very fast, and shied away from the living in a way that he didn’t from the dead. By the time he arrived, he’d collected a trailing retinue of spirits in various stages of confusion and irritation.

Once in range of the thing that had disturbed their rest, the young man began to command them. He seemed to know what he was doing, suddenly standing straighter as resentful energy and Qi coiled around him. Still, it was all night and into the next dawn, before the annoying tendrils had retreated back to the nearest transit station.

Which wasn’t very far away from the graveyard’s borders. The dead wanted to pursue, but the young man collapsed on the leaf-covered lawn behind a row of gravestones. Even the rising sun didn’t rouse him.

He slept through that day, and the next night, while the souls he had aided clustered around him protectively. They couldn’t protect him from the living—without his command anyway—so eventually one of the cemetery guards spotted him and prodded him to his feet and sent him staggering away.

Some of the ghosts drifted back to sleep but more than half followed him onto the streets of Brooklyn. There they made a slow, ragged procession around the stumbling, ragged man. Resentment flared whenever they got too close to the subway tunnels, so they followed the tunnels aboveground, staying one or two blocks away. It was easier to travel at night, when fewer people noticed them, so they did. Also, the nights were getting colder, and the man needed to keep moving. The man was hard to see, with the swirls of resentful energy surrounding him, but he was not invisible.

There was too much resentment and too much traffic around the Brooklyn Bridge. It was clear, though, that they had to get onto Manhattan Island. They followed the most deserted streets along the edge of the East River. In the middle of one night, they ghosted across the Williamsburg Bridge, the man hanging at the far edge of the bike path and the ghosts doing their best to block some of the headlights.

The thickening tendrils of resentful energy led to Grand Central Station. They couldn’t get anywhere near it. Whatever was sending out the tendrils was aware of them, now, and seemed able to create obstructions for them. They ran, or shambled faster, in the only direction permitted them, which was north and, sometimes, west toward the Hudson River.

.

Chapter Text

Nie Huaisang, possibly-no-longer art student at Columbia University, having decided to trust someone at long last, really didn’t know where to start.

His art professor, Sarah Chen Laoshi, seemed mostly to be concerned about Lan Wangji, which really wasn’t the most important part of the problem, here. He was at least safe, for now. It was Wei Wuxian who was in trouble. Or causing trouble. It really didn’t matter which.

But Chen Laoshi’s wife, history professor Song Zongzhu, was an actual sect leader in modern New York, and so should be in a position to provide actual help.

Perhaps mentioning The Tragedy of Hanguang-Jun and the Yiling Laozu was not after all the best introduction.

“What,” said Song Zongzhu, “does an almost two hundred-year-old Chinese porn novel have to do with the gathering of resentment in New York City?”

Huaisang very pleased that she had heard of the novel. But. Wait. “It isn’t porn,” he protested.

She gave him a disbelieving stare that rivaled Jin Guangyao’s best. “Right. So all those scenes where Hanguang-Jun and the What-his-name Laozu can hardly keep their hands off each other aren’t porn?”

Huaisang shrugged. “But they didn’t actually do anything.”

“They didn’t have to.” Song Zongzhu said dryly. Then, “Wait. Are you going to tell me that you wrote The Sunshot War?”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Huaisang lied. They were getting a bit off the track. “But I am going to tell you that it’s a true story. Except for the kissing parts.”

Song Zongzhu looked extremely skeptical. But she wasn’t, like, drawing her sword or anything. Wait. Did she even have a sword? Did anyone carry a sword? Xichen hadn’t worn one . . . He couldn’t think about that now.

He said, “Hanguang-Jun’s courtesy name was Lan Wangji. His birth name was Lan Zhan. That’s our Lan Wangji’s birth name too, right?” He looked at Chen Laoshi, who nodded. “The Yiling Laozu was Wei Wuxian. And Jiang Wuxian, who was, I believe, adopted from Yiling in China, is calling himself the Yiling Laozu.”

“Wait,” Chen Laoshi said. “Hanguang-Jun called the Yiling Laozu Wei Ying.”

“Yes, that was his birth name.” Huaisang said. Then it caught up to him that Chen Laoshi must also have read the book. He was not entirely surprised that a history professor would know about an old book, since the book at least pretended to be a retelling of ancient Chinese history. But. Did non-historians read it too?

He continued, “The Yiling Laozu was Wei Wuxian, birth name Wei Ying, which is what Hanguang-Jun called him. He grew up in the Jiang sect, though.”

“Jiang Wuxian,” Song Zongzhu said. It wasn’t really a question. She was, Huaisang hoped, beginning to understand.

Huaisang wondered just how popular the book was. Until a couple weeks ago, he had been trying very hard to be American enough. He wouldn’t have noticed a Chinese novel, no matter how popular it was. Ooh! Maybe it was a literary classic! Maybe everyone in China read it . . . He was getting distracted again. “Jiang Wuxian used the name Wei Ying at his job, but is now calling himself Yiling Laozu.”

Song Zongzhu met Huaisang’s eyes, gaze level and dispassionate. She clearly didn’t quite believe him, but had not yet dismissed him either. She said, “And who were you, in this tragic non-pornographic tale of good and evil.”

Huaisang looked away. “I . . . I wasn’t important.”

There was a long silence. Finally, Huaisang looked up, to find the two women staring at each other with raised eyebrows.

He was being honest, right? “I have been reincarnated with the two of them somewhere around a dozen times,” Huaisang said hesitantly. “I think I’m supposed to get them together, so they . . .” He really wasn’t sure exactly how to end that. He settled for, “Lan Wangji has always been a very powerful musical cultivator. The Yiling Laozu can talk to ghosts and musically control resentful energy. I think New York needs them.”

The look between the two women was more serious now. At least they weren’t laughing. Or calling the Mental Health Crisis line. Or drawing swords that they might not even have. Huaisang let the silence stretch.

Chen Laoshi finally broke it. “Wait a minute. Nie. . . That name is in the book. Nie . . .” she said. “Nie Mingjue? You can’t be him. You certainly weren’t a fierce and powerful general in the war. Or ever.”

Huaisang sank even further, studying a random spot on the floor and, annoyingly, having to resist the impulse to cry. “No,” he said. “Mingjue was my big brother, my da-ge.”

“And why . . . ” asked Song Zongzhu, then paused as though questioning the sanity of the Heavens, or maybe just Nie Huaisang. To be fair, Huaisang shared that cynicism. “Why did the dubious honor of becoming a reincarnated matchmaker fall to you?”

Oh, right. Huaisang hadn’t written the second part of the story, where Wei Wuxian got resurrected too soon and the wrong person became an Immortal. He really, really didn’t want to stretch their belief to Jiang Cheng’s and Wen Ning’s stint as replacement Immortals, or to the whole core re-transplant thing. He didn’t want to talk about Mo Xuanyu or Jin Guangyao, or why a plot to pursue revenge for his brother had been necessary.

He strongly considered his old standby of “I don’t know. I just don’t know.” But he wanted to tell someone the truth. Also, he was pretty sure they wouldn’t believe him whether he told the truth or not. He said, “I did a terrible thing with forbidden magic, and brought Wei Wuxian back before his time. The Heavens were not—are still not—pleased.”

Chen Laoshi gave a long, almost melodramatic sigh, then made a brief, resigned nod at her wife.

Song Zongzhu visibly braced herself. “Okay,” she said. “Assuming this isn’t a load of crap, what do we need to do? I mean, we don’t even know where the two of them are right now. Let alone if they really can bring the resentment under control.”

“Oh, they totally can,” Huaisang said. “But they will be hard to find. Or at least Wei . . . Jiang . . . Wuxian will. He worked at a Starbucks until five months ago, when he got kicked out of his apartment for, it seems, doing demonic cultivation in his bedroom. Now he’s on the streets, talking to ghosts and acting like a crazy person.”

“Demonic cultivation?”

“Technically, yes,” Huaisang said. “It’s more like drawing talismans in blood and being a magnet for resentful energy. He probably can hear the dead. But he’s not evil. He put a protective array around his old apartment and the Starbucks. He’s probably anemic as fuck and living in a graveyard somewhere.”

Song Zongzhu considered this, frowning. “He probably can’t keep that up for very long.”

“Right. He’s in danger. Most of his deaths have been in graveyards, consumed by his own attempts to keep the resentful energy that is drawn to him under control.”

“What about Lan Wangji?” Chen Laoshi asked.

“He can help Wei Wuxian keep things under control. And together they can combine Qi and eliminate resentful energy. They have fought resentful ghosts and yao together. They can deliver or suppress lingering ghosts also, not that anybody seems to need that anymore.”

“I meant, is Lan Wangji safe?”

Huaisang met her eyes. He would not deny his involvement with Lan Wangji. “He is in something like enforced seclusion in a mental hospital in Saratoga Springs. He needs Wei Ying, who played music with him in the subway. I suspect he will not survive if he has to wait much longer.”

Chen Laoshi winced. “How do you know?”

“I talked to him.”

She looked surprised. “Dr. Lan gave you permission?”

“No.”

“You really don’t want your Masters degree, do you?”

“Oh, I really do,” Huaisang said. “But this is sort of more important? Don’t you think?”

They both agreed.

They discussed strategies late into the night. Chen Laoshi agreed to at least talk to her colleague Dr. Lan, who was not the Lan sect leader. That was a one Lan Qingheng. They had no idea if he was actually Lan Wangji’s father in this life. He probably was, Huaisang thought gloomily, which would probably make it even harder to free Lan Wangji. Qingheng-Jun had been much more unreasonable than Lan Qiren.

They searched maps for the most likely graveyards where Wei Wuxian might be. Song Zongzhu thought she could get some of the other sects to help comb some places for a homeless, crazed cultivator. Possibly they could get a disciple to hang out in the Starbucks. Huaisang privately thought that anyone other than himself would be unlikely to find Wei Ying, but it was nice to have backup.

They also learned to make the talismans for Wei Wuxian’s protective array. Song Zongzhu was not terribly good at it, though she recognized some elements as an ancient design. Chen Laoshi, being an artist, had no trouble at all copying the complex calligraphy. In fact, she was better at it than Huaisang, because he kept reverting to his memories and messing up. He did not mention that.

The effect of the wards, when they finally activated them, was unexpected. It was not a quiet night, and the sound of sirens and traffic and voices seemed to brighten. It felt like the resentment had dulled everything, and without it the city seemed more alive.

The two women were just about to leave, holding an extra talisman for their car, when Huaisang’s phone bleeped. It was a text from his mother. Call me? Terrible timing!

Wait. This could be bad. It was after ten, awfully late for her to text. Had something happened to her? To his step-father? He had to make himself stop hyperventilating.

Song Zongzhu’s phone rang with a text too, so he could take care of this right away.

With a look of apology to Chen Laoshi, he called her cell phone.“Hi Ma! What’s up?” Ned said, trying not to sound worried.

“Hi sweetie. You have a car now, right?” She didn’t even wait for an answer. “I need you to come pick me up at the airport.”

“Um, what?”

“The airport. I had to fly out to New York for a . . . a work emergency.”

This was so unexpected that it left Huaisang momentarily speechless. His mother did not have a job, that he knew about. She did sometimes go to New York for volunteer work, but that had never seemed like anything that could result in an emergency trip. He managed to stammer, “Um . . . okay . . . when?”

“Now? I know it’s late, Ned. Please?”

“Okay, I’m on my way,” he said, then hung up. He had to call her back to ask which airport.

Meanwhile, Song Zongzhu was texting rapidly. She had dropped some of her elegant facade over the course of the evening, but now she seemed downright excited. “Liu Jingyan is here," she said. "We have one more cultivator to help us.”

Ned dropped his car keys. His mother usually used her American name Julia Sang, but . . . “Liu Jingyan is my mother’s Chinese name,” he said, kneeling to retrieve them. “I’ve got to go pick her up from La Guardia.” Wait. “You know her?”

Song Zongzhu and Chen Laoshi were both staring at him with something like suspicion. Song Zongzhu said, smiling sharply, “Liu Jingyan is an accomplished rogue cultivator.”

“No, she’s not,” said Ned. He sat all the way down on the floor with his keys because it was suddenly impossible to get up.

“You mean, your esteemed sect leader self didn’t recognize that his own mother is a cultivator?“

Huaisang groaned. “This inadequate cultivator was a student who didn’t want anything to do with being Chinese. Until a month ago. When he started seeing paintings of Cloud Recesses in his dreams. And, sadly, copying them.” He groaned again. “She doesn’t know about that either.” She also didn’t know about the reincarnation thing.

“Well. You two will have a lot to talk about.”

Huaisang was saved from having to think about that by his phone, ringing with an actual call. This time it was from a number he didn’t recognize. From an area code in upstate New York. He answered it, because it had to be Mianmian Luo.

It was. “It’s Lan Wangji,” she said, whispering as though she didn’t want to be overheard. “He broke down the door to his room earlier, which is, like, reinforced steel.” There was a brief pause while she took several loud calming breaths. “Then he incapacitated the guards at the front door, and walked off into the night.” She paused to breathe again. “I followed him, and he didn’t stop me. He won’t talk to me, though. All he will say is, ‘I’ve finished waiting.’ ”

“Shit. Does he have a sword?”

“Yes. Why?”

“He’ll probably remember that he can fly on it, soon.”

“You’re not kidding.” It wasn’t really a question, but Huaisang shook his head, which she couldn’t see but must have sensed because she added a dubious “Really?”

“Really,” Huaisang said. “Where is he going?”

“I don’t think he knows. He was walking toward the city, but like he was feeling his way with Qi or something. I told him that you have a car, and can come get him. He stopped walking when I told him that we are almost two hundred miles away, and driving would be faster. Now he’s just sitting and meditating. By the side of the lake.”

