practical mythology

[metisket]

After the Wen Qing time travel fic, I spent some time trying to decide whether I believed Wei Wuxian was actually capable of doing time travel without causing more problems than he solved. I decided maybe! ...But only by accident.

Listen, he tries.


Summary: The Yiling Patriarch is a living legend—a terrifying, ancient force of nature, dispensing punishment or reward with implacable, indifferent fairness.

Wei Wuxian, on the other hand, is a weird but oddly charming guy who wanders around the cultivation world making fun of people’s art and mooching food from sect leaders.

It really upsets people to find out that they’re the same person.

(Also on AO3)


Practical Mythology


Lan Wangji has been told stories of the Yiling Patriarch since he was very small—so small that he’d thought it was only a fairytale his mother had made up, and hadn’t learned otherwise until after she’d died.

Long ago and far away, his mother would tell her sons, the Yiling Patriarch suddenly appeared in the Burial Mounds.

Now, the Burial Mounds in those days were a horrible place, the home of old battles, pain, fear, and abandonment, and the resentment from a thousand tragedies had seeped into the land and water and poisoned the very air. No one who went into the Burial Mounds ever returned, neither body nor soul.

Some say the Yiling Patriarch was born of the Burial Mounds. Some say he’s a god who was sent to cleanse it, and was so corrupted in the process that he was unable to return to the heavens. Some say he was once just an ordinary, determined cultivator.

Whatever the truth, the Yiling Patriarch appeared in the Burial Mounds, and he drew all the poison out of the land and into himself. Now the land is green and thriving, and the Patriarch seethes with resentment and stares at the world out of blood-red eyes. But the people of Yiling don’t care about his looks—they know what he sacrificed for their safety, and they are properly grateful.

At this point in the story, Brother would always ask if the Patriarch was a good man or a bad one, and their mother would shake her head and tell him that nothing was ever so simple. Never so simple as black and white.

She said they would never know the truth of the Yiling Patriarch unless they met him for themselves and asked him for his story.

Lan Wangji is eight years old this year, and he’s finally going to get the chance to ask.

* * *

While the cultivation world has been tracking inexplicable changes—improvements—in the Burial Mounds for as long as a century, they didn’t become aware of the Yiling Patriarch as an entity until shortly before Lan Wangji’s birth. Swiftly thereafter, they became aware of the Yiling Patriarch’s enormous power.

And yet the typical fears never surfaced, because despite his power, the Yiling Patriarch had no apparent ambition. He kept himself confined to a land long abandoned by the sects, and he asked for nothing. His power and secrecy were unnerving, of course, but that was simply how immortals were, was it not? No one feared Baoshan Sanren, after all. Immortals were above worldly things, and therefore no threat. Or so went the logic.

Baoshan Sanren, however, lived on an impossible-to-find mountain, while the Yiling Patriarch lived, conveniently, in Yiling. Which meant that, soon enough, he had callers asking for favors.
The callers came with gold and jade and salt, with silk and brocade and horses. A servant of the Yiling Patriarch invariably met the callers at the base of the Burial Mounds, thanked them politely for their offered gifts, gave them tea, and then sent them and their gifts away.

This behavior was considered extremely rude, but then, immortals were known to be eccentric.

No one remembers who first thought to offer a human sacrifice.

Obviously a Jin, are the mutters among most in the cultivation world. Could’ve been a Wen, others argue. And who can say? But it’s easy enough to see how the idea arose. After all, the man lived in a (formerly?) haunted graveyard, and was possibly something of a ghost himself. Wouldn’t he enjoy a human sacrifice or two?

The answer turned out to be no.

Human sacrifices are not met with tea and polite rejection. Human sacrifices are met with silence, darkness, and bone-chilling cold. The sacrifices vanish into the Burial Mounds, and nothing comes back but misfortune. And the sacrifices themselves, on occasion.

Wherever the idea originated, the first human sacrifice actually made was the wife of Sect Leader Jin. She had just given birth to the sect heir, and as soon as the child seemed likely to survive infancy, the Sect Leader had her carried to the Burial Mounds as an offering to the Yiling Patriarch—in exchange for the safety and good health of his son.

Madam Jin vanished from her carriage at the edge of the Burial Mounds without any of her attendants noticing, and though they waited for hours, no servant of the Yiling Patriarch ever appeared.

A year later, however, Madam Jin reappeared, entirely healthy—stronger and more fighting-fit, in fact, than she had been since before her marriage—and she returned to Koi Tower. The day before her arrival, the Sect Leader died of an abrupt fit of some kind—a bleeding in the brain, the doctors said, and shouted down the voices that murmured of murder and dark cultivation.

Madam Jin became her son’s regent, and so she remains. She has never spoken of her time in the Burial Mounds, but whenever she refers to the Yiling Patriarch, it is with the deepest respect.

This story played out many times over the following years. Cultivators great and small tried to send sacrifices—family and strangers, enemies and friends. Most famously, Wen Ruohan tried to sacrifice his niece and nephew in order to find the entirety of the Yin Iron, and ended up driven swiftly to insanity and killed, along with both of his sons, by the very Yin Iron he’d found—which then mysteriously vanished. The Dafan Wen branch family quietly took over leadership of the Wen Sect—the sacrificed niece and nephew’s father at the head of it, his children healthy, apparently happy, and by his side.

And then Sect Leader Nie tried to sacrifice himself in exchange for the Yiling Patriarch’s help overcoming their family tendency toward qi deviation. Sect Leader Nie tried to sacrifice himself for the love of his sons.

Sect Leader Nie still leads the Nie Clan, which no longer suffers from a tendency toward qi deviation. They also have, if not quite an alliance with the Yiling Patriarch, at least a friendly relationship with him.

The Yiling Patriarch’s rules, Lan Wangji has always felt, are very clear. And yet some people refuse to learn them.

* * *

When Lan Wangji is eight years old, his uncle takes his brother away on a trip to visit the other sect heirs. Qingheng-jun takes this opportunity to have his youngest son sent to the Burial Mounds as a sacrifice in exchange for his wife.

The disciple ordered to take Lan Wangji to the Burial Mounds cries the entire way, which is a little worrying, Lan Wangji thinks. He would prefer that the person flying him high above the ground have clear vision.

He’s not sure why the disciple is crying. Nothing bad is going to happen to him or to Lan Wangji—the stories are very clear about that.

He thinks something very bad might happen to his father, though. Maybe that’s why the disciple is crying. It’s unfilial, but Lan Wangji finds that he has no desire to cry for his father at all.