“Lake?”

“Saratoga Lake. He was trying to go in a straight line. He might just have stopped because it was in the way.”

“I’ll be there,” Huaisang said. It was a three hour drive. And he had to go to the airport first. Then, what? Drive with his mother who was a fucking cultivator to Saratoga Springs? That would be fun.

Song Zongzhu was watching Ned with one eyebrow raised, perhaps in concern. He was still sitting on the floor. He ran both hands through his hair and then covered his face with them. The fan was just too far away. Through his hands, he said, “Lan Wangji just escaped. He’s sitting by a lake, meditating. He seems to want me to go get him.”

“You have to go,” Chen Laoshi said.

“My mother is waiting at La Guardia,” Ned pointed out. He got to his feet, briefly, then collapsed on the couch.

“Oh, we can go get her,” Song Zongzhu said. “She usually stays with us anyway.”

Ned was not going to even try to process that. Usually. Stays in New York. With . . . whatever.

“Okay, I’ll drive to Saratoga Springs,” Ned said, feeling defeated but at the same time oddly delighted.

Chen Laoshi extended a hand to help Ned up from the couch. “You can handle A-Yan without me, A-Bai,” she said to Song Zongzhu. It took Ned a bit to catch up with this. Apparently, they were all such good friends with his mother that they used Chinese nicknames. Also, Chen Laoshi was not going to go to the airport with her wife, to pick up her good friend, Ned’s mother.

Chen Laoshi pressed the car-protecting talisman into Song Zongzhu’s hand. “Take this,” she said. “I can draw another one in the car. I’m going to Saratoga with Ned.”

Interlude: Same night

Near the river, the ragged man and his ghostly retinue were chased by things which had mostly started as rats. The man, desperate, absorbed resentful energy and seemed to be much stronger for it. When a corpse that had apparently been overlooked by whoever was assigned to collect dead bodies attacked him, he was able to destroy it with a web of resentful energy and awful music. But by then, there were a dozen yao; mostly rats, but also three cats and one raccoon that towered over the rest.

The man ran west leading the yao to the edge of the city, away from the people who lived there. There was a sliver of green between the city and the Hudson River, and he followed it north. After a mile or so, the city rose above the water on a steep cliff, so that he was trapped between rock and water. A subway ran underground inside the cliff, spilling resentment. And he had not been entirely successful at remaining hidden. Sirens began to close in behind him.

Eventually, around the same time that Nie Huaisang was arriving north to rescue Lan Wangji, the ragged man was trapped between the Hudson River and the A Line, looking up at the George Washington Bridge. The way was blocked by the huge tower holding the Manhattan end of the bridge. There was a small, upward path around it, but coming down the path was an enormous, four-legged beast that had once, maybe, been a Great Dane.

With no other choice, the Yiling Laozu began a panicked climb over a chain-link fence and up the Manhattan Suspension Tower.

.

Chapter Text

Once they were clear of New York City traffic, zooming unobstructed on Highway 87 for Saratoga Springs, Nie Huaisang let his mind wander to the problem of Dr. Sarah Chen. Not that it was a problem, really. More like a mystery. Why did she come with him instead of going home with her wife? She had been touchy about the subject of Lan Wangji from the beginning. What did she know about him?

Of course, she was sitting right next to him in the passenger seat of his car. He didn’t need to be devious. “How do you know Lan Wangji, Chen Laoshi?” he asked.

She huffed a tiny laugh. “Please, just Sarah,” she said. Just when Huaisang started to think that she wasn’t going to answer the question, she said, “I’m his girlfriend.”

There was so much wrong with that, Huaisang wasn’t sure where to start. “Umm . . . I’m pretty sure that, in a dozen or so lifetimes, he’s only ever been interested in one person. And that person is a guy.” She had to be at least ten years older than him, too, but he wasn’t going to say that. He glanced at Sarah Chen, but she was looking out the windshield as though there was some important message in the passage of shiny white lines next to the car. “And, you’re married. And also lesbian?”

There was a silence. Huaisang decided that he’d made his point, and that it actually didn’t matter. But then she said, “Every painfully shy, socially awkward guy needs someone to buffer unwanted advances. Wangji needed it more than most, the years he was famous.”

Huaisang could understand that. Lan Wangji in this life was as gorgeous as he had been in every life. And as quiet. Since he was always committed to total honesty, it would be easy to hurt him with his own words.

People had stalked him, both on line and in real life, Sarah Chen told him. She had stepped in, seemingly with Lan Qiren’s encouragement, from a crowd of much younger women, all vying for the young Wangji’s attention. Lan Wangji had tried to put them off by saying that he was gay. The Lan family was very invested in denying this. So Sarah had claimed, on the spot, to be his girlfriend.

Lan Wangji had been worried that this was a lie. “I just told him that it wasn’t a lie,” Sarah said. “I’m a girl. And I’m his friend. Right? Wangji seemed . . . moved by this. Or maybe impressed? I’m not sure if it was because he hadn’t realized that words could be manipulated like that, or because someone had claimed to be his friend.”

“After all this time, I don’t know him, really,” Huaisang said. Lan Wangji had distanced himself from everyone in most of his lives. “It’s good that he has a friend.”

“Yeah. But I’m not a good enough friend to be told when he was having problems. I hadn’t seen him for years when he disappeared. Professor Lan wouldn’t talk about it.”

“You care about him, don’t you?” Huaisang asked.

“He’s, well . . . sweet. Underneath all the awkward. He’s honest and loyal and, I don’t know, trustworthy.”

“Righteous,” Huaisang said. “He’s always been righteous.”

Sarah Chen said, “You must like him, right? Isn’t that the real reason you’re willing to drop everything to help him?”

Sadly, this was a reasonable conclusion. It just wasn’t correct. Huaisang shook his head. “I don’t like like him," he said. "I know he’s gorgeous and, well, hot, and I’m not not-gay, but . . . Well, he’s always belonged to Wei Wuxian. His Wei Ying. And I’m not really interested.” He wasn’t interested in either of them, actually. He also didn’t personally care what the two of them did together.

“Then why are you trying to . . . whatever you’re doing . . . rescue him?”

He could not tell her that he was playing a game, following some ancient, weird Heavenly mandate. And he wasn’t, really. It was more than that. “I care about them,” Huaisang said. “Both of them, I think.” And as he said it he realized that it was true. “Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian have been the only constant in way too many lives. By now, I think I just want them to be happy for however long they can be.”

“Good to know,” Sarah Chen said. Then after a pause she added, “What do you want for yourself?”

Oh, there were so many things—art, beauty, prestige—but, really, those things were mostly ways to occupy time. He wanted his brother back, but not the crazed, critical version who, come to think of it, had abused him in much the same way Jiang Chang abused Wei Wuxian. Maybe he just wanted his brother to approve of him. But Mingjue was long gone. He’d come to terms with the possibility that some souls were just too damaged for him to recognize on reincarnation. No, Mingjue was not going to say anything about Huaisang’s lifestyle ever again.

And Huaisang (or at least Ned) had parents, in this life, who actually did approve of him. Mostly. Except who knew what his ‘I-forgot-to-tell-you-I’m-really-a-rogue-cultivator’ mother thought? He’d have to tell her something. He didn’t know what he wanted her to think, either. “I really don’t know,” he said finally.

“But you want a Masters Degree?”

He did. He really did. “Yes.”

“What does a sort-of immortal, skilled artist do with a Masters Degree?”

It was a very good question. He thought he had no idea at all, but the answer came to him in a sudden realization. “Learn. Teach, maybe.”

There was so much to know now—modern styles, better materials, new techniques, new ideas. But looking back, the times he’d loved the best were not when he’d been free to pursue anything he wanted. It was when he’d had some responsibility for someone—for the Nie Sect, or Wei Wuxian, or even Jiang Cheng. Or that brief, lovely time he’d been married in name only to Li Qian and her lover—he’d been happiest then. As well as more productive.

He wanted to gather a group of supportive, artistic people to cherish and work with. Maybe there were lonely, under-appreciated kids out there, just like he had been in Qinghe as a child. Kids who would blossom if they were allowed to explore different talents. Kids who needed art as badly as he did.

Sarah Chen said nothing, merely nodded in solidarity and understanding.

* * * * *

Mianmian Luo was easy to spot, pacing along the edge of a beach parking lot on Saratoga Lake. She was wearing a business-like two piece skirt suit, much like she had worn when Huaisang had visited. She must have been at work when Lan Wangji had decided to stop waiting. She had somehow managed to change into sneakers, though, and carried a backpack that looked like it might contain everything including camping gear. Maybe she walked to work through the mountains, or something.

Looking at her gave Huaisang the uncomfortable realization that he looked very different from the sophisticated Chinese gentleman that he’d impersonated for the visit. In his jeans and MOMA t-shirt, he looked every bit the student Ned Sang. Oh, well. Nothing to be done about it now.

Lan Wangji was seated in a pile of fallen leaves near the lake, facing away from the parking lot. He was in a meditation pose, absolutely still and straight. Someone had thrown a blanket around his shoulder carelessly, presumably so that he wouldn’t be seen easily from the highway. Indeed, when he rose and turned—with utmost grace, of course—his white bathrobe did kind of glow in the dark. At least he was wearing it over a normal pair of khaki pants and button-down light blue shirt.

He was not wearing the ribbon on his forehead. Huaisang had no idea if that was significant. His core was blazingly bright.

“Nie Huaisang?” Ms Luo said. Her skeptical expression meant that even in the darkness, he looked obviously different from what she’d expected.

“Yes, I’m younger than you thought,” Huaisang said, waving a hand at his t-shirt. “I’m also a lot older than you think.” He introduced Sarah Chen with a wave, glad for the distraction.

Lan Wangji nodded, in recognition of Sarah Chen or perhaps just in agreement with her name. It was hard to tell. He said nothing.

Huaisang was not at all sure what Lan Wangji intended to do. Or what he might need in order to do it. He stood square in front of Lan Wangji and met his eyes. “Did you manage to bring everything you need?” he asked. If Wangji was going on something like a night hunt, Huaisang was pretty sure he would be properly prepared. There was no way he would think of practical things like food or money or a cell phone, though. Fortunately it looked like Ms Luo had thought of those things.

“I have the guqin Ms Luo gave me, and a sword,” Wangji said. “The sword is not mine.”

So it was to be a night hunt, then. He thought Lan Wangji had probably been able to imbue the guqin with spiritual power. But. “Do we need to find your own sword?”

Lan Wangji drew a sword from a qiankun pouch at his belt and examined it. A tiny crease appeared between his eyebrows. “I can use this sword.”

Huaisang had a brief memory of a white sword with an etched silver sheath; Lan Wangji’s original sword, Bichen. But the memory was oddly from this life, not a previous one. The sword had been in a glass case . . . somewhere . . . some museum exhibit. He’d been to a lot of art museums. The Lan would probably know where Bichen was. “I think your real sword might be very hard to get back,” he said.

The forehead crease vanished. “This one will do.”

In the car, Ms Luo . . . “Call me Mianmian,” she’d said . . . Mianmian sat in the back seat with Lan Wangji. He sat crosslegged in the seat, which looked uncomfortable. He was not meditating, but staring through the windshield as though he could see the future in it. Sarah Chen took over the driving, which Huaisang was only too happy to let her do. It was getting toward 2 AM and he was tired.

“Where are we going?” Mianmian asked.

Hmm . . . Huaisang actually hadn’t thought that far ahead. The route to New York City was straight south, for now, but eventually they’d have to decide whether to stay on 87 South to Manhattan or cross the Hudson to Long Island. “My apartment in Brooklyn, I guess,” he said. Though he didn’t know how he’d fit everyone in there. Maybe they should go to Dr. Chen’s house in Queens . . .

“Grand Central Station,” Lan Wangji said.

Huaisang exchanged a glance with Mianmian, but she shook her head. She didn’t know why Wangji might want to go there. He had not told her that Lan Wangji and Wei Ying had played together in Grand Central Station a year ago. Was that why he wanted to go there? Huaisang said, gently, “I don’t think Wei Ying will be there.”

“That is where we must go,” Lan Wangji said. His voice was flat, matter-of-fact certainty.

“Okay,” Sarah Chen said. “I’ll drive us across the George Washington Bridge to Columbia University. We can use faculty parking there, and get the rest of the way when the trains start in the morning.”

When Lan Wangji said nothing, Huaisang shrugged and said, “Fine by me.”

Huaisang had just shut his eyes for a tiny little bit when Lan Wangji said, “Something’s wrong.” Huaisang opened his eyes blearily and looked around. The road was dark around them, four lanes of quiet, unobstructed traffic. But he must have actually slept for nearly two hours, because they were well past Albany. He turned a puzzled gaze toward Sarah Chen.

She shrugged and shook her head. “We’re fine,” she said.

In the back seat, Mianmian said, sleepily, “What?”

Everyone who wasn’t driving turned to Lan Wangji, who unsurprisingly said nothing more.

But twenty minutes later, as Sarah Chen merged onto 287 toward New York City, Huaisang felt it too. It wasn’t anything specific, just a vague feeling of wrongness gathering in the distance. They were still something like thirty miles from the city. It would take an awful lot of resentment to be detectable at that distance.

Ten minutes and ten miles closer, Mianmian could feel it too. Huaisang retrieved the forgotten talisman, and stuck it to the inside of the car windows. There was an immediate decrease in tension, as though some sort of storm had passed. That more than anything convinced Huaisang that something, indeed, was wrong, somewhere. If the problem was at Grand Central Station, they were still a long way away.