The Burial Mounds are, satisfyingly, just as the stories say: though the land seems green and lush from far away or high above, the closer you come to it, the darker and more menacing it appears, until you are surrounded by resentful energy, very afraid, and very, very cold.

Lan Wangji stands and shivers, trying not to mind the weeping apologies of the disciple, as he waits for the Yiling Patriarch to collect him.

But the person he meets, when he’s finally swept into the Burial Mounds proper by something that feels like a gust of wind and smells like spices, is a young man with unkempt hair, shining eyes, and a bright, bright smile.

He’s very pretty. It’s against the principles to stare, so Lan Wangji tries not to stare, but it’s hard. He’s so distracted by the man that he hardly notices that the Burial Mounds are just as lovely on the inside as they looked from far away.

“Oh no,” the man gasps at the sight of him, delighted and horrified at once, kneeling down to inspect Lan Wangji. “Baby Lan Zhan? What are you doing here?! Oh help, you are so cute, but—what, what are you doing here?! Are you lost? Your uncle is going to straight murder me, Lan Zhan. Help me out, how is this even happening? How are you already so big, has it been that long? I feel like I’m losing my mind, what even.”

Lan Wangji waits patiently for the man to stop talking so he can answer the questions. He wonders why this man knows his name, but he supposes the Yiling Patriarch must know everything, and must have told this man.

The man eventually stops talking and just stares at Lan Wangji in confusion, so Lan Wangji repeats what his father told him to say, even though he knows it will end badly. “My father offers me to the Yiling Patriarch as tribute. In exchange, he begs the Patriarch to return his wife to his side, for she died unjustly.”

The man loses all of his cheer at once, so fast it’s a little frightening. He rises to his feet and turns away slightly, face gone hard and cold. Resentful energy starts to build around him, and his eyes…his eyes turn red.

Lan Wangji’s own eyes fly wide, and his heart feels like it’s going to beat out of his chest. This is the Yiling Patriarch! This beautiful man, who smiled at him and knew his name and talked too much, this is the Yiling Patriarch!

The Yiling Patriarch was always his favorite story, always. But even in his wildest dreams of meeting him, he’d never pictured someone so, so…

So alive.

“And where were your brother and uncle when this happened, Lan Zhan?” the Yiling Patriarch asks, so dangerous but so soft.

“In Qinghe, visiting Nie Mingjue,” Lan Wangji explains obediently, still reeling.

“So they didn’t know about this…plan. Of your father’s.”

Lan Wangji shakes his head. Uncle would certainly not have allowed this. He always said the Yiling Patriarch stories were nonsense.

The Yiling Patriarch’s red eyes narrow in thought, and the resentful energy coils around his feet like a cat. It’s very interesting.

“May I ask a personal question?” Lan Wangji asks, even though he would really like to ask at least ten. He’s never been so curious about someone in his life. Still, it seems rude to ask too much.

Apparently startled, the Yiling Patriarch blinks, and the resentful energy fades away, the sunlight returns, and the red seeps out of his eyes. Lan Wangji tries not to be disappointed. “Lan Zhan…wants to ask me a personal question? Really? I…I mean, sure? Go for it. What is happening.”

He seems very confused for a person who knows so much about Lan Wangji and his family. He also doesn’t sound anything like what Lan Wangji thought the Yiling Patriarch would sound like. Somehow he’s even better. “Does everything look red to you when your eyes are red?”

The Yiling Patriarch stares for a very long time, but just when Lan Wangji has started to worry that the question was rude after all, he throws his head back and laughs out loud.

This is a display of excessive emotion, of course, and excessive noise as well, but this is the Yiling Patriarch’s home, Lan Wangji reasons. He must have different rules in his home, so Lan Wangji doesn’t say anything about it. He’s happy he made the Yiling Patriarch happy, even if he’s not sure how he did it.

“Funnily enough, no!” the Yiling Patriarch tells Lan Wangji when he’s finished laughing. “Everything looks the same to me. I didn’t even know my eyes had started going all red like that until someone told me.” He smiles reminiscently, and a little meanly. “Well. Screamed it at me.”

Lan Wangji nods. It must have been someone wicked anyway, to make the Yiling Patriarch angry enough to have red eyes. The screaming makes sense. Lan Wangji would scream, too, if he’d made the Yiling Patriarch angry with him.

…He hopes nothing awful happens to Father before Brother is ready to lead the sect.

He continues asking the Yiling Patriarch questions about all the stories, since the Patriarch doesn’t seem to mind. Some of the stories are true, and some are only a little bit true, and some are made-up. It’s just the way Mother said. You have to ask the person.

The Yiling Patriarch asks where Lan Wangji heard all of these stories anyway, and Lan Wangji tells him about his mother. The Yiling Patriarch looks very sad. “I’m sorry you lost her, Lan Zhan,” he says, “I’d bring her back to you if I could, but I’m afraid that’s beyond even me.”

Lan Wangji had suspected as much—for all the talk of the Yiling Patriarch reanimating corpses, none of the stories have ever said anything about him bringing the dead back to proper life. And even if he could, who could bring back the dead after so long? Mother has probably already reincarnated. She’d probably reincarnated by the time Lan Wangji realized why she would never open her door again. Maybe she’s happier in her new life than she was in the Cloud Recesses. He hopes she is.

The Yiling Patriarch is studying his face and looking oddly worried. After a moment, he holds his arms out tentatively, as if to offer a hug if Lan Wangji wants one.

He normally does not like it when people touch him, but the Yiling Patriarch is different, the way his mother was different and his brother is different. He does want a hug from the Yiling Patriarch. He is unsurprised to find that the Yiling Patriarch is very good at hugs.

After this conversation, the Yiling Patriarch asks what he would like to do now, and Lan Wangji says he would like to see everything. The Yiling Patriarch laughs and shows him the Burial Mounds, which are very beautiful and very strange. They only pause for lunch and for more questions. Lan Wangji approves of everything. Still, wherever they go, there are no other people. It’s odd, that a person so bright and friendly should live all by himself. It doesn’t seem right.

“Ah,” the Yiling Patriarch says a few hours of exploring the Burial Mounds later, looking toward the barrier Lan Wangji came through. “Your family is here.”

“My family?” Lan Wangji asks.

“Your uncle and brother,” the Yiling Patriarch explains, kneeling down to tug Lan Wangji’s robes straight and gently smooth his hair, careful not to touch his ribbon. “I’ll send you out to meet them, okay? Please reassure them that I didn’t corrupt you or eat you or anything.”

“You only hurt bad people,” Lan Wangji informs him with perfect confidence. “They won’t be worried.”

“Ah, Lan Zhan,” the Yiling Patriarch says, ducking his head and smiling, but sounding sad for some reason. “If only everyone had the faith in me that you do.”

Lan Wangji frowns. Everyone should have faith in the Yiling Patriarch. The Yiling Patriarch is always fair, and that means his rules and the Lan rules can’t be that different. “Can I visit you again?”

The Yiling Patriarch beams at him so brightly that Lan Wangji’s breath catches. “Yes! Come visit me, Lan Zhan. But you have to wait until you’re grown, okay? For decency’s sake.” He laughs, and Lan Wangji isn’t sure why.

“When will I be grown?” Lan Wangji wants to be clear.

“Hmm.” The Yiling Patriarch looks skyward, rubbing his nose thoughtfully. “…Twenty? Let’s say twenty. Your uncle shouldn’t have too much of a qi deviation about that. How’s that sound?”

Lan Wangji frowns, but nods anyway. It’s a very long time, but he supposes that’s how all the Yiling Patriarch stories are. You can’t win anything worth having without fighting for it yourself. “I will be here.”

“I look forward to it, Lan Zhan,” the Yiling Patriarch, smiling and tugging gently at Lan Wangji’s hair one last time before sending him away to the other side of the barrier—to his brother and uncle.

“Wangji!” his uncle cries at the sight of him, running (which is against the rules), and then dropping straight down to his knees to check Lan Wangji over for damage. Brother comes running up behind him, also looking worried.

“I’m not hurt,” Lan Wangji insists, confused. “The Yiling Patriarch only hurts bad people.”

“Oh, what sort of nonsense did that woman—” Uncle mutters, cutting himself off abruptly to take Lan Wangji’s pulse, and looking puzzled when he finds nothing wrong.

“I told you,” Lan Wangji says. Because he did tell him.

“What did that man want from you?” Uncle demands.

“Nothing,” Lan Wangji says, indignant. “Father sent me here. The Yiling Patriarch only took me around the Burial Mounds and told me stories until you came.”

“Stories?” Brother asks hesitantly.

“The one about the phoenix is not true,” Lan Wangji tells him, a little disappointed. “But the one about the tortoise is.”

Brother is starting to look a little bit pleased, which is good.

“Did you eat anything there?” Uncle asks, still unhappy for some reason.

“Yes,” Lan Wangji tells him. “But only rice and potatoes. He said everything else had spice in it and I wouldn’t like it.”

“…Rice and potatoes,” his uncle repeats blankly.

It was an odd meal, it’s true. Very white all over. The Yiling Patriarch apologized four separate times for how boring it was.

“The Yiling Patriarch,” his uncle says eventually, nervously checking the barrier every few seconds, “gave you a tour of the Burial Mounds, told you stories, fed you a sort of meal, and then simply…let you go.”

Lan Wangji nods, pleased that Uncle understands. “He says I can come back when I’m twenty if I want to, but not before that, because it’s not decent.” For some reason, Uncle goes very pale when he hears this.

Brother, more sensibly, smiles. “Was he nice, Wangji?”

Lan Wangji nods again. “He was very nice.” He was more than that, but Lan Wangji can’t find the words to explain it. The Yiling Patriarch, not a dark figure of death at all, but bright like life. Maybe he and the Burial Mounds were so opposite that the Burial Mounds simply had to give up and turn beautiful in the face of him. “I’m going to marry him,” Lan Wangji decides.

Uncle chokes, and then immediately starts bellowing protests. Even Brother looks a little shocked.

It doesn’t matter. Lan Wangji’s decided. In twelve years, he’ll be grown, and then he’ll come back and marry the Yiling Patriarch, and the Yiling Patriarch won’t be alone anymore. It will be wonderful.

He’d better work very hard at his cultivation. Everyone says his future husband is an immortal, even if he didn’t really seem the way an immortal ought to seem. That means Lan Wangji has to be an immortal, too. He can’t just die and leave his husband all alone again. That would be cruel.

* * *

Lan Wangji’s father dies peacefully in his sleep a week later. He’s been reunited with Mother after all, just as he asked.

Brother seems sad about it, but at least no one expects him to lead the sect yet—Uncle is still doing it for now, so that’s good. As for Lan Wangji, he has no idea how to feel, but it’s not as if his father’s death is a surprise. Indeed, it’s a much less horrible death than Lan Wangji was expecting.

The Yiling Patriarch was merciful.

* * *

Jiang Yanli knows all the stories of the Yiling Patriarch—Madam Jin treats him as something approaching a god, and so Mother also holds him in a certain regard. Father seems to feel he can’t possibly have done all the things attributed to him, but A-Cheng thinks he’s the greatest cultivator in history and will one day be A-Cheng’s best friend.

As for Jiang Yanli…she thinks being the Yiling Patriarch must be very lonely.

Possibly that’s part of the reason she makes the decision she does, though it’s not the whole reason, of course. The thing is that all her life, she’s been assured that she’s not good enough. Her father finds her forgettable, her mother thinks she’s embarrassing, her baby brother seems to believe she’s incapable of surviving without his protection, and her fiancé…well. He doesn’t have enough free time to even notice her, really.

In view of that, there seems no reason not to see if she can be of use to the Yiling Patriarch. If nothing else, she can cook for him. And in exchange…

In exchange, she wants him to make her family happy. If he can. Somehow, some days, solving a generational, cultivation-induced qi deviation problem for the Nie Sect seems like it was probably an easier task.

Still, Jiang Yanli tells her parents she’s visiting Meishan, tells her escort she’s meeting her grandmother at an inn in Yiling, and, having successfully shaken off all of her constraints, she walks alone into the chilling, black fog at the edge of the Burial Mounds. It’s just as unpleasant a sensation as advertised, but she braces herself against the bitter cold and the half-heard wails and whispers of the resentful dead, and she prepares to explain herself to the Yiling Patriarch.

She is not expecting to be swept gently into the Burial Mounds, apparently by the air itself, and then come face to face with a handsome man with a kind expression, not much older than she is, who takes one look at her and yelps, “Shijie?!” in obvious shock.

“I’m…Jiang Yanli?” she offers, puzzled.

He stares at her with his mouth open, looking oddly like a confused A-Cheng, for all that their faces are so different. Despite herself, Jiang Yanli has to raise her sleeve to cover a smile. This can’t possibly be the Yiling Patriarch, surely? Is this his servant?

“Jiang Yanli!” the man manages eventually, still obviously at a loss. “I knew that. Jiang Yanli, yes, of course. This is almost as weird as Baby Lan Zhan, but it had better not be half as horrible. What…uh. Why are you here?”