Well, there were cultivation sects in the city, and Huaisang knew how to reach at least one sect leader. He got out his cell phone. “Chen Laoshi,” he said, “I think I’d better call Song Zongzhu, even though it’s . . . like . . . 5:00 AM.” He tried not to think about the likelihood that he’d have to wake his mother as well.

Mianmian reached for her cell at the same time. “I have emergency contacts for the Lans,” she said. Huaisang realized that she’d be in far worse trouble than he might be, since she had just helped Lan Wangji escape.

“Let’s find out if the Song know anything first,” Huaisang told her. “And we can see if there’s anything on the news.” Though things would have to be really out of control before non-cultivators noticed anything.

To Huaisang’s surprise, Song Zongzhu answered right away. And she sounded very awake. “I’m busy,” she said, and then, apparently handed her phone to his mother, who said, “Ned!?! Are you okay?”

What? Why wouldn’t he be? “Um . . . I’m fine,” he stammered. “I’ll be back in the city, with Lan Wangji and a friend named Mianmian Luo, in maybe an hour?”

His mother made a sound that was probably a sigh of relief, but sounded like a wave of static.

“What’s wrong?” Huaisang said.

“We’re not sure. But there are sirens everywhere. I haven’t seen any, but there are reports of yao or guai all over. Some of them are attacking the police, who seem to think there’s some sort of riot. And there are ghosts. But the ghosts seem to be fighting the yao, which I’ve never heard of but maybe they just do that in New York City . . .”

It wasn’t terribly polite to interrupt his mother, but she could probably go on like that for minutes. “Lan Wangji wants to get to Grand Central Station.”

That halted the flow of words. “What? Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but if Lan Wangji thinks that’s the source of the problem, he’s probably right.”

“Okay,” his mother said. “But the Song have been called to the West Side, along the Hudson River. There have been a lot of reports from the riverside. I’m going with them.”

“Just tell Song Zongzhu, when you have a chance.”

“Okay.” There was a brief pause during which Huaisang heard muttered conversation barely audible over a police siren. “She says to tell Sarah I love you.“

Huaisang wasn’t sure quite what that meant, but he said, “I love you too, Ma,” and ended the call.

He looked up to see the red lights of dozens of stopped cars ahead of them. By then they were on the Palisades Parkway, along the west side of the Hudson River, maybe five miles from the George Washington Bridge. The scant morning traffic compacted and then slowed to a crawl.

Mianmian had been scanning her phone for news. She looked up at the wall of cars in front of them. “Um,” she said. “They just closed the traffic lanes on the south side of the Bridge.”

“All of the lanes into Manhattan? Just before rush hour?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess something is going on at the base of the Manhattan Tower, maybe a riot? And someone is climbing the south side of the tower. People are saying it might be terrorists.”

Ten minutes later, they were a complete standstill, red brake lights lined up for miles in front of them. Nothing was moving. At all.

Lan Wangji said, “Wei Ying is there.” He opened the car door and got out.

“Wait!” Huaisang yelled, but he knew that Lan Wangji would not be dissuaded. He got out of the car too. It was totally safe. They weren’t moving. “We’re still miles away. You don’t even know how to get there.”

Lan Wangji drew his sword and Huaisang’s stomach lurched. Either Lan Wangji was going to stab him for standing in his way or, worse, Lan Wangji had remembered that he could fly on a sword. It was the latter. Lan Wangji’s sword hovered a step above the asphalt.

“Can you carry two?” Huaisang said. Though he was kind of hoping that the answer would be ‘no,’ he put as much challenge into his voice as he could. He did not want Lan Wangji going off alone.

“Of course,” Lan Wangji said. He stepped onto his sword and held out his hand for Nie Huaisang.

Huaisang hastily put on his jacket and grabbed his backpack—with his cell phone, talisman paper, and his small collection of fans—then mounted behind Lan Wangji. The brilliant white bathrobe flowed around them like a real cultivator robe. Even in the pre-dawn darkness, people must have been able to see them as they soared into the air. But New Yorkers were well-trained in the art of not paying attention to things that shouldn’t be happening.

He wondered if anyone travelled by sword anymore. He’d never seen anyone flying above the streets of the city on a sword. He hoped it wasn’t a closely-guarded secret, or something requiring an application for a permit.

Huaisang put his hands on Lan Wangji’s shoulders and tried to pretend that he was still half asleep in his nice, warm, immobile car.

It didn’t work. This was happening.

Shit.

.

Chapter Text

It was not the first time that Nie Huaisang had travelled by sword, of course, though it had been several centuries. He’d never managed sword flight by himself, even when he’d finally been able to generate enough Qi to do so. He’d never bonded to a sword—or saber, for that matter—and hadn’t cared to test whether the same principle would work for a spiritual fan.

It wasn’t that he hated flying, exactly. It was convenient, and usually fast. And flying with a dedicated sect disciple was pretty safe. But it was cold, and windy, and uncomfortable and, well, actually, he really hated flying.

They followed the red brake lights, not too high above them, but far enough that the lights, aimed at the road, didn’t reach them. The lights snaked along the Hudson River, becoming ever more dense as more lanes fed onto the approach to the bridge. When the lights of the George Washington Bridge towers became obvious, Lan Wangji veered toward them, away from the traffic and over the river.

Happily, Lan Wangji did not try to fly over the six-hundred-foot-high suspension towers. Instead he leveled off about fifty feet above the river, and soared unnoticed beneath the bridge. On the other side, he rose slowly to parallel the span just below the lower traffic level, heading east toward Manhattan. Flying alongside the massive bridge somehow served to emphasize just how far away the ground was. It was dizzying. Huaisang buried his face in Lan Wangji’s back.

He looked up again when Lan Wangji poked him, hard, which didn’t seem at all safe while on sword-back. But Huaisang looked where Lan Wangji was pointing. There were two helicopters hovering over the Manhattan Suspension Tower, searching its framework of girders with spotlights.

At the base of the tower were something like thirty rescue vehicles in a vaguely circular clearing, with their lights blinking in overlapping confusion. As Lan Wangji hovered closer, Huaisang could see that there were dozens of policemen, lined up in riot gear against what looked like roiling clouds of shadows. Above, on the top level of the bridge span, was a matching line of blinking lights, though the policemen up there seemed to be unravelling ropes and aiming spotlights instead of preparing for a fight.

There were solid . . . things . . . in the shadows at the base of the tower. They might have once been rats, mostly. They were not exactly yao or guai. Yao and guai were often hideous, but were usually not too far off whatever animal or object they’d cultivated from. These looked like they’d been pieced together from broken remains of both inanimate objects and dead matter, with resentment holding them together like glue.

The shadows were made of resentment swirling around human ghosts. Hidden within them, Huaisang could just make out a few fierce corpses. Just like his mother had said, the corpses were fighting the not-yao. The ghosts, which were otherwise harmless, were herding resentment away from the living humans.

Barely visible in the restless lights, crouched on a narrow girder a hundred feet up the tower, was a man wreathed in rags and resentment. Though none of the creatures on the ground could actually reach him, his position looked precarious. His black hair tangled in the wind that blew both from the river and from the backlash of the fighting below. And directly below him was a giant dog-thing that had already slashed its way through the chain-link fence that had been protecting the base of the tower.

The man had no weapons, no armor, no means of defense, except a flute, which he was playing frantically.

They had found Wei Wuxian.

Huaisang couldn’t suppress a scream as Lan Wangji banked his sword in a flying turn to land neatly on the girder beside Wei Wuxian.

Though the girder was horizontal and looked pretty solid from the side, its top surface was not actually a solid bar. It was maybe six inches wide, supported from behind by triangular struts of thinner metal. Lan Wangji had no trouble leaping off his sword onto what was essentially a network of widely-spaced balance beams. He danced toward Wei Wuxian, while Huaisang dropped immediately to wrap both his legs and arms around the nearest triangle.

Huaisang had no idea what Lan Wangji intended to do next. They were too high up to effectively fight the things on the ground. He didn’t think that Lan Wangji would leave him clinging to the girder while he rescued Wei Wuxian by sword. Probably. Wei Wuxian would not stop playing long enough to be rescued anyway. His affinity for ghosts had just gotten stronger with each life, and he was probably leading the ghosts and fierce corpses in the fight below.

Then out of the darkness flew something that had probably once been a pigeon. It headed straight for Wei Wuxian who had no way to kill it except maybe bat it away with the flute. Wei Wuxian turned to Lan Wangji and gave him a long, assessing look. He did not stop playing. At the last second, he bent down, and Lan Wangji’s sword went flying over the spot where his head had been, cutting the pigeon-yao in two. Wei Wuxian straightened as Lan Wangji’s sword flew back to his hand.

There was shouting from somewhere, and one of the spotlights that had been randomly searching the girders zeroed in on Lan Wangji. Of course. The police had not managed to find the man in black shrouded shadows. But Lan Wangji was wearing a white robe. No chance now of somehow escaping undetected, with or without Wei Wuxian. It was probably completely illegal to climb on the bridge regardless of the need to use it to escape an army of not-yao.

But Huaisang didn’t have long to contemplate his imminent arrest, because there were more pigeon-yao. Lots more. They’d appear, suddenly and way too close, as they flew into the cone of light created by the spotlights. He managed to get the fan with sharp metal edges out of his pack without totally letting go of his hold on the bridge. He saw Lan Wangji spin through the air in front of Wei Wuxian, skewering two pigeon-yao before lightly landing back on the girders. Then he was being attacked also.

Huaisang saw the videos later, because of course there were news helicopters in the air, and there were now at least three spotlights on Lan Wangji. Lan Wangji leaped across girders, sword flashing, doing acrobatics that most people wouldn’t attempt on the ground. Wei Wuxian never stopped playing. Huaisang was a brown lump, barely visible over the girder, except when his fan came up to slash at another dive-bombing pigeon. He remembered killing two of them, but the tapes showed at least four.

Fortunately the pigeon-yao, or whatever they were, seemed to be assembled from pigeon-bits and garbage held together with resentful energy. They were not very well put together, and they were very easy to kill. And whatever was making and sending them finally ran out of ingredients or resentment, or both.

As the flying attacks ceased, the dog-thing at the base of the tower also shrank. Lan Wangji sent a bolt of pure Qi at it with his guqin, one handed. With a final shrill note of the flute, the thing collapsed into a heap of garbage.

Wei Wuxian turned to Lan Wangji a look of dismay on his tired, dirty face. There was still resentful energy curling from him. Lan Wangji reached for him, but he took a tiny step away. “Sorry,” he said. Then he fell sideways from the girder.

Lan Wangji caught him by his wrist, but he had to lean out to do so. He dropped his sword so he could use his other hand to grasp the girder on which they’d all been fighting. His sword hit a girder far below, and shattered. Lan Wangji ended up barely balanced over the edge of the girder, holding Wei Wuxian’s wrist in one hand, the other curled around a girder and supporting both their weight.

Huaisang was too far away to do anything. He could see Wei Wuxian, eyes wide in his thin face, looking up at Lan Wangji. There was blood around his mouth and eyes, running in a track like tears down one cheek. His face was a mask of guilt and resignation.

It was obvious to all of them that Lan Wangji could not hold on forever. Wei Wuxian said, “Let me go, Lan Zhan.”

“I will not.”

Wei Wuxian said something that Huaisang couldn’t hear. Probably something like, “I’m not worth it.”

Huaisang saw the moment when Wei Wuxian tried to wrench his wrist from Lan Wangji’s grasp.

So did Lan Wangji. He said, reverently, “Wei Ying,” then released his hold, not on Wei Wuxian’s arm, but on the girder above them. They both fell.

But Lan Wangji had also released an enormous burst of Qi, which seemed to slow their fall and rotate them back toward the bridge. They landed on a diagonal strut, not ten feet below. Lan Wangji wrapped his legs around a wide triangular girder, and his arms around Wei Wuxian. “If you fall,” he said, “I will too.”

Huaisang could see the two of them through the network of girders below him, but he could not reach them. Well, a strong cultivator might be willing to make the attempt, but he was not going to do it.

Anyway, the crisis was over. There were no more yao, and the people on the ground were regrouping, probably to begin clearing the mess of dead things and garbage that now littered the clearing below the tower. Someone would have to fix the fence, too, he supposed . . . Actually that was not his problem. He could relax. As much as someone could relax while clinging to a narrow beam of metal one hundred feet from the ground.

There were still a number of emergency vehicles below, lights still flashing, though less obtrusive in a lightening morning sky. Someone would know how to get three . . . criminals, cultivators, heroes? . . . whatever they were, off of a high bridge.

Now that he wasn’t fighting, Huaisang noticed the cold. Sweat was drying on his back, chilling him further. He wished for gloves, then realized that he knew how to use his core now.

Wei Wuxian was limp in Lan Wangji’s arms, either spent or passed out entirely. There was resentment visible around him, but Lan Wangji had surrounded them both with a faint glow of Qi. Huaisang could feel Wei Wuxian’s core leaking resentful energy, mixing with the Qi. He looked away, faintly embarrassed and telling himself that he should give them a moment of privacy.

In the distance, a couple miles down the river, the sun was just touching the top of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. The river below the bridge was a calm, flat gray. Traffic was beginning to move again across the bridge, horns blaring as people competed to be the first to arrive in the city. It was actually kind of beautiful. He could almost understand why everyone wanted to get to the city as soon as possible.

It was probably warmer down there, too.

Somewhere in the mess of traffic, Sarah Chen and Mianmain Luo were in his car, still probably trying to get to Grand Central Station. He’d have to call them. Soon. Right now, he needed both hands to hold on.