She straightens up and steels herself, having no idea how the man will take this. “I’d like to offer my service to the Yiling Patriarch in exchange for my family’s happiness.”

She knows it won’t work. She knows, because the man’s face instantly goes soft and regretful and sad.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and she almost cuts him off there, but doesn’t, because it would be rude. “I can’t do emotions. Well, I mean…I can, but it’s creepy. I’m assuming you don’t want your parents wandering around like mindless puppets, and I can’t think that would help the situation very much anyway.”

She traitorously spends a second thinking that it might, really, but puts the thought firmly out of her head before it plants roots. “And you don’t think the Yiling Patriarch might…?”

He looks confused for a moment, then throws his hands up in exasperation—apparently at himself? “I forgot!” he says. “You introduced yourself, but I never introduced myself! I’m the Yiling Patriarch, but my name is Wei Wuxian. You can call me whatever you want. Nie Huaisang calls me Senior Wei.”

She tries to imagine calling the Yiling Patriarch Senior Wei, and she just can’t. Nie Huaisang is braver than he looks. “Thank you.”

“For what?” he asks, frowning. “All I did was tell you I can’t help. It’s nothing to thank me for.”

“It was a fool’s errand, anyway,” she admits. “I didn’t think you’d really be able to change anyone’s hearts. It’s only that I…I wanted it to be true. It was stupid of me.”

“It was not,” the Yiling Patriarch insists indignantly, and he really does look and behave so young, it’s very odd. She keeps having to remind herself that he’s an immortal. “Of course you want your family to be happy. I’m just a blunt force weapon, is all.” He frowns in thought while she tries to process that oddly self-deprecating statement. “You can come visit anytime,” he declares finally. “You and your brother. Say it’s for training from the sinister but helpful Yiling Patriarch or whatever. Your mom should like that. I’ll write you an invitation to show her and everything—make it official.”

Jiang Yanli blinks. She hadn’t thought the rumors about the Yiling Patriarch knowing everything about everyone in the cultivation world were true, but he certainly knows an inexplicable amount about her own family. “Would it really be training?”

He shrugs. “I mean, if you want. You could also just hang out and take a break for a while. Whatever.”

Jiang Yanli doesn’t know how to take this at all. The chance to do nothing is not an offer that’s ever been made to her in her life, and she suspects it will be even more alien to A-Cheng.

“No dogs, though!” the Yiling Patriarch announces, looking oddly hunted. “Terrible beasts. I bet Jiang Cheng has a whole fleet of them, doesn’t he?”

Jiang Yanli, baffled, says, “He only has three? They’re very sweet dogs, really—”

“No dogs in the Burial Mounds!” the Yiling Patriarch yelps, shuffling slightly behind a tree, apparently feeling the need to hide from the very thought of dogs. “There are no dogs in the Cloud Recesses, either, so he should get used to it. Sooner or later he’ll have to go to those boring lectures.”

“It’s like you know us,” Jiang Yanli marvels.

“Haha,” the Yiling Patriarch laughs unconvincingly, sidling further behind the tree like a child. “Really? How strange. Anyway, you’re welcome anytime. Have a nice day. Thank you for coming.”

And with that, Jiang Yanli is swept back to the border of the Burial Mounds by a breeze smelling faintly of lotus, an invitation inexplicably appearing in her hands. She stares at the invitation—very formal, very proper, her mother should love it—then turns to stare back the way she came for a long time before finally giving up and making her way home, trying to think how she’s going to explain herself to her family. At least she’ll have something to show for it, she supposes.

The Yiling Patriarch is a very strange man, and not at all what she thought he’d be. She wonders how he expects her and A-Cheng to spend time in the Burial Mounds if he’s going to reflexively banish them every time he feels a little bit awkward.

She decides that she likes him and she can’t wait to introduce him to A-Cheng.

* * *

Nie Huaisang didn’t have great hopes of his third attempt at the Gusu Lan lectures, so at least he’s not disappointed. He is, however, both bored and stressed. He also thinks Lan Qiren could make a lot of money curing insomniacs by lecturing them.

At the moment, he’s drawing in class instead of taking notes, because he won’t learn anything either way, and therefore might as well prioritize staying awake.

He’s drawn his birds, his favorite garden, his brother, his father, and has just finished a quick portrait of Senior Wei when class finally, mercifully ends.

Tragically, Lan Wangji, the most humorless Lan in all the Cloud Recesses, catches sight of the last drawing before Nie Huaisang has a chance to pack it away, and he figures he’s doomed for sure.

But he isn’t. He isn’t, because Lan Wangji takes one disapproving look at the drawing, and then his eyes light up like a child’s. “You know him?” he asks.

Nie Huaisang is shocked for any number of reasons. “What—Senior Wei? Yes! Yes, he’s friends with my father. Um, why do you know him, Second Master Lan?”

Lan Wangji almost actually smiles for a second. This is unfair. Lan Wangji is upsettingly beautiful just standing around, and if he’s going to start smiling as well, Nie Huaisang will be unable to cope. “We met when I was very young. I will see him again soon.”

“I mean…he comes to the Unclean Realm pretty often. I could write you the next time he visits?”

“Thank you,” Lan Wangji says with alarming earnestness, “but it won’t be necessary. I’ll go to him when I’m twenty. We’ve agreed.”

“…Go to him, like go live with him? In the Burial Mounds?”

Lan Wangji nods peaceably, and then, unbelievably, adds, “And then we will be married.” Like this is at all a reasonable thing for the Second Jade of Lan to announce, and not the single most unhinged statement Nie Huaisang has ever heard in his life. Amazing.

“Aren’t you, well. Aren’t you afraid of the Yiling Patriarch?” Nie Huaisang asks, fascinated. “I know Senior Wei’s really nice, but his boss is kind of infamous.”

Lan Wangji gives him a puzzled mini-frown. “This is the Yiling Patriarch.”

Nie Huaisang frowns back. “Who is?”

Lan Wangji indicates the drawing.

“No,” Nie Huaisang informs him. “No, that’s Senior Wei—Wei Wuxian. He’s not the Yiling Patriarch, he’s…he’s his servant, not…”

“Wei Wuxian,” Lan Wangji repeats in a tone of voice that, in another person, Nie Huaisang might describe as dreamy.

“I’d know if he was the Yiling Patriarch! He’s been hanging around my house mooching food from my family for years!”

Lan Wangji stares at him blankly. “Did you ask?”

To this, Nie Huaisang has no reply. Because no, he didn’t ask. He didn’t think he needed to, he thought that was the kind of thing someone would mention! Especially someone who was always chatting with Father, sparring with Da-ge, and critiquing Nie Huaisang’s use of perspective in his landscapes. And only those things. There’s been no resentful energy, red eyes, or armies of the undead. None whatsoever.

“Would you mind if I kept your drawing?” Lan Wangji asks while Nie Huaisang is attempting to process this madness. “I am willing to offer compensation.”

“What? Oh—no need. Have it! It’s a gift,” Nie Huaisang babbles, sliding the drawing over and watching Lan Wangji reverently pick it up with both hands, tuck it into the pages of one of his books, and then…scurry off with it like a thief making off with a priceless gem.

Nie Huaisang needs to find a sane person to complain to about this situation or else he is going to scream.

* * *

It takes him a couple of hours, but he eventually finds the perfect victim. Said victim is innocently standing in a garden admiring the flowers, and has no idea what level of little brother nonsense is about to hit him. Poor thing.

“So, Xichen-ge, I hear your brother is planning to run away and marry the Yiling Patriarch,” Nie Huaisang casually declares. He’s always felt more comfortable hassling Lan Xichen than he has Lan Wangji, anyway. “What’s that about?”

Lan Xichen sighs and suddenly looks very tired. “It was cute when he was eight.”

Wow. Just wow. “How did he even meet the Yiling Patriarch when he was eight?”

Oh, that was a bad question, because Lan Xichen’s eyes just iced over like a Gusu winter. Nie Huaisang will just have to pry the details of that ugly story from someone else. “Never mind!” he cries. “It doesn’t matter. At least Senior Wei is nice.”

Lan Xichen frowns at him in confusion. “Senior Wei? Your father’s friend, Senior Wei?”

Oh good. At least Nie Huaisang isn’t the only one who didn’t know. “My father’s friend, Senior Wei, who is the Yiling Patriarch. Yes.”

He’s never seen Lan Xichen gape before. This is a shockingly exciting day in the Cloud Recesses.

“You’ve met Senior Wei, haven’t you?” Nie Huaisang continues, starting to feel a bit cheerful about the whole thing. “What do you think—brother-in-law material?”

“But Senior Wei is very young…” Lan Xichen trails off.

“He seems like it, right?” Nie Huaisang agrees sympathetically. “That’s immortals for you, I guess. But that youthful look is a good thing, given the whole marrying-your-brother plan.”

“I am…very unclear on whether the Yiling Patriarch has actually agreed to this marriage,” Lan Xichen admits, pained. “Wangji started insisting they were engaged when he was around nine years old. I find it difficult to believe that Senior Wei would have agreed to any such thing.”

Nie Huaisang thinks about that. Then he decides to carefully put aside the whole terrifying, world-ending, Yiling Patriarch aspect, and just thinks about Senior Wei. Who is frankly kind of an idiot. “You know,” he says eventually, “I can actually see him agreeing by accident.”

Lan Xichen is developing something that could almost be called a twitch. “…Accident?”

“Yeah. He just says stuff sometimes, and then when you call him out on it later, it’s like he has no idea what you’re even talking about.”

“Is the Yiling Patriarch going to break my brother’s heart?” Lan Xichen asks, looking like he can’t believe a single word that’s coming out of his mouth. Which is fair.

Nie Huaisang seriously considers that question in view of the shenanigans he now knows Lan Wangji to be capable of. He can absolutely see Senior Wei being into a stealth problem child. “I don’t think so,” he decides eventually. “I think he’ll still go for it, once he figures out what he’s agreed to.” He also thinks it’s going to be the funniest thing in the entire world, but he’s not sharing that with Lan Xichen, who’s looking more exhausted by the second.

Nie Huaisang is so glad he failed his way into this year’s lectures. Who knew Senior Wei could cause so much fun chaos without even being physically present? And what other shenanigans is he up to that Nie Huaisang doesn’t know about? Exciting things to discover.

* * *

Dear Immortal Wei,

Did you, by chance, write a threatening letter to my fiancé?

I ask because he ran up to me today, bowed entirely too deeply, and apologized for everything he’s ever done to offend me. I asked him what he thought he’d done to offend me. He cried that he didn’t know, but he hoped I would tell him so that he would never, ever do it again, and also he begged me to tell the Yiling Patriarch that he would become a better man.

Immortal Wei, my fiancé has never been even slightly unpleasant to me. Honestly, I don’t think he has the energy. His mother has taken her regency very seriously, and has been training him half to death since childhood. He’s always seemed to greatly enjoy his visits to Lotus Pier, possibly because he’s allowed to sit still and not train or study or discuss politics for whole hours together. Similarly, he seems to delight in the Lan lectures, as solving problems without dire, real-world consequences is a deep relief to him. Sometimes he’ll ramble to me and A-Cheng about the latest social or political fiasco his mother’s ordered him to resolve. I think A-Cheng feels sorry for him.

Please do not torment my already exhausted fiancé.

With the deepest respect,

Jiang Yanli

* * *

Dearest Jiang Yanli,

I guess the Peacock has changed since his father died when he was so young. Sorry for not thinking about that—he’d have been an asshole if his father had lived, trust me on this one.

I’ll write him a nice letter, Shijie, promise.

Hope you’re having fun at the lectures! Don’t let the rules get you down. Say hi to Lan Zhan for me!

Yours,

Wei Wuxian

* * *

To the Jin Sect Heir, Jin Zixuan, greetings,

Jiang Yanli has chastised me for being overly harsh to you in my previous letter. She tells me that I have misjudged you, that you have always been kind to her, and that you’re under enough pressure without my help.

I’ll take her word for it for now. She seems to like you. You’d better keep it that way, is all I’m saying, or I’m coming for you and everything you love.

With the deepest respect and hope for your future prosperity,

The Yiling Patriarch

* * *

It’s not that Nie Huaisang hasn’t been enjoying the hell out of the Lan Brother Drama (the fact that Lan Brother Drama exists at all is enough to entertain him for a month on its own, to say nothing of the content of said Drama), but sometimes you need to rest. That much sustained excitement isn’t good for a body, probably.

So Nie Huaisang decides, after a week or two of quietly tormenting Lan Xichen, to take some time off and hang out with Jiang Cheng, who has entirely different and less shocking types of drama, and is reassuringly cranky and fun, besides. Also, Jiang Cheng needs special attention and moral support in the Cloud Recesses, because he’s tragically dogless.

It’s oddly sad to see Jiang Cheng without his dogs. He comes off as too intimidating without them, and Nie Huaisang thinks it’s making it harder for him to make friends.