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Chapter Text

Watching sunrise over Manhattan while clinging to cold metal a hundred feet off the ground, Huaisang managed not to notice his rescuers until they started shouting at him. He turned, very carefully, to see three men wearing black vests marked NYPD and MTA, standing on a small platform that seemed to be part of a utility system for bridge maintenance. They were only about thirty feet from him, across a wasteland of very thin girders laid across a bottomless pit.

He waved, then waited for them to come to him. They had ropes and climbing harnesses.

They reached him eventually, picking their way across the obstacle course, setting ropes and testing every footstep for safety. They brought extra climbing equipment with them. And warm blankets. One of them helped Huaisang; the other two knelt down on the widest girder to consider Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian in their much more precarious position below.

Once he had some safety ropes, he felt much braver, but he still whined and winced his way across to the platform. The guy helping him rolled his eyes more than once and finally asked “How did you get up here in the first place?” The ‘since you’re such a coward’ went unspoken, but Huaisang heard it anyway.

“I flew,” Huaisang said dryly and without explanation.

The guy laughed.

Once they reached the platform, it was easy. There was an elevator to the bottom of the tower, where a small garage opened to the enclosure that had been protected by the chain link fence, before the dog-yao had flattened part of it. There was a gate in the ruined fence, big enough for a truck. It was open, and the guy hustled Huaisang through it. Outside, there were police and rescue people everywhere. Huaisang wondered if he was going to be arrested, but the guy just said, “I’ll find the EMTs. Don’t go anywhere.” Huaisang was fine with that. Where would he go anyway?

Huaisang drifted around the bottom of the tower, toward the rescue vehicles to a spot where he could see Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, still clinging to the same diagonal beam. The ground was littered with the remains of the things they’d killed. After a bit, he got used to the smell. He was feeling that fuzzy exhilaration that comes after an all-nighter. He was fine. He’d made it. He wasn’t tired at all.

It looked like Lan Wangji had refused to let go of Wei Wuxian, even to let someone rescue him. There were two more guys on Huaisang’s beam now, all in ropes and harnesses. They seemed to be assembling some sort of scaffolding rig.

Huaisang dug his phone out of his backpack.

There were not as many messages as he was expecting. His mother had sent: “There’s nothing at Grand Central Station. But cultivators are being called to Riverside Park.” Later, too late to be helpful, she sent: “Avoid the George Washington Bridge. It’s closed.” Then, not too long after: “That better not be you up there.” This was pretty restrained for a regular mom whose kid might be in danger, but quite reasonable for a rogue cultivator in battle. He sent: “It was me. But I’m safe on the ground now.” There was no response, so perhaps his mother was still fighting somewhere.

His mother was still fighting somewhere. And he was okay with that. Maybe he was kind of in shock.

Mianmian had sent multiple messages with some variation of, “What are you doing?’ and “Is that Lan Wangji?” It seemed that she had been watching some video feed of the fight. He sent back merely, “On the up side, we found Wei Ying.”

Surprisingly he received an immediate response from Sarah Chen: “Meet us at the Little Red Lighthouse.” What? After scrolling frantically, he looked to his left where there was indeed a tiny lighthouse under the enormous bridge. In the morning light, it was very red. “Okay,” he sent.

On the tower, the rescuers had lowered their platform level with Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian. They had a stretcher and were clearly expecting to lay one or both of them on it. They seemed to be arguing, pointing and holding out safety harnesses. Lan Wangji ended the argument by standing up, balancing easily on two thin, sloping pieces of metal. With Wei Wuxian still in his arms. He stepped smoothly onto the platform. Huaisang could see the rescuers gesticulating at Lan Wangji, who stood solid and immobile. Eventually, they lowered the platform. Ten feet from the ground, Lan Wangji simply jumped off the platform and landed lightly on a spot relatively clear of yao remains. Rescue workers waiting on the ground surrounded him, but he ignored them, carrying Wei Wuxian away from the mess beneath the tower. Huaisang ran toward him.

“Please put him down,” a woman in an EMT uniform said. “He needs medical attention.”

Huaisang thought she was probably right. It was difficult to tell how badly Wei Wuxian was injured, but there was blood on his face and hands, and shiny spots on the dirty rags he was wearing that probably also were his own blood.

Lan Wangji stopped in front of her, but did not respond. Wei Wuxian responded, though, mumbling, predictably, “I’m fine.”

“You are not,” Huaisang said, forgetting that Wei Wuxian had never met him in this life.

Wei Wuxian shot Huaisang a confused look, then made a weak smile at Lan Zhan. “Put me down and tell these nice people that I’m fine.” Clearly torn between lying and loosing his contact with Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji placed him carefully on his feet. Wei Wuxian swayed a bit and Lan Wangji put an arm around his waist to hold him up.

Given the choice between a filthy barely conscious young man, a forbidding dude in a white bathrobe, and Huaisang—looking tired and disheveled but wearing normal jeans and jacket—the rescuers went for Huaisang. The EMT, two policemen in riot gear, and a person in a business suit, turned to him with a jumble of questions: “What were those things?” “How did you get way up there?” and, cutting through them all, “FBI. You are under arrest.”

Huaisang had no idea what to do. He wanted to hide behind his fan, except that was currently not-at-all innocent looking, and covered in pigeon-yao goo. Fainting wouldn’t work either, since that would just get them all sent, presumably under guard, to various hospitals. But what could he say without possibly giving away secrets that were not his to tell?

“Stop!” The voice came from an older Chinese man in full, formal, sky-blue hanfu. He had long hair and an elaborate guan, and looked like every Lan elder Huaisang had ever had the misfortune of meeting. The man showed some sort of badge or token to the FBI guy, and said, “This is cultivator business.”

Huaisang almost sagged in relief when the FBI agent backed off, but Lan Wangji tightened his grip on Wei Wuxian.

The elder turned to Lan Wangji, examining him with a cold expression. “Wangji,” he said with enormous disapproval.

“Father,” Wangji said. There was no emotion in his voice.

“You dare call me that while standing here, where you are not supposed to be,” he said.

Lan Wangji inclined his head ever-so-slightly. “Lan Zongzhu.”

“Get away from that filthy miscreant before you catch some disease,” Lan Zongzhu said. “You are ill. You will go back into seclusion as soon as Ms Luo arrives.”

Wei Wuxian looked up at Lan Wangji, guilt and worry once again on his face. “Lan Zhan! I didn’t know you were sick. Don’t get into trouble over me.”

Lan Wangji looked fondly at Wei Wuxian, then drew himself up into the perfect stillness of an accomplished cultivator. Even though he was wearing a torn white bathrobe stained with blood, he looked suddenly like he was the person in charge, and the sect leader merely a recalcitrant child. He said, calmly, “I will stay with Wei Ying.”

“Then let the authorities arrest you. I will not defend you.”

“Qingheng-Jun! The Lan have no authority here.” Unnoticed a group of four cultivators had made their way through the surrounding police cordon. All of them were battle-stained and held sheathed swords. The man who had spoken was not much older than Huaisang. He was wearing a calf-length coat in Jin gold. “The Jin will take responsibility.”

“Jin Gongzi is correct,” Song Zongzhu said.

Then Huaisang’s mother yelled, “Ned!” and ran past Song Zongzhu to throw her arms around Huaisang. She stepped back and looked him up and down cautiously. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine, Ma.” He examined her briefly, but saw no real injuries. “Are you all right?”

The fourth cultivator was Professor Lan. His button-down blue shirt was streaked with ichor, and there were pigeon feathers in his hair. He stared at Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian with something between wonder and irritation, then he noticed Huaisang. “Ned?” he said. “How? What are you doing here?”

“Um . . . It’s a long story?” This was awkward. Maybe Lan Qiren hadn’t realized that Ned Sang and Nie Huaisang were (more or less) the same person. But it had to be obvious that Huaisang had been up on the bridge with Lan Wangji. “I drove Lan Wangji here from Saratoga, but it was his idea to go up on the bridge.”

Professor Lan looked up at the bridge, where men in vests and climbing gear were disassembling their equipment, then back to Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian. Lan Wangji was still wearing the stony, superior attitude he’d given his father, and clearly had no intention of leaving go of Wei Wuxian. Professor Lan’s eyebrows rose a tiny fraction.

“Um . . . sorry?” Huaisang said.

“No need,” Professor Lan said. “Wangji’s Qi is more stable than it’s been for months.” Then he actually bowed to Huaisang. “Thank you for helping my nephew.”

Huaisang bowed back.

There was still a ring of police, hovering in the background, obviously intent on eventually doing their jobs. He pitched his voice to carry, “To be clear, we were on the bridge so that we were out of reach of that giant dog-monster. Which, by the way, those two killed.” He pointed to Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, who were both trying to stand between the other and the crowd of authorities. “And I’m pretty sure that one”—he pointed to Wei Wuxian—“made sure none of your troops were actually attacked.”

Lan Wangji said, “Wei Ying was fighting alone.” His voice edged toward critical, as though he thought that he really should not have been alone. It was unclear if he would blame his fellow cultivators or himself.

Everyone turned to Wei Wuxian, who babbled, “Oh. It’s fine. I can handle a bunch of yao. It would have been fine except I have this thing about dogs.” He shuddered. “There’s still something under Grand Central Station, though. We’ve defeated it, for now. But it’s not gone. I need to . . .”

“You don’t need to do anything right now,” Huaisang interrupted.

“Oh . . . but . . .” Wei Wuxian lay his head on Lan Wangji’s shoulder. “Okay.” His face had gone deathly pale underneath the dirt and blood.

Huaisang said, “We’ll take care of it,” and Wei Wuxian went completely limp.

Lan Wangji lowered him gently to the ground. His eyes were wide, which was probably the Lan Wangji equivalent of total panic. The stream of Qi he’d been sending to Wei Wuxian the whole time widened to a small river. Huaisang wondered how many of the other cultivators present could recognize the healing flow, or even detect it.

Certainly the EMT’s couldn’t. They took Wei Wuxian’s collapse as a sign that it was past time for them to do their jobs. Not unreasonable, actually. Huaisang was not sure how much Qi Lan Wangji was pouring into Wei Wuxian, or how long it would last. But he could tell that it was barely enough, even if Lan Wangji could keep it up forever.

Huaisang moved to stand between the EMT’s and Lan Wangji. “Wait, please,” he commanded, using every bit of the certainty he’d learned as a sect leader. “Please do not separate those two. They are . . .” he started, then had no idea what to tell them.

To his surprise, Professor Lan stepped next to him and added, “My nephew is performing an important Chinese healing ritual.” Coming from a distinguished older gentleman, it sounded much less like bullshit than it would have if Huaisang had said it.

Huaisang knelt by Lan Wangji. “Don’t stop what you’re doing,” he said. “But these people will help too. Let them.” Lan Wangji said nothing, but moved aside a little as the EMT’s started taking vitals and hooking up machines. He did not loose his hold on Wei Wuxian’s wrist.

Huaisang moved out of the way too, but founded himself surrounded by two other EMT’s and his mother. They seemed really interested in a tear on the shoulder of his jacket. “It’s just a bruise,” he protested, until they made him take off his jacket and then his bloody (?) shirt to reveal a long gash underneath. It was still bleeding. Once he saw it, they had no trouble getting him into an ambulance.

Things got a bit fuzzy after that. His mother stayed with him, but Song Zongzhu and the Jin cultivator went off somewhere with the FBI guy and some important-looking policemen. Wei Wuxian was bundled off in a medical helicopter with an unreasonable number of EMT’s and Lan Wangji. Professor Lan, who had somehow claimed to be responsible for both of them, said that they were taking Wei Wuxian straight to surgery at Columbia Hospital.

At which point Huaisang remembered that Sarah Chen and Mianmian Luo were supposed to meet him here. He suddenly found it unexpectedly hilarious that there was a red lighthouse under the bridge. His mother wouldn’t let him text anyone, and said she’d take care of it. Probably they’d given him some drugs when he’d freaked because he was bleeding and needed stitches in his shoulder.

The EMT’s were going to take Huaisang to the nearest hospital, but his mother and Professor Lan insisted that he also be taken to Columbia. There was a doctor there who, he said, knew something about the medical treatment of cultivators. Huaisang was willing to bet he’d never before seen anything like Wei Wuxian.

Huaisang fell asleep in the back of the ambulance, which took forever since, despite Huaisang’s begging, the EMT’s wouldn’t drive on the sidewalks with sirens blaring. He was very sure that was how it was supposed to work. They gave him more drugs, and he didn’t wake up until that evening, stitches already in place and feeling like he’d been run over by a truck.

.

Chapter Text

They wouldn’t let Huaisang see Wei Wuxian that night. All he could get from the night nurses was that “the unconscious guy” was “still alive,” which sounded ominous, and that the “very hot guy” was still holding his hand. There was definitely some jealousy going on there . . .

“It was the weirdest thing,” Huaisang’s morning nurse said, “I mean, I wasn’t there but I heard that your friend—you know, the hot guy—the one who came in last night with the unconscious guy?” Huisang nodded, not sure he was entirely following all this. “Well, when he came in, he had about five bloody slashes on his clothes, and everyone was sure he’d been injured. But when they finally convinced him to get checked out himself, there was nothing on him. Not even a scratch.” She stared at Huaisang as if she thought he’d have some sort of explanation.

He did, but he wasn’t going to tell her about Lan Wangji’s sun-about-to-go-nova core. He shrugged.

“His clothes were absolutely shredded,” she said. “That must have been some battle, up there.”

This was his chance to flirt a bit and maybe get treated like a hero. He found that he didn’t really want to go there. He hadn’t done anything, really. He’d just . . . knocked down a couple yao. Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian had done all the real work. He wondered vaguely if that was why it had been so hard to get information from the people who’d fought in the Sunshot Campaign. Most of the army had seen only their tiny part of it, and probably thought they hadn’t really done anything special either.

He said, “I’m not supposed to talk about it.” That might even be true.

Sarah Chen showed up bright and early with Huaisang’s mother. Well, she was actually Ned’s mother, but she had fought yao as a cultivator! just last night, so she’d probably be fine with being Huaisang’s mother now. She and Sarah Chen had come with Professor Lan, who’d gone straight to the ICU, presumably to once again try to pry Lan Wangji away from Wei Wuxian. Huaisang didn’t think he’d succeed.

“They’re going to send you home today, I expect,” Huaisang’s mother said. “They want the cultivation doctor to check you out first. It’s the same doctor who is seeing your friends.”

“They’re not . . .” Huaisang started. Not my friends, he was going to say. He hadn’t even met Lan Wangji until a week ago, and he still hadn’t spoken to Wei Wuxian. Still, it was quite possible that he knew more about them than they did themselves. And he wanted to be their friend. “That’s fine,” he said.

Sarah Chen added, “We can take you to your apartment, but you should come stay with us, if you’d like. If you want to rest up a bit.” Then she smiled. “But you’d better not take too much of a break. You’re getting behind on your classwork.”

“But I thought . . .” Huaisang said, then paused because he didn’t know if anyone had told his mother about the whole being expelled for plagiarism thing. Whatever. She hadn’t told him about the whole being a rogue cultivator thing. “I thought I was being expelled.”

Sarah Chen’s smile widened. “Well, I think Professor Lan means to talk to Dr. Fitzgerald this week. He really liked your New York City watercolors. As did I.”

“And, well,” his mother said, “We did show you some of Nie Huaisang’s work when you were very young. You must have forgotten.” She said this with an exaggeratedly straight face, that made it clear that all three of them knew she was lying.

Huaisang stared at her in astonishment. “Right,” he said, drawing it out with sarcasm. “And that’s where I learned fluent Mandarin overnight too.”

“Did you, now?” his mother asked, in Mandarin, then laughed.

There was a polite knock on the door, and a man wearing maroon surgical scrubs under a white lab coat entered without waiting for a response. “Ned Sang?” he said, and Huaisang nodded.

He was an older Chinese man with short black hair, graying at his temples. There was something about his apologetic demeanor that reminded Huaisang of Wen Ning. He had the same tentative smile and round face, too. But Wen Ning had never aged in his very long un-life, and this guy had to be at least sixty.

He said, “I have been consulted because I have some knowledge of cultivation medicine. I’m Doctor Wen.”

Holy shit. Wen Ning? How had he gotten here from China?

But no. Dr. Wen’s upper chest and neck were easily visible above his scrub shirt. His skin was tanned and unblemished. There were no creeping black lines. He moved without the Ghost General’s undead stiffness. He couldn’t be Wen Ning . . . Unless perhaps Wen Ning’s soul had at last entered the cycle of reincarnation.

Huaisang smiled back, somewhat shakily, and held out his wrist for Dr. Wen to examine his Qi. Dr. Wen sent the two women to wait outside, then felt Huaisang’s meridians and core. His hands were warm, very much alive. Up close, Huaisang could read the small print on Dr Wen’s name badge. His first name was Qionglin, just as Wen Ning’s had been.

“I have been told that you have some memories of past lives as a cultivator,” Dr. Wen said.

“Who told you that?” Huaisang squawked, in preparation for denying it utterly.

“Dr. Chen and Lan Qiren. And your mother.”

“Oh,” Huaisang said. So much for that secret. He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or annoyed that someone else had told his mother. “I guess I do, then,” he said.

Dr. Wen insisted on unwrapping the bandages to see Huaisang’s laceration. “Your core is not doing everything it could to heal this,” he said at last. He took Huaisang’s wrist again, and there was a small flush of Qi. “There. That should be better. We’d better give you some broad spectrum antibiotics too, just in case. Yao are not known for their cleanliness.”

Huaisang couldn’t tell if whatever the doctor had done actually made any difference. His shoulder maybe ached a little less. He was burning with questions, though, but he stayed silent while Dr. Wen reapplied the bandages and typed his notes on a bedside computer. After a pause, the doctor added, “I’ll give you some cultivation exercises that might help clear your meridians a bit more.” He shrugged. “Though it won’t accomplish anything like your friend Lan Zhan.”

That was the opening Huaisang had been hoping for. “I heard Lan . . . Zhan . . .” He paused. If that was the name they were going with, he’d better use it too. “. . . healed himself in a couple of hours.”

Dr. Wen looked a little uncomfortable, as though reluctant to gossip, but then said, “Yes. His cultivation is stronger than any I’ve ever seen.”

“That may be true,” Huaisang said. “Lan Zhan used to be called Hanguang-Jun, bearer of light.”

“Is he an Immortal?”

“Huh . . ?“ Huaisang gaped, taken by surprise. But actually it was a very reasonable question. He’d long suspected that Lan Wangji had repeatedly rejected immortality. But now Lan Wangji had finally attached himself to his Wei Ying. So. “Maybe? I mean, he hasn’t been so far, but it’s possible he is now.”

There was a pause during which Dr. Wen seemed to be coming to terms with that. He finally said, “Well, Wei Ying isn’t immortal. Yet, anyway.” He huffed quietly, as though he meant this to be a joke, then went serious again. “Is he your friend too?”

“Of course,” Huaisang said lightly, because he really had no idea if he was lying or not. “Why?”

“Well, neither Lan Zhan nor Lan Qiren seem to know anything about Wei Ying, except his name, which Lan Zhan was oddly insistent about.”

“Lan Zhan has always called him Wei Ying.”

“Okay,” Dr. Wen said, still looking uncertain. Perhaps he was wondering how long that ‘always’ actually was. He took a deep breath before continuing. “Wei Ying has been unresponsive since he came in, so he can’t tell us. I don’t want to doubt the Lans; I’m nearly certain now that Lan Zhan is the only reason why Wei Ying is still alive. But they don’t know where he lives, or who else to contact, or anything.”

“I haven’t seen him for a couple . . . uh, years,” Huaisang said. “I think his family kicked him out. He’s been living on the streets.”

Dr. Wen nodded, seeming a bit more comfortable. “When he arrived, Wei Ying had multiple infected wounds,” Dr. Wen said, falling into a clinical recitation. “He needed surgery to clean them and stop the bleeding. But we couldn’t take him to the OR right away because his labs were too abnormal—renal failure, sepsis, severe anemia, not to mention dehydration and malnutrition—nearly incompatible with life.” He trailed off as though he had gotten distracted by the mystery, then met Huaisang’s eyes. “Anyway. Within a few hours, things improved so much that we are now assuming the original numbers were a lab error. But they weren’t, were they?”

Huaisang shook his head. “No, probably they were correct.” It was just further evidence of Lan Zhan’s amazing abilities.

“Wei Ying’s core had nothing to do with his recovery, I think,” Dr. Wen said. “It was functioning, but completely without Qi. He seems to have been holding himself together with nothing but negative energy for weeks, at least.”

“He’s done that before, and not just in this life.”

The doctor didn’t so much as raise a suspicious eyebrow at this final admission that Huaisang had past connections with Wei Ying. “It felt almost familiar to me,” Dr. Wen said. “Though there’s nothing about using negative energy for anything like that in the textbooks.”

“You probably have to read about demonic cultivation methods,” Huaisang said.

“We call that 'alternate cultivation,' these days,” Dr. Wen said with mild disapproval. “It is more accurate. But it turns out there’s no need. Lan Zhan’s Qi mixed with the Negative Energy in Wei Ying’s core. I thought his core was corrupted at first, but it actually seems to need both to function. There’s nothing at all about that, anywhere.”

Huaisang was impressed that Dr. Wen had figured that out so fast. “I think Wei Ying’s core is unique. He’s used to manipulating resentful . . . uh, negative energy. He could probably start a whole new branch of alternate cultivation.”

Dr. Wen laughed quietly. “But what bothers me is that the process of clearing the negative energy felt so familiar, like I’ve helped him before. But I know I haven’t.”

“You did know each other,” Huaisang admitted reluctantly. “In the past.”

“I thought so,” Dr. Wen said. He looked oddly relieved. “It is good to know that we actually are connected somehow.”

“You were with him during a very bad time, a very long time ago,” Huaisang said. This was going to be interesting to explain. “Wei Ying used demonic cultivation to. . . “

“Mr. Sang,” Dr. Wen interrupted holding up one hand. “It is good to know that I have not imagined our connection. But if you truly have memories of my past lives, I do not wish to know them.”

Huaisang stopped talking. Wen Ning had been gentle and kind, trapped in an ageless and fearsome body. He’d never had a chance to live past his teens. He did not need to remember everyone he had loved and lost. He did not need to remember that he had been, effectively, immortal.

“I have a lovely wife and three wonderful children,” Wen Ning said happily. He smiled. “My youngest will graduate from high school next year. She wants to design video games. My son is in medical school. My oldest daughter is a cultivator. My first grandchild is due soon.” His smile grew wider as he talked. “I am content to live out this life with them.”

Huaisang had never seen Wen Ning smile like that, full of joy unrestrained by worry or fear or shyness. He was finally free of his lonely centuries as the Ghost General.

“I will complete the paperwork so that you can go home today,” Dr. Wen said.

Huaisang resisted the urge to bow as one would to an Immortal. Instead he said, merely, “Thank you,” knowing that he was thanking him for very much more than his brief medical visit.

.

Chapter Text

The Song Compound was in southern Queens, almost to Brooklyn. It was in a very unpromising location, surrounded by junkyards and warehouses, some of which seemed deserted. But behind a crumbling concrete wall topped with razor wire, was a carved gate guarded by two young people in dark blue, loose-fitting outfits that were clearly disciple’s uniforms.

Inside was a parking garage, well lit and clean. The inner edges of the garage were open, and looked out on at least two city blocks of gracious brick buildings linked by tree-lined walkways. There were buildings that had to be either dorms or hotels, several buildings holding offices or classrooms, and a gymnasium. Except for a large, central training ground paved in concentric cloud patterns, it could have been any college campus anywhere.

Song Zongzhu and Sarah Chen had a separate house, big enough for several guest rooms, an office, and a studio/classroom with floor-to-ceiling windows. “I’m afraid you’ll be staying in the dorms with the disciples,” Sarah Chen said. “We expect to be hosting cultivators from out of town until the situation at Grand Central Station is resolved.”

Huisang was impressed that the sects were still worried about something at Grand Central Station. There had been no trouble there, though apparently some resentment had been traced from the bridge back to the station. Mostly they were acting only on Lan Zhan’s word.

The room they gave Huaisang was smaller than his apartment in Brooklyn, though that was probably because it didn’t have a kitchen. Meals were served downstairs in the cafeteria.

“You can use my studio, if you want,” Sarah Chen said.

Two days later, the combined sects sent a group of cultivators to Grand Central Station to track down the source of the resentment. Huaisang didn’t go with them, much to his relief. But Song Zongzhu and his mother both went, along with disciples from the Song, Lan, and Jin.

They reportedly searched the entire system down to the deepest tunnel. The Jin had obtained authorization to scout the tracks a short way from each of the station’s many platforms. A few of the cultivators caught occasional whiffs of resentful energy, but nothing they could follow. There were many rats, but none of them were yao or even undead. There was nothing.

It was likely that whatever-it-was was hiding.

“We’ll have to wait until Wei Ying wakes up,” Nie Huaisang said.

They were calling them Lan Zhan and Wei Ying, because those were the names that Lan Zhan insisted on at the hospital. Neither name was familiar in cultivator circles these days. As far as anyone was concerned, Lan Wangji was still obediently in seclusion, and Jiang Wuxian was gone. Nobody had heard of Nie Huaisang either, and he had no trouble using it as his name while with the sects. His mother switched to calling him A-Sang with an ease that made Huaisang think that she had never really given up on his birth name.

The non-cultivator news services had moved on as well. There had been excitement over the initial rescue, but no details from either police or hospital were released. The news videos disappeared virtually overnight, with nothing remaining on line but blurry, badly lit body-cam footage. The sects must have employed someone who was really good at internet privacy.

Wei Ying was not exactly unconscious. But when he woke up, he was confused and incoherent and immediately started to undo the hard work of Lan Zhan and Dr. Wen by drawing on resentful energy. Huaisang suspected he was unmoored in time, reliving old memories and forgetting that he now had a core again. Lan Zhan never left his side.

The day after the failed subway expedition, Huaisang returned to the hospital to visit Wei Ying. Wei Ying was sitting up, and whining that his food wasn’t spicy enough and didn’t come with alcohol. Disturbingly, he was speaking Mandarin, and asking specifically for Emperor’s Smile.

Lan Zhan was in a particularly pissy mood, possibly because Lan Qiren was there also. They seemed to be arguing. Also in Mandarin.

“Wei Ying needs his sword,” Lan Zhan said.

Lan Qiren huffed. “No one in their right mind would give that man a sword.”

Huaisang had to agree. Wei Ying was terribly thin, hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked. He didn’t look like he could lift a sword. The hospital gown hung off of him making him look like a stick figure wearing a tent. He was never still, twitching and kicking at the blankets over his legs. His dark eyes were focused on the far corner of the room, and it was not clear if he was even listening to the conversation. He looked unhinged.

“He needs to meditate,” Lan Zhan said.

On the surface, Huaisang thought, this was reasonable. For a normal cultivator meditating with a sword to which they were spiritually attuned would be mandatory. But Wei Ying had given up on his sword in his first life, and never taken it up again. He had a core now, though. Perhaps he had been given another sword by the Jiang. Huaisang wondered what had happened to it. “Neither of you are carrying swords,” Huaisang pointed out.