The thing is, Jiang Cheng has a scary face. He also has three big dogs, and they ought to look scary too, especially since Jiang Cheng always puts spiky collars on them to make them seem fierce. It doesn’t work, though, firstly because he named those dogs Princess, Love, and Jasmine, and secondly because they’re the happiest, goofiest, friendliest dogs in the entire cultivation world.

Jiang Cheng, ferocious scowl in place, marching purposefully around Lotus Pier with three goofball dogs devotedly following him, staring up at him, tails wagging joyfully…they ruin his entire image. They blow his cover. They let everyone know the truth about Jiang Cheng, which is that he’s helpless in the face of a fluffy animal. This fact has made him every single friend he has, Nie Huaisang included. All the Jiang disciples think he’s adorable.

Everyone at the lectures thinks he’s actually scary, and it’s a travesty.

“Do you miss your dogs?” Nie Huaisang asks Jiang Cheng when he finally finds him sitting alone and scowling across the river.

“Yeah,” Jiang Cheng admits, turning his scowl toward Nie Huaisang. “But I’m used to it, you know? Wei Wuxian doesn’t like dogs, either, so I’m not allowed to bring them to the Burial Mounds.”

Nie Huaisang just sits and processes that little what-the-fuck statement for a while. And to think Jiang Cheng was supposed to be his break from Yiling Patriarch-related nonsense. Wow, Nie Huaisang is learning a lot at the Gusu Lan lectures after all—it’s just that none of it is about cultivation. “What?” he demands eventually.

Jiang Cheng’s scowl intensifies. “What what?”

“You hang out in the Burial Mounds?!”

“Yes? My sister’s friends with the Yiling Patriarch, so he lets us go visit whenever things at home are…whenever we need a break. We go a few times a year.”

“How long has this been going on?! Why did you never tell me?!” And why did Senior Wei never invite Nie Huaisang to hang out in the Burial Mounds? Jiang Chang and Jiang Yanli both got an invite, Lan Wangji apparently got a marriage proposal, but what did Nie Huaisang get? Stolen food and snide art critiques! He didn’t even know Senior Wei was the Yiling Patriarch! Where is the justice?

Jin Zixuan had better not have a secretly intimate relationship with the Yiling Patriarch. That would be the final insult.

Jiang Cheng, meanwhile, is shrugging like this is no big deal. “I guess I thought you knew. We’ve been going since I was, I don’t know, ten or something. You know him too! I don’t know why you’re being so dramatic about it.”

“What do you do in the Burial Mounds?” Nie Huaisang demands, increasingly incredulous about everything to do with Senior Wei.

Jiang Cheng shrugs again. “Not much. I swear I mostly sleep—I think he’s got some kind of sleeping powder in the fog. But yeah. Sleep, eat, train a little. Listen to him yammering about whatever weird experiments he’s in the process of blowing up. He’s such an embarrassment, I don’t even know why people are afraid of him.”

That last sentence would seem harsh if it wasn’t accompanied by an alarmingly fond little smile. Who knew Jiang Cheng was capable of making that face about anyone other than his sister? Not Nie Huaisang, that’s for sure.

He tries to picture Senior Wei and Jiang Cheng in the same place at the same time, and weirdly, he can kind of see them getting along. Senior Wei would be about as affected by Jiang Cheng’s bad temper as ducks are affected by waves, and Jiang Cheng would probably find that soothing. He doesn’t mean to scare people, most of the time—it’s just that nature and nurture have combined to give him this ominous presentation.

“Do you know about Senior Wei and Lan Wangji?” Nie Huaisang asks, deciding Yiling Patriarch drama is just his destiny this month.

The Jiang Cheng scowl returns. “What has Lan Wangji got to do with Wei Wuxian?”

Oh ho ho, was Senior Wei trying to keep his fiancé a secret? Well, that’s not allowed. Nie Huaisang considers his options and decides to go for the evilest one, because anything else is a waste of resources. “You know what?” he says with innocent brightness. “I think you and your sister should go ask Lan Wangji about it. Hear it from the man himself. I think that would be best.”

Jiang Cheng eyes him with extremely hurtful (although entirely correct) suspicion. “Uh huh,” he says. “I’ll be sure to do that. Sometime.”

“Oh no, now, I think,” Nie Huaisang decides, not willing to risk the possibility that he’ll miss this conversation, which is bound to be the best entertainment Gusu has ever had to offer. “Definitely now. Let’s go find your sister!”

“I hate you so much,” Jiang Cheng mutters while being dragged away from the river and toward The Drama. But he doesn’t really mean it, bless his heart. He’s hardly resisting at all.

Fortunately, Jiang Yanli is a secret gremlin and needs virtually no persuasion to go have a questionable conversation with the Second Jade of Lan. As for Lan Wangji, he’s surprisingly easy to catch, too. Then again, his tolerance of Nie Huaisang has been at an all-time high ever since the Senior-Wei-picture incident. Nie Huaisang is prepared to milk that for as long as it lasts.

“Wangji-xiong!” he says brightly. “It turns out the Jiangs are close with the Yiling Patriarch, too! I thought I should properly introduce you to each other, seeing as you’ll be so intimate in the future.”

“…Intimate?” Jiang Cheng asks darkly.

“When Wei Wuxian and I are married,” Lan Wangji explains, apparently delighted to announce this to anyone who will listen, and equally delighted be able to use Senior Wei’s actual name.

The absolutely dead, awkward silence that follows is everything Nie Huaisang hoped it would be. This is magical.

“…Married?” Jiang Yanli repeats, clearly shocked.

“He didn’t mention it?” Lan Wangji asks, and wow, Nie Huaisang didn’t know Lan Wangji’s face could do heartbroken, but it sure can, and it’s killing all the fun in this conversation.

“He never tells us anything really important,” Jiang Yanli hastily reassures with much less grace and poise than usual. “He rarely tells anyone anything important, honestly.”

“Yeah,” Nie Huaisang puts in, also eager to get that look off Lan Wangji’s face. “For example, he never told me he was the Yiling Patriarch. If he’s not even sharing his identity, he’s definitely not sharing his marriage plans.”

“You didn’t know he was the Yiling Patriarch?” Jiang Cheng asks, interested. “When did you find out?”

“Two weeks ago,” Nie Huaisang tells him. “Imagine how weird my month has been.”

“Really, I think that the more important something is to him, the less likely he is to talk about it,” Jiang Yanli persists, clearly still worried about Lan Wangji’s delicate maiden heart. But she’s also right, is the thing. “He never talks about his past, or his family, or how he came to be in the Burial Mounds…”

“He never talks about anything that could be used to hurt him,” Nie Huaisang agrees. “Congratulations, Wangji-xiong. You’re one of the Yiling Patriarch’s vulnerabilities.”