Lan Qiren said, “Carrying a sword in public is impolite. And unnecessary.” Not against the rules, Huaisang noticed. He remembered that Wei Wuxian had been considered impolite when he’d refused to carry his sword. But he couldn’t remember any Lan rules about it, one way or the other.

“It is best for meditation,” Lan Zhan said.



“You would not meditate with your sword before you went to Saratoga Springs,” Lan Qiren argued.

“That wasn’t the right sword.”

Wei Ying waved a hand weakly in the direction he’d been staring. “Please,” he said, “I can’t help you now.” Huaisang didn’t think he was responding to anything either Lan Zhan or Lan Qiren had said. Perhaps he was speaking to a ghost. There must be ghosts. This was a hospital.

Both Lans looked at Wei Ying briefly, then turned away as though they were used to this sort of interruption. “Why didn’t you say anything at Saratoga?” Lan Qiren asked.

“There was nothing to say.”

“You gave up your music, too.”

Unnoticed, Wei Ying had begun listening and becoming increasingly agitated. “Aiya, Lan Zhan,” he said. He was picking at the tape around his IV as though trying to remove it. “You should have stayed away from me. I ruined your music.”

Lan Zhan took Wei Ying’s hand, guiding it away from the IV. “The music was never mine,” Lan Zhan stated. He paused, lifting Wei Ying’s chin with a gentle finger until Wei Ying met his eyes. “Lan Zhan only knows the notes. Wei Ying hears the music.”

Wei Ying covered his face with his hands. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Lan Zhan.”

Lan Qiren looked pensive. Perhaps it had not occurred to him that Lan Wangji might have opinions and desires of his own.

“I want to play with you again.” Lan Zhan said to Wei Ying.

“Did we play Rest, at the bridge?” Wei Ying mumbled. He was once again staring at nothing in the far corner, eyes round and scared peering over his hands. “I need my flute.”

“Where is it?” Huaisang asked. The little flute that Wei Ying had used on the bridge had dropped when he fell. There would be no way to find it. “Your real flute, I mean. The one you played with Lan Zhan.”

“Oh, right,” Wei Ying said. His voice was muffled by his hands, but he switched to English. “That was Jiang Wuxian’s flute. He needed money? So he sold it?”

“Did Jiang Wuxian have a sword too?” Huaisang asked Wei Ying, also in English.

Wei Ying peered at him between his fingers. “There is no Jiang Wuxian,“ he said dolefully. “They took his sword and his name when they kicked him out of the sect.” He started clawing at his own face and chest, tears running silently down his cheeks.

Lan Zhan took his hands to try to stop him, and was soon holding him down while Wei Ying fought and tried to roll away. Lan Qiren rang for a nurse who took one look at the situation and ran for medication. Whatever she put into Wei Ying’s IV sent him rapidly to sleep.

“I think we should try to get his sword back. And his flute,” Huaisang said, when the silence got too uncomfortable.

Lan Zhan handed Huaisang a small slip of paper. “This was in his pocket,” he said. The paper was a receipt from a pawn shop on Metropolitan Avenue.

Huaisang did not go with the delegation to the Jiang to ask for Jiang Wuxian’s sword. The Jiang disciples reportedly were delighted to hear that Jiang Wuxian was alive. Some of them had guessed that he was the man who had fallen from the bridge. But their sect leader, a formidably angry man, was not at all happy about their visit.

Jiang Zongzhu complained at length about his ex-disciple, who had been disobedient, disrespectful and ungrateful from the first. They’d adopted him from Yiling, as was apparently written into their sect rules. But he’d supposedly been inadequate in every way. He attracted resentment the way he attracted trouble. He supplemented his sword skills with talismans and music, all of which the sect leader seemed to think were demonic. Then he’d had the audacity to go off to college.

Jiang Wuxian had refused to come back from Columbia for a night hunt, because he had exams, the delegation was told. The hunt had gone badly, and a disciple had been killed. They blamed Wuxian. Wuxian blamed himself. He did not protest when they stripped him of all sect possessions—sword, money, name—and sent him onto the streets of Brooklyn with nothing but his backpack, flute and clothes.

But in the face of three eminent cultivators—Song Zongzhu, Jin Zongzhu, and Lan Qiren—Jiang Zongzhu had no choice but to give up the sword. Lan Qiren angered him even further by insisting on paying for the sword, in Chinese yuan, which he dropped on the floor in a fairly large pile at Jiang Zongzhu’s feet. Then he’d turned around and stalked out, carrying the sword. Huaisang kind of wished he’d seen it.

Lan Qiren was tight-lipped and stony-faced when they returned, which Huaisang found out was the Lan Qiren version of rage. But he had with him a sword in a plain leather sheath that was inscribed, ever-so-lightly, with the pattern that had been on Jiang Cheng’s Sandu.

The next day, Lan Qiren brought another sword to the Song complex. This one was for Lan Wangji. If it wasn’t the original Bichen, it was a damn good copy. It had been on display at the Lan archives.

They sent Huaisang to the pawn shop. The flute was still there, leaking resentment even through its case, and nobody wanted to touch it, let alone buy it. The pawnbroker sold it back to Huaisang hastily, without even trying to jack up the price. Huaisang could probably have bargained him down. The silver had tarnished into a solid black which would not rub off. Lying in its red-cushioned case, it looked vaguely sinister. It was a flute, not a dizi, but felt every bit as demonic as the original Yiling Laozu’s flute Chenqing.

On the way back to the compound, Huaisang bought a red tassel for it.

* * * * *

Wei Ying recovered fairly quickly, once he had his sword to help him stabilize his Qi. Except for some performative pouting, he was surprisingly cooperative with Dr. Wen’s instructions for diet and physical therapy, which closely resembled the Jiang sword forms.

Dr. Wen discharged him three days later. It might have been even sooner, except Wei Ying also had his flute, which he played whenever he wasn’t meditating or exercising. He claimed to be laying to rest the ghosts that had been speaking to him. Huaisang believed him, based on his long history. Lan Zhan believed him based on no evidence whatsoever.

Lan Zhan refused to go back to Cloud Recesses, and Wei Ying didn’t have anywhere else to go. The two of them moved into the dormitories at the Song compound. They were given separate rooms, and everybody pretended not to notice that they only used one of them at a time.

They spent the next two weeks “preparing,” which meant getting disciples to order random deliveries of spicy food, sneaking out to coffee shops (during the day) and liquor stores (at night), and meditating to sword forms at all hours of the day and night. The Song disciples loved all parts of this, and were soon petitioning the cafeteria for a new, improved menu. They were also learning new sword forms in some combination of Lan and Jiang traditions, and getting somewhat confused. Huaisang could see how the Jiang sect elders might have been irritated by the constant upheaval.

Huaisang joined them sometimes, mimicking the sword forms with his fans. He refused to do anything that would break a sweat, though. Mostly he made sketches for his now-revived and utterly changed thesis project. He was painting New York City scenes using ancient Chinese composition and brush techniques. With the approval of his faculty advisors and the department chair.

Lan Zhan requested his violin, along with some ancient music from the Lan library, scores which no one had been sure how to read for decades. It seemed that he now remembered the ancient notations. Huaisang was not sure what else he might have remembered.

Surprisingly, the person who delivered the manuscripts was Mianmian Luo. She was taking a break from her job at Saratoga Springs, she said. Later she admitted privately that she had really been sent to spy on Lan Wangji. Though why they thought she would tell them anything after failing to report Huaisang’s visit and Lan Zhan’s subsequent escape, she had no idea.

Mianmian moved into the dormitory. She turned out to be a formidable swordsman.

They made Huaisang come along when they finally made another assault on whatever was still lurking under Grand Central Station. This was mostly, he suspected, because they wanted him to keep an eye on Lan Zhan and Wei Ying. Huaisang's mother, who'd gone home once she knew that Huaisang was fine, flew back in from California. Possibly she just wanted to keep an eye on Huaisang. There was also a general feeling that, because the previous group had felt no great evil, whatever was down there wasn’t really dangerous.

They were wrong, of course. Wei Ying told them that, repeatedly. At least until someone suggested that, if it was that bad, he probably was too weak to go with them.

.

Chapter Text

The day before they were to try another assault on Grand Central Station, Huaisang woke to a steady pounding on his door. He groaned. It wasn’t even morning yet. Lan Zhan was at his door at—he checked his phone—5:23 AM. He was barefoot and wearing an old-fashioned pajama set, which was kind of adorably quaint. He said, “Huaisang, Wei Ying is gone.”

Shit. Of course Wei Wuxian would go off on his own to do something dangerous, in order to keep everyone else away from danger. He should have been watching. Their drinking bout had ended early, just after midnight. He’d personally escorted Wei Ying to his room, where Lan Zhan had already been asleep for two hours.

Sadly, that was plenty of time for Wei Ying to disappear.

But even if he’d left right away, it was unlikely that Wei Ying could have gotten to Grand Central that quickly. There weren't very many trains late at night, and there were, like, three transfers between this part of Brooklyn and Grand Central. Plus, the nearest station, assuming Wei Ying even knew where it was, was almost two miles away.

Huaisang threw on random clothes and gave Lan Zhan a clean grey sweatsuit, because he wouldn’t go back to his room even though it was only two floors down from Huaisang’s. It was too small for him, but it would have to do. They would have to get to Grand Central as soon as possible. Maybe if he drove to the Myrtle Avenue Station . . . no . . . Where would he park?

They were in the car, driving vaguely toward a J-train subway station—any subway station with a parking space—when Huaisang’s phone bleeped with a text. It was Bryan from Starbucks. Huaisang pulled over into an illegal parking spot.

The text said only: “Yiling Laozu is here.”

He answered, “Be right there,” and reprogrammed his phone for the Lafayette Avenue Starbucks. It was only twenty minutes away, by car.

And Wei Ying was indeed there, sitting at a small table with a gigantic coffee labeled “Yiling Laozu” in front of him. He was hunched over, looking guilty and gently steaming with resentment. He was still wearing the black jeans and death metal t-shirt he’d worn the night before. Bryan was arguing with Christina.

Huaisang interrupted Christina mid-rant against people who couldn’t pay for their coffee. “I’ll pay for the coffee,” he said. “And another one just like it. And a large tea. And three breakfast sandwiches.”

“We don’t open until six,” Christina said. But Bryan wordlessly opened the cash register and started making tea.

Lan Zhan sat down next to Wei Ying. “Yiling Laozu?” he said quietly.

Wei Ying looked at him with tears in his eyes. “It’s what the ghosts call me.”

“You are Wei Ying.”

Christina pointedly ran Huaisang’s credit card before beginning to warm up the sandwiches. Huaisang gave a generous tip. In cash. To Bryan.

“Yiling Laozu is a bad person," Wei Ying said, mournfully. “It means I’m not right, Lan Zhan. Evil, probably.” He stood up, turned toward the door. “Lan Zongzhu . . . your father . . . was right. You should not go near me.”

“Do not go near Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan recited. He shook his head minutely. “It is a bad rule. Wei Ying is good.”

Wei Ying gave Lan Zhan a pitying look, and took another step toward the door. Huaisang stood in front of him and grabbed him by both shoulders. He said, “Talking to ghosts is not evil. Channelling resentful energy is not evil. Of course, all power can be abused. But the Yiling Laozu has always been loyal and kind and entirely too helpful.” He pulled Wei Ying into a hug. Wei Ying resisted briefly, then melted.

Lan Zhan gave Huaisang a look that could only be interpreted as a glare.

“Fine,” Huaisang said to him. “You hug him, then.”

Lan Zhan did. It was so awkward that Huaisang realized it was possible that, despite the room-sharing, the two had never actually touched each other. He would have to give them lessons . . .

* * * * *

The group that arrived at Grand Central Station on Thursday at midnight was large and varied. All the New York sects were represented except the Jiang, who weren’t told about it because no one wanted to be yelled at. Of course Wei Ying and Lan Zhan led the assault, mostly because they likely wouldn’t take direction from anyone else. Song Zongzhu and Jin Zongzhu each commanded three disciples. The Song contingent was amplified by Nie Huaisang and his mother, who introduced herself as the rogue cultivator Liu Jingyan. Several people had heard of her. The Lan were represented by Lan Qiren, Mianmian Luo, and, to Huaisang’s surprise, Lan Xichen.

When he saw Lan Xichen, Lan Zhan turned away, making a small sound that might have been dismay. Wei Ying stepped between Lan Zhan and Xichen. Huaisang hid behind his fan and stepped closer as well, even though he had no real desire to meet the man again.

But Xichen moved toward Lan Zhan standing square in front of him and saying, “Wangji. I’m sorry. Please . . .” He trailed off partly because Lan Zhan’s expression became impossibly more frozen. And also because he noticed Huaisang. “You!” he sputtered.

Huaisang sighed and bowed, hiding an eye roll behind his fan.

“You interrupted my brother’s treatment,” Xichen said. His fake diplomatic smile was back in place. “You recklessly endangered my brother’s life.” Then his placid demeanor cracked a bit. “And you found Wei Ying. How? I thought he was imaginary.” Lan Xichen laughed, high and a little hysterical. “He could have been killed, fighting yao up there.”

“I was up there too,” Huaisang said dryly. “Lan Wangji flew me there. On his sword.” He didn’t expect to be believed, exactly, but he thought it likely that Xichen could also feel Lan Zhan’s core, shining a few feet away.

Xichen sagged. “When he fell . . . I thought . . .” He straightened and visibly pulled on a neutral expression. “Well. You also seem to have saved my brother’s life. So I must thank you.”

“He saved himself,” Huaisang said.

“I guess my little brother doesn’t need me to protect him any more.” He sounded wistful, though his expression remained blank.

Huaisang thought how, even now, despite everything, he missed Mingjue. It would be nice to have an older brother. “No,” he said. “Big brothers are always bigger, and good to have around, even if they make mistakes.”

He looked at Lan Zhan and Wei Ying, who had somehow started holding hands during this exchange. Lan Zhan was looking at his brother with something like hope. Wei Ying was wearing a smile that spelled trouble.

Wei Ying grabbed Lan Xichen’s hand with his free one and started shaking it. “Hi,” he said cheerily. “I’m Wei Ying, Lan Zhan’s boyfriend.”

Lan Xichen’s expression froze for just a second. Then he smiled, a real smile, not the one he used when he was being diplomatic. “Hi, Wei Ying,” he said. “I’m Lan Zhan’s brother, and you’d better treat him right.”

Lan Zhan’s eyes widened. His glowed from his core, and for a brief minute, he looked like nothing could possibly ever harm him.

* * * * *

At Wei Ying’s insistence, they went first to the platform for the Green (4,5,6) Line coming up from the south. This was, it seemed, where Wei Ying had first met Lan Zhan. It was unclear whether Wei Ying knew something about resentful energy tied to the platform, or if he just wanted to find a private spot to either tease Lan Zhan or to abandon the rest of the group. He was in a very strange mood, smiling widely and giggling as though he was leading them in some sort of game. Huaisang suspected he was hiding a very deep fear.

There was nothing there, but Wei Ying played a few drawn out notes on his black flute and seemed satisfied. He had, Huaisang noticed, attached the red tassel to it. He did not twirl it between his fingers, though. Perhaps the raised keys were in the way.

Wei Ying then led them on a merry and seemingly random jaunt through the station. After the second call to the Stationmaster for access to a locked door or section of track, the man merely trailed after them. Every now and then, Wei Ying stopped and, after giving the walls or ceiling an irritated look, played another snatch of music.

They ended up in the newest and deepest part of the station, opened just a year ago to bring a second Long Island Railroad terminus to the city.

“Where did this come from?” Wei Ying said, looking down one of the long, shiny escalators that descended several stories to the train platforms. The escalators were turned off, since the last train for the day had already departed.

The Stationmaster gave Wei Ying a sour look. “It was under construction for, like, fifteen years,” he said. The implication was that anyone who didn’t know about this was not a proper New Yorker.

“Oooh,” Wei Ying said, as though a great truth had just been revealed. He clattered part way down the nearest escalator. Before anyone could follow him, he clattered right back up again. “Which track is closest to the subway station?” he asked.

The Stationmaster led the group to a different escalator. This time they all followed Wei Ying and the Stationmaster down. The platform at the bottom was at least a block long, a thin area of concrete safety raised between two train tracks. Wei Ying stalked to one end, where the tracks vanished into a dark passage. He pointed to the concrete block wall on the far side of the tracks.

“What’s behind that wall?” he demanded.

“Um . . . nothing?” the Stationmaster stammered. “This deep it should be mostly rock. Or maybe a construction access tunnel? It would be filled in though.”

“Is there any way to get in there?”

“Shouldn’t be.”

“That’s not good,” Wei Ying said, then stiffened in alarm. He raised his voice. “Someone get this guy out of here. Now!”

Then something that looked like a coiled rope of vines and darkness, covered in black strands of resentful energy punched through the wall and across the tracks, aimed straight at Wei Ying.

Lan Zhan was already in the air, sword drawn. His sword came down, severing the rope just before it could hit Wei Ying. The entire tendril dissolved in a swirl of resentment, revealing nothing but a strand of cable which snapped back the way it had come. It left behind a hole in the wall. Concrete dust fell onto the tracks below.

Lan Zhan and Wei Ying exchanged a questioning look. Then Lan Zhan tightened his grip on his sword ever-so-slightly and Wei Ying raised his flute. Two notes later, a second tendril came through the wall not far from the first hole, and was summarily dispatched by Lan Zhan. Wei Ying danced out of the way without pausing his music. After two more tendrils, there was a hole in the wall large enough for a man to pass through.

Mianmian Luo had been trying to get the Stationmaster back to the escalators, but had not been successful. He was rooted to the spot, watching the wall crumble, a stormy look on his face that spoke of both annoyance and horror. To be fair, he had only a few hours to reroute all the morning trains away from the now-debris-covered track. If, that is, he survived.

Two more cultivators surrounded the Stationmaster. But the tendrils seemed to be interested only in attacking Wei Ying. Huaisang thought Wei Ying’s music might be goading whatever was behind the wall. Probably he was attracting the attacks to himself. Quite possibly he was using them to widen the hole in the wall.

A Jin cultivator who had taken a position closer to the platform’s end shouted and drew his sword. From the tunnel came a cloud of mist that resolved into a swarm of rats. They were mostly just regular rats, but there were a few yao and undead rats among them. They also went straight for Wei Ying, and since there were (possibly) more than Lan Zhan could handle, it gave the rest of them something to do.

And for the second time in a month, Huaisang found himself stabbing things with his fan. He found that it worked best to just spread the metal edges in the direction of oncoming rats and let them run into it. Someone behind him with a sword took care of the ones that got past him. It was decidedly unglamorous.

A deep musical chord infused with Qi cut through the confusion. Undead rats unravelled instantly and normal rats were flung back to run away down the tracks. Someone had just used the ancient Lan chord assassination technique. In the sudden quiet, Huaisang looked at Lan Zhan, but he was still holding his sword at ready for another tendril.

It was Lan Qiren, sitting on a passenger bench with a guqin on his lap, who had played it. They all stared at him in disbelief until another tendril came through the wall for Wei Ying. Lan Zhan cut it down. Lan Qiren stared back placidly, though he did not remove his hands from the strings.

A large section of the wall had now collapsed onto the tracks. The opening revealed a writhing tangle of cables and wire, bent railroad tracks and broken support struts. Resentment twisted through the mess, fed by a looming presence from above.

“Xichen. Baihe. Protect Wei Ying,” Lan Qiren said. “Wangji. With me.”

Xichan and Song Zongzhu positioned themselves between Wei Ying and the wall. Lan Qiren brought his guqin and stood next to Lan Zhan. Reluctantly, Lan Zhan sheathed his sword and joined Lan Qiren with his own guqin. Together they swept a wall of Qi through the opening. Lan Zhan had his sword back in his hand before the notes faded.

A few pieces of concrete fell noisily to the small pile now covering the tracks. But the resentment had lessened and the motion inside the opening had mostly ceased.

Wei Ying smiled crookedly. “Now for the hard part,” he said. “We need to destroy its core. Follow me only if you are not injured or exhausted. Everyone else stays here.”

He began playing a gentle, wandering melody. It had some things in common with the Lan Song of Clarity, the song that calmed disordered Qi in cultivators. This seemed to be directed instead at angry resentful spirits. It wound its way through the opening in the wall, and the tendrils seemed to relax, as though they’d been put to sleep. Was this a Lan song that Huaisang had never heard? No, all three Lans listened intently. It must be something that Wei Wuxian had discovered. Or composed. Lan Zhan picked up the melody first, followed by Qiren on his guqin and Xichen on a xiao.

When he was sure everyone had mastered the song, Wei Ying stopped playing long enough to say, “Xichen, you and Qiren Laoshi stay here. Play as long as you can.” Then he jumped down to the tracks and walked through the opening, flute at his lips. Lan Zhan, of course, was right behind him.

Song Zongzhu told her disciples to stay behind, though none were injured. She and Mianmian and Huaisang’s mother all followed. After a pause to tell his disciples to take care of the one disciple who’d been injured, Jin Zongzhu followed as well. (Huaisang didn’t remember his name, except that it wasn’t Zixuan or A-Ling or Guang-anything.) Huaisang considered faking an injury or something, but then he thought about sitting here on the almost-deserted platform while anything could be happening to his favorite people. He jumped down from the platform and crossed the tracks with the rest.

They spent the next eternity clearing debris from warped beams and girders, so they could climb them. It was easiest when Wei Ying and Lan Zhan both were playing Wei Ying's song along with the cultivators below, but one or the other had to stop often so they, too, could climb. It was eerily still, but all of them could feel the resentful energy gathered above them. They kept waiting for something to come alive with resentment and sweep them away, but nothing stirred.

They finally reached an odd chamber that perhaps was part of a long-forgotten tunnel. In the center was a thing made of bare branches and dead leaves, shrouded in resentment. Most of it was still vaguely tree-shaped, though it was more root than tree. It had possibly been lulled a bit by the music, but it also seemed to have merely paused to gather more resentment. Coming into it from several directions as though nourishing it, were streams of resentful energy.

Wei Ying’s eyes were wide and dismayed above his flute. He stared at the tree-thing through two full rounds of his song. He lowered his flute. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” he muttered. Then, louder, “Keep playing Lan Zhan. The rest of you protect Lan Zhan. Sing along if you can.” He grinned. “You must all know it by now.”

He stepped away from the group and began an entirely different melody. This one was discordant and horrible and almost drowned out the other song. Lan Zhan played louder as Wei Ying stepped toward the tree-thing, protecting him from behind as best he could. Huaisang’s mother stepped forward to go with him, but Huaisang pulled her back. Whatever Wei Ying was going to do next—probably go full-on Yiling Laozu—no one there could protect him.

Indeed, Wei Ying no longer needed protection. He gathered resentment to himself, stealing from the streams feeding the tree-thing. He cloaked himself in it so that it clung to him, swirling around him like black robes. The tree-thing fought back, but now Wei Ying had switched to whistling so he could grab the tendrils with his bare hands, draining them of resentful energy to increase his own power. He moved steadily nearer.

Too late, the tree-thing realized that there was more than one enemy in the room. Branches wrapped in resentment suddenly reached for the group of cultivators behind the Laozu. Huaisang waited behind Jin Zongzhu, hoping he wouldn’t need his fan. The tendrils seemed to move almost in slow motion, effected by Lan Zhan’s music, which never faltered. Huaisang was able to deflect one with his fan. The cultivators slashed branches with their swords and soon were soon surrounded by small piles of severed branches and leaves.

The Yiling Laozu didn’t stop until he reached the trunk, the place where all the branches and roots met. He paused and raised the flute again, power gathering around him. With resentment swirling darkness around him, and hair blowing in a non-existent wind, he looked in every way like an evil sorcerer. Huaisang wondered for a second what would happen if the Yiling Laozu decided he wanted to take all that power for himself.

But Wei Ying had never wanted power for himself.

Wei Ying gathered power into a single, piercing note and flung it at the tree-thing’s core. “Lan Zhan, now!” he screamed. And Lan Zhan was next to him in a single leap, sword at the ready. Wei Ying drew his sword too, and together they slashed down and through the core. The branches shivered, narrowed. The influx of resentful energy slowed.

Now that they weren’t being attacked, the cultivators were able to hunt down and sever the roots bringing in the resentful energy.

Wei Ying and Lan Zhan together hit the core one more time, and the branches shriveled, drained of resentment.

There was quiet except for the rustling of dead leaves.

Wei Ying stood, pale and bleeding from his nose, in the center of what now looked like an ancient ancient tree stump at the edge of an abandoned section of subway tunnel. He swayed once, then dropped into a lotus position on the floor. Lan Zhan caught him as he fell, supporting him from behind and already sending him Qi.

Behind them, the support network they’d climbed to get up here collapsed with a long, slow rumble. Huaisang imagined the expression on the Stationmaster’s face as, probably, more of the wall fell onto his precious tracks.

Shouts of alarm came from below, young voices yelling, “Zongzhu!” and “Wei Ying!” Lan Qiren yelled, “Wangji.” Wei Ying's song rose from below, both guqin and Xichen's xiao still playing.

Huaisang leaned over the edge of the hole they’d climbed. The opening onto the tracks was really not very far below, thirty feet at the most. It had felt much further than that, climbing up. He yelled down, “We’re fine. You can stop playing.” A moment later, Xichen appeared at the bottom of the shaft. “I think we’re going to need a ladder,” Huaisang told him happily.

They did not need a ladder. Jin Zongzhu had a rope which everyone, including the Stationmaster and the one injured disciple climbed up. The Stationmaster immediately got on his phone and started screaming at people about a construction tunnel that had collapsed through the wall onto the tracks. Foul language was used all around, but no one mentioned a tree-yao that had seemingly been awakened by the construction. Huaisang was sure there would be lawsuits later, but it was unclear who would sue whom, and for what . . . It wasn’t his problem.

The disciples swarmed the remnants of the tree, cutting it into bits with their swords. The sect leaders not only didn’t stop them, but occasionally joined in. Someone started a fire in the center of the chamber to burn the pieces. Huaisang expected that they would have to use a lot of Qi to clear away the smoke, but it rose obediently to the ceiling where it vanished. There had to be some connection with the surface. Someone would have to come back and cleanse the area later. Also not Huaisang’s problem.

By the time they had burned everything down to the tiniest leaf and slid back down the rope, the station was open. The first trains were running on all the tracks except the one that was currently buried. There were people clearing debris from the track, which was now hidden by scaffolding and sheets of plastic.

Thankfully, the escalators were turned back on for the day, and they didn’t have to climb all those stairs back up to the station. Huaisang was not sure he could have made it to the top. Wei Ying stood limply against Lan Zhan, and probably couldn’t have climbed all the way up either.

One of the disciples said, “Dang, I wanted to see him carry Wei Ying up the stairs.”

Lan Zhan, the tips of his ears looking a bit red, carried Wei Ying one-handed onto the escalator, while Wei Ying pretended to be outraged.

.