They’ve succeeded—Lan Wangji doesn’t look heartbroken anymore. He does look super worried about Senior Wei, but Senior Wei should be punished somehow for this mess, even if it’s just in the form of nagging from his secret fiancé.

* * *

Tragically, the month of Drama is also the last month of the lectures, which means this is the first time Nie Huaisang has ever felt remotely sad to leave Gusu. He doesn’t even get to come back and follow up in person, because due to some kind of weird personal failing, he accidentally passed his classes. He complains to Meng Yao about this sad situation all the way home, and receives precisely as much sympathy as he expected. (Which is none, none at all, none whatsoever.)

The trouble is, Meng Yao is the illegitimate son of one of the Yiling Patriarch’s most famous victims, and he’s super weird about Senior Wei because of it. (In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious that Meng Yao knew Senior Wei was actually the Yiling Patriarch and not just his servant, but whatever, he’s low on the list of people Nie Huaisang blames for not telling him about that.) Nie Huaisang is trying to break Meng Yao of this habitual weirdness by talking about Senior Wei all the time. Getting him used to the man! He thinks it’s working.

...It could also be making things worse, but only time will tell.

In any case, Nie Huaisang was sadly convinced he’d left The Drama behind in Gusu, only to discover, delightfully, that he was dead wrong. Because when they walk through the gates of the Unclean Realm, there’s Senior Wei, hanging around with Father, probably trying to mooch food.

The very source of The Drama himself, here in person. A perfect target.

* * *

Nie Huaisang behaves himself all the way until dinner because he is both patient and spiteful. He waits, in fact, until Senior Wei has a mouthful of wine, and then he says, “You never told me you were engaged to Lan Wangji.”

Senior Wei spits wine all over Da-ge. It’s very satisfying.

“I’m what?!” he cries, ignoring Da-ge’s problems.

“Engaged to Lan Wangji,” Nie Huaisang repeats cheerfully, toasting him. “He told me all about it. Me, and Jiang Cheng, and Jiang Yanli. He might’ve even mentioned it to Jin Zixuan. He seemed very excited. Very set on the idea. Immovably set on the idea, one might say.”

“Oh,” Senior Wei says blankly. And then, after a pause, “Wow.”

“So you didn’t…know. That you were marrying Lan Wangji,” Da-ge clarifies slowly.

“He didn’t tell me!” Senior Wei cries, throwing up his hands. “Isn’t that the sort of thing you should tell someone?!”

All these years and Nie Huaisang had never realized that Lan Wangji is the biggest freak in the cultivation world. This is amazing.

“And yet you don’t seem unwilling at all,” Father points out, intrigued.

Senior Wei looks away, mumbles something incomprehensible, goes through a dizzying array of expressions that Nie Huaisang can hardly track, and then refuses to talk about it for the rest of the evening. No matter how sneakily various Nie cousins try to drag the topic up again, bless them.

This does mean that Senior Wei is extra entertaining, though, as he’s desperately trying to keep everyone’s mind off his apparent nuptials, and thus is forced to break out the really good stories. Nie Huaisang’s favorite, and by far the freakiest of them all, is the one about a nine-fingered kid who tried to sacrifice an entire clan to Senior Wei in exchange for his finger back.

Didn’t work out the way the kid had hoped, of course. Nie Huaisang feels that giving a kid a haunted finger that eventually drives him insane is maybe a little tacky, but hey, he’d never make it as the Yiling Patriarch, so he probably shouldn’t judge.

Senior Wei also mentions, as a casual aside, that he did rip the arm off of one member of the clan of would-be sacrifices, and sent “the right kind of ghosts” to haunt him to insanity, too. “Because he deserved it.” Turns out that even a table full of Nies doesn’t actually want any more details on that topic.

So it’s a pretty fun evening, but at the end of it, Nie Huaisang is unhappy to see that Senior Wei has carefully set aside about a quarter of his meal to be thrown out. Senior Wei absolutely does not waste food, for reasons that are probably depressing. Something suspicious is going on here.

“Did Meng Yao try to kill you again?” Nie Huaisang demands, indignant, as he drags Senior Wei back to his rooms for drinks and gossip. (He regularly drags the Yiling Patriarch to his room for drinks and gossip. His life is more surreal than he knew.) “I’ve told him to knock that off.”

“Eh,” says Senior Wei, shrugging. “He feels like he has to, you know that. But honestly, he’s barely trying anymore. If he gets any sloppier he’ll just be handing me cups with labels reading Poison on them. It’s downright polite, as assassination attempts go.”

Senior Wei’s cavalier attitude toward assassination attempts is almost as upsetting as Meng Yao’s cavalier attitude toward the blow the Nie clan’s reputation would take if one of their guests got poisoned to death.

Nie Huaisang silently notes this incident down for yet another point to bring up during his next exhausting non-conversation with Meng Yao on this topic, and interrogates Senior Wei a little further. “Does Jin Zixuan try to kill you?”

“No?” Senior Wei looks confused. “He doesn’t have to. I killed his father, but I saved his mother’s life. We’re even—nobody owes anybody anything. Which is just as well. The peacock would march right up and challenge me to a duel, and that would be so embarrassing for him.”

It really, really would.

“I didn’t do anything for Meng Yao’s mother, so he has to try to kill me,” Senior Wei further explains, as though this is all very reasonable. And it is, Nie Huaisang supposes. It’s just hard to imagine anyone, anywhere feeling genuinely upset that Jin Guangshan is dead.

Well, that can all be a problem for later. Now is the time to get Senior Wei drunk (a real challenge) and coax him into talking shit about famous cultivators he’s killed.

* * *

As far as Wei Wuxian is concerned, he’s cleared all of his debts by way of the Burial Mounds. However long he was in there, it burned him down and built him back, and whoever he is now should be starting from a clean slate. He should be square with the heavens, and that means they shouldn’t be shoving him into, for example, awkward social situations.

And yet.

“I hear you’re marrying a Lan boy who’s younger than I am,” Wen Qing says judgmentally, striding into the Burial Mounds like she owns the place, as usual—with Wen Ning, more adorable, trailing shyly behind her. “Cradle-robber,” Wen Qing concludes.

“Okay, look,” Wei Wuxian snaps, “I’m not marrying him until he’s twenty, first of all. Second of all, I didn’t even find out we were supposed to be getting married until a few weeks ago.”

“Shouldn’t that second thing have been first?” Wen Ning whispers to Wen Qing, but Wei Wuxian ignores that.

“And finally,” he says, “it’s none of your business anyway. Why are you here?”