Chapter Text

Six months later:

Huaisang buzzed nervously around the gallery, once again making sure everything was just right. There was a table adorned with a single red lotus, surrounded by little cakes iced in exactly the same color. There was another table where wine would be served, not Emperor’s Smile, but imported from Yunmeng and almost as good. And his artwork, the final product of his thesis, was displayed on cream walls at exactly the right height for viewing.

His parents—both of them—had flown in from California for the opening of his exhibition, and were chatting happily with Lily Song, who had finally gotten Huaisang to stop calling her Song Zongzhu. Chen Laoshi, who would be his teacher for only this one more night, was nearby, entertaining the rest of the Department of East Asian Art and History. Dr. Fitzgerald had even shown up.

Dr. Wen was there, with his wife, who was a gentle woman totally unlike Wen Qing. They were frequent visitors to the Song Compound, after Dr. Wen's follow-up treatment of Wei Ying's "alternative cultivation methods" turned into an ongoing friendship. Mianmian was there too, holding hands with a Jin disciple who she’d apparently taken a liking to during their battle in the subway. She’d saved his life, he said. She’d gotten a job as a psychologist and moved to Manhattan, so she could be close to him. Huaisang really hoped he was not a reincarnation of Jin Zixuan.

The room teemed with disciples from several sects and art students from several departments.

All of Huaisang’s favorite people were there. Except.

There was no sign of Wei Ying and Lan Zhan.

Huaisang figured that any plan in which Wei Ying was involved, as always, should have a back-up. But, really, no one else could provide music that would set off his art perfectly. The traditional Chinese music would remind the viewers that the modern themes in Huaisang’s paintings were done using ages-old ink and brush techniques. This was New York City depicted as a fantasy landscape from ancient China.

His favorite was one of the first paintings he’d done as part of his replacement mid-term project, a delicate watercolor of the skyscrapers of New York rising as misty mountains out of a sea of clouds. It looked a bit like the Immortal Jiang Cheng’s bonsai mountains, except there were windows in the mountains. Huaisang made a brief, silent toast to Jiang Cheng, who hopefully could stop being so angry in his next lives. Assuming that immortals got more mortal lives.

Huaisang had done several paintings of the towers of the George Washington Bridge at sunrise, shrouded in the same mist but with cultivators in flowing robes fighting at the very top. Just painting it had made him dizzy. Then there was a portrait of Wei Ying sleeping in the door to Starbucks, done in simple black brush strokes in the style of the famous Song Dynasty painter, Liang Kai.

In fact he had signed most of his work as Liang Kai in both Chinese and English. He liked the idea of using the name as a pseudonym, because historians agreed that he’d also been called Madman Liang. It seemed appropriate. He couldn’t use Nie Huaisang, after all. He’d used that one too much already. And he certainly didn’t want to sign his work as Ned Sang, even though that was the name that would go on his shiny new Masters Degree.

There was a commotion at the entrance to the studio. He heard Wei Ying’s boisterous laugh. Finally. He headed toward the door.

The two of them were dressed in layers of formal silk hanfu, long sleeves trailing. Lan Zhan was wearing light blue, probably borrowed from the Lan sect for the evening. Wei Ying, of course, was wearing black over red. Huaisang had no idea where they might have gotten the robes. He had a sudden dizzying feeling of stepping back in time.

“A-Sang. Sorry we’re late,” Wei Ying babbled, not looking the slightest bit sorry. “I had trouble with . . .” He twirled his hand around his head, where his hair was tied with a red ribbon. “. . . my, you know, hair thingy.” Huaisang checked Lan Zhan, who was wearing an elaborate guan and looking vaguely smug.

“You both look amazing,” Huaisang said.

Lan Zhan was carrying his guqin in a large, very obvious case. No qiankun pouches with big musical instruments appearing out of nowhere. For tonight anyway. Wei Ying had brought only his new dizi, which he twirled between his fingers whenever he wasn’t playing. He used the black flute only for cultivation, these days.

The two of them were still living with the Song sect, in the same two adjoining rooms. Lan Zhan was spending a lot of his time in the Lan library, though, where he was working his way through ancient musical scores, transcribing them for modern instruments. Because of his new experience with musical cultivation, Xichen had volunteered to help him. Xichen had also hired him to teach guqin with and without musical cultivation to some of the Lan disciples, but could not convince Lan Zhan to move back home. Or wear his ribbon. Or even respond to the name Wangji.

Wei Ying was working part time at Starbucks. Christina had quit, and Bryan took her place. It was only a couple of shifts per week, but he made a fair amount in tips. At the Song compound he drifted into teaching Jiang and Lan sword forms to disciples of all ages. He also had been caught one afternoon placing warding talismans around the compound, and was hired on the spot to officially set up wards and teach everyone all about talisman design.

They both clearly had recovered some memories from their past, but Huaisang could not tell how much. Mostly their knowledge seemed to be about cultivation. Lan Zhan had not learned sword flying from his sect—that skill had been long lost—and had received only minimal lessons on the guqin. Wei Ying had no idea where he’d learned the song he’d taught them in the station. The modern Jiang didn’t use musical cultivation at all. They did use talismans, but Wei Ying’s ever-improving designs for his talismans were far beyond anything they used. Huaisang never asked Lan Zhan or Wei Ying if they remembered anything personal from their first lives. And they never asked him what he knew, though the fact that they had past connections with him was common knowledge.

Huaisang had moved back into his apartment to finish his thesis, but his lease was up at the end of the month. He thought he might have to move back to California with his parents. New York was so expensive. He couldn’t afford to stay unless he sold one of his fabulously overpriced paintings.

That was a problem for tomorrow. Tonight he would make sure everything was perfect.

From across the room, Huaisang saw a teenage boy staring raptly at the drawing of Wei Ying. He was wearing a wrinkled purple shirt over jeans that were too short. His hair was shoulder length and greasy. He was carrying a backpack that was almost as big as he was. He was way too young to be a college student, and way too dirty to have come to the exhibition with his parents. Huaisang had never seen him before.

Huaisang casually walked up behind the kid and said, “Hi.”

The kid jumped with a startled flash of Qi, quickly brought under control. He had a core, then, but not one that Huaisang recognized. “Sorry,” the kid said, “I just wanted to see . . .” and tried to scuttle away mid-sentence.

Huaisang grabbed a handle on the backpack, almost lifting the kid off the floor. “Wanted to see what?” he asked, not unkindly.

“J-Jiang Wuxian,” the boy said, almost in tears. “I . . . I need him.” He was, perhaps, trying to sound insistent, but he ended up merely giving the impression of hollow desperation.

“He’s Wei Ying now,” Huaisang said gently. He was reminded a little of Jiang Cheng, who had said something similar. Jiang Cheng had channeled all his guilt and grief into anger, though, and it seemed this kid hadn’t learned to do that. Huaisang guided the kid over to the low dais where Lan Zhan and Wei Ying were playing, without letting go of the backpack.

The boy stared up in amazement, then knelt in front of Wei Ying in a full formal bow, head to the floor. Wei Ying stopped playing mid-note and dropped to the floor. He said, to Lan Zhan, “Keep playing, okay?” Then he raised the kid’s head by putting one hand under his forehead. “Charlie Jiang?” he said.

The boy nodded. “Please take me as your disciple,” he said, trying to put his forehead to the floor again.

Lan Zhan finished the piece he’d taken over as a solo. There was a smattering of applause, which he ignored in favor of sitting next to Wei Ying. And also ignoring his enormously expensive, very light-colored robes. Huaisang stepped onto the dais and announced a short break, though there wasn’t supposed to be one yet. Then he joined the odd little group on the floor.

The kid, it turned out, was a fifteen-year-old Jiang disciple. He’d been having a rough time in the sect, since Jiang Wuxian had been the only person, he said, who’d “understood” him. He’d been bullied and “disciplined” more than once. “Just like you were,” he said, practically crawling into Wei Ying’s lap. “With the whip and everything.”

Lan Zhan’s expression clouded. “They whipped you?” he said. It was not clear if he was talking to the boy or to Wei Ying.

“All I did was tell them that I’m a boy. But they wanted me to keep pretending to be a girl,” the kid said. “So I ran away.”

“I can’t take you as a disciple,” Wei Ying said, as serious as Huaisang had ever seen him. “I don’t have a sect for you to join. But,” he added as the kid threatened to dissolve into tears, “I think we can work something out.”

Huaisang ended up towing the kid with him for the rest of the evening, while Wei Ying and Lan Zhan went back to playing music. It was actually kind of gratifying. Charlie Jiang admired his paintings, and ate too many cakes before Huaisang realized that he had to be hungry and ordered him a pizza. He practically overflowed with admiration and gratitude.

It was, in fact, perfect.

Huaisang introduced the kid to everyone as “Charles Jiang, teenage rogue cultivator.” His mother thought that was hilarious, but also said that she was in no position to take a disciple. Lily Song, though, looked pensive, particularly after he told her, very quietly, that the the Jiang were using a whip on children. Huaisang’s step-father smiled broadly and said, inexplicably, “I always thought my grandchildren would start out a little younger.”

Eventually, Sarah Chen and Lily Song adopted Charlie, though it took two years of legal battles and an accusation of child abuse against both Charlie’s parents and the Jiang sect. Huaisang became something between a father and a brother. Charlie got his name officially changed to Charles Song, and started taking hormones. He was an excellent swordsman, and absorbed talisman design from Wei Ying as though he’d been born to it. But that was later.

Right now, Charlie went back to the Song compound and was ensconced in Wei Ying’s room. Wei Ying, for the first time possibly ever, did laundry instead of getting drunk with Huaisang, because everything in Charlie’s backpack was smelly.

Huaisang found that he didn’t much want to polish off the rest of the wine by himself, so he went back to the room that he still had at the Song compound and made a watercolor of Lan Wangji seated at his guqin with Wei Ying standing behind him playing a dizi. Clouds and lotus blooms circled them, so that they looked like Immortals. Perhaps they were.

The exhibition was to run for a month, but after a week, Huaisang had offers on two of his watercolors. He stayed in New York, moving back into the Song compound, into a no-longer-guest bedroom in Lily Song’s house. He moved all his art supplies into Sarah Chen’s studio. He taught watercolor classes at a local high school and calligraphy classes at, of all places, Cloud Recesses.

Mostly, he painted. But he spent days training with the Song disciples, evenings watching movies and snuggling with Sarah and Lily, weeks sometimes in California with his parents. He helped Mianmian plan her wedding. He helped Wei Ying and Lan Zhan move into their own house in the Song compound, making absolutely sure that there was only one bed.

It was perfect.

Twenty-five years later:

Lan Zhan and Wei Ying blew into Huaisang’s house, literally, just ahead of an early December snowstorm. It took only forty minutes by sword to get from Laguardia Airport to the Song compound. More than half of that was getting far enough from the airport to safely take off.

Huaisang opened the front door as Wei Ying laughed and dusted snow off himself. Lan Zhan watched him fondly, and deflected a snowball Wei Ying threw at him without even looking at it.

“They’re here,” Huaisang yelled.

Lily came out of the kitchen, still holding a stirring spoon. Sarah arrived from her studio, wheeled by her twenty-two year-old daughter. Sarah had adopted Evie when she was eight, and she had moved back in after college to help care for her mother. Lily, being a cultivator was still young-looking and active. But Sarah was recovering from cancer, and looked every bit of her almost-sixty years.

The commotion had drawn Charlie from next door. He immediately made a formal bow to Wei Ying and Lan Zhan, intoning, “Yiling Laozu. Hanguang-Jun. Welcome.”

Wei Ying laughed but Lan Zhan bowed in turn. “Song Zongzhu,” he said. Charlie had taken over as sect leader last year, so his mothers could spend more time with each other.

Their other kids wouldn’t be here tonight. Emily, the only non-cultivator, had gone (once) to California to visit her grandparents and was probably going to stay there after she finished at UCLA. And Marcus, who had not a shred of Chinese ancestry, was taking a semester abroad in Taiwan to study cultivation.

Huaisang couldn’t remember where Wei Ying and Lan Zhan had just flown back from, this time. The Immortals Hanguang-Jun and Yiling Laozu were much in demand, circling the world to lecture on talisman design, demonstrate musical cultivation, or just help out where needed. Lan Zhan and Wei Ying circled the world to play concerts, mixing traditional Chinese music with Western classical music. Their little house in the Song compound was often empty, except when Evie snuck in to play the piano.

Huaisang got out his phone to text his mother that it was time to come over. She had been living in an apartment in the Song compound since her husband, Huaisang’s step-father, had died five years ago. She didn’t want a whole house to herself, she said. She claimed it was too much for an old woman to take care of, which was absurd because she could still do an hour of sword forms without breaking a sweat.

So could Huaisang, actually. But unlike his mother, he did not look a day older than he had that morning twenty-five years ago, watching the sunrise from the George Washington Bridge. He wondered if immortality could just sneak up on a person without them noticing. Happiness certainly could. Whatever. There was nothing he could do about it anyway.

Then Charlie’s wife came out into the snow with their two-year-old child, bundled in a snowsuit and blankets. “Baby!” Wei Ying yelled and bounded over to make funny faces at the kid. After a couple minutes of staring at him while sucking dubiously on their finger, the kid practically leaped into Wei Ying’s arms. They both shrieked in delight. Lan Zhan threw a snowball at Wei Ying. It hit because Wei Ying was not paying attention.

Charlie said, “So. When are you two getting married?”

Wei Ying paused, holding the baby close. “What? Why?” he said. He shot a puzzled look at Lan Zhan. “Aren’t we already married?”

“Yes,” said Lan Zhan decisively and without hesitation.

Evie, Charlie, and Huaisang’s mother closed in with Questions.

“Dinner time,” Huaisang announced loudly, before things could escalate. They all trooped inside, into the warmth.

.