Wen Qing visibly debates whether she cares enough about Wei Wuxian’s love life to torment him about it further, and then decides that she does not. (She’s the world’s meanest person; it’s her best trait.)

“I’m here to try to figure out what the hell is going on with your weird, resentment-based golden core,” she says finally, demonstratively holding up needles in a distinctly menacing way. “One day I’m going to publish my research about it, too, so get used to that idea. A-Ning is here because he misses you for some reason.”

“I raised you two,” Wei Wuxian complains. “Where’s the respect?”

“You did not raise us,” Wen Qing snaps, clearly horrified. “You hid us here for a few months and fed us such a shockingly unhealthy diet it’s a miracle we survived!”

“My babies are so unfilial!” Wei Wuxian wails to the sky. “Well, Wen Qing is, anyway. Not you, Wen Ning, you’re perfect.”

“Father says hello,” Wen Ning tells him quietly, ignoring the bickering. “Also he says…congratulations? On your marriage. And Mother says, um. Good job? Because. The Lan boy is very pretty.”

“He is,” Wei Wuxian is forced to agree. “So pretty.”

“How do you even know?” Wen Qing demands, high-handedly grabbing his wrist. “You haven’t seen him since he was eight.”

Hmm. For someone so performatively uninterested in Wei Wuxian’s love-life, she sure seems to know a lot of the details. “I can see through the eyes of my ravens,” he claims in his very spookiest and most mystical tones. “I’m a time traveler, sent back by the gods to save the cultivation world. This body isn’t real—I’m actually an amorphous mist present in all places at all times—”

“Shut up,” Wen Qing snaps. “I’m sorry I asked if you’re just going to be an asshole about it. Hold still, I need to go find some of my old records on you.”

With that, she storms off into the Demon Subduing Cave. But just as Wei Wuxian is congratulating himself on a deflection well done, he notices Wen Ning shooting him repeated, nervous looks, and he has a sinking feeling of dread. Wen Ning is much more perceptive than Wei Wuxian, personally, wishes he was.

“What is it, Wen Ning?” he asks eventually, resigned.

“…You’re a time traveler?” Wen Ning asks hesitantly.

And there it is. Wei Wuxian sighs. “Don’t tell anybody, okay?”

“Of course not!” Wen Ning cries, clearly distressed that Wei Wuxian would even think he needed to ask.

He is absolutely going to tell his sister everything the moment they’re out of earshot.

* * *

After the Lan lectures, the Jiang children are only able to bear about a month at home before fleeing to the Burial Mounds. Jiang Yanli thinks the Cloud Recesses made them overly accustomed to things like peace, harmony, and a lack of screaming. They’re not readjusting as well as she’d like.

Fortunately, their mother always encourages visits to the Burial Mounds, no matter how their father feels about it. She thinks the Yiling Patriarch is teaching them deadly cultivation secrets.

Jiang Yanli thinks the Yiling Patriarch is teaching them how to relax and have fun, and that’s about it. She’s nonetheless prepared to consider those very valuable lessons, especially for A-Cheng.

A-Cheng, who is napping. He spends most of the first few days of any trip to the Burial Mounds napping. Come to think of it, Jiang Yanli also sleeps more than usual the first few days of every visit. She’d known that dealing with their parents was emotionally exhausting—she hadn’t realized it was physically exhausting, too.

She does try to wake up before Wei Wuxian, however. If he beats her to the kitchen, he will try to make them congee, and it’s…well. She was born and raised in Yunmeng, and even she finds his congee a bit intense.

It’s funny—everyone thinks he has a sect up here, like Baoshan Sanren, but he doesn’t. It’s just him and anyone who chooses to visit. The Burial Mounds aren’t his sect, they’re only his home—and a simple home, too. One with a few extra rooms for guests and just enough farmland for one person to keep up with, if that person happens to have walking corpses around to dig fields for him.

Jiang Yanli always brings food when she visits. Immortal or not, she worries that Wei Wuxian isn’t eating well or taking proper care of himself. He’s always so skinny.

“You two are here awfully soon after the lectures,” Wei Wuxian says, staggering rumpled and unkempt into the kitchen and collapsing into a seat at the dining table—which is also, more or less, in the kitchen, only the most nominal of dividers separating the two spaces. “Didn’t you miss home?”

“We missed some parts of home,” Jiang Yanli concedes, cracking an egg and refusing to picture anything other than an egg as she cracks it. “We did not miss our parents’ constant arguments.”

Wei Wuxian blinks into something approaching proper wakefulness. “Arguments? What…uh. What do they argue about?”

Jiang Yanli rolls her eyes. “Oh, they always find something. Lately I believe they’ve been accusing each other of mismanaging the Lanling trade agreements, but it really doesn’t matter. If they can’t find something real, they’ll invent something imaginary. My parents are very creative, Immortal Wei. But as for what they’re really arguing about, I believe it’s something along the lines of, ‘How dare you be something other than what I imagined you would be before I really knew you?’”

She would not normally say such things to anyone. Saying them to her parents would be like sticking her hand into boiling water on purpose, and saying them to her brother would be cruel. But if you can’t be bitter in front of the Yiling Patriarch, who can you be bitter in front of?
And he always looks so shocked every time. It’s very funny.

All he says, though, in a slightly odd voice, is, “Actually begging you not to call me Immortal Wei.”

She always calls him Immortal Wei, and he always makes a hilarious face and whines about it. If he thinks that’s a disincentive, he is mistaken. “Apologies, Immortal Wei.”

“Shijie, I love you, but you’re secretly kind of mean. When did this happen? How did I never know this about you?”

She’s never figured out why he sometimes slips and calls her Shijie. Possibly she reminds him of a shijie of his from when he was young. In any case, she likes it and doesn’t want to put him off by drawing attention to it. “I’ve always been this way with you, so I really can’t say why you didn’t know. Maybe you weren’t paying attention?”

“Shijie!” he wails, flopping down on the table like a child.

The terrifying Yiling Patriarch, a mysterious immortal, bane of wrongdoers all over the cultivation world. Currently sprawled across a table and whining about how everyone is mean to him.

Jiang Yanli thinks she would have loved to be his shijie.

At this point, A-Cheng strolls in, lazier and more relaxed than he ever permits himself to be at home. If he were allowed to bring his dogs here, he’d probably never leave.

He sits down next to the terrifying Yiling Patriarch and elbows him in the side, telling him to shut up and informing him that he’s an embarrassment to his own title. The terrifying Yiling Patriarch turns to flop over onto A-Cheng’s shoulder instead of the table, and begins wailing about how A-Cheng doesn’t really love him. A-Cheng smiles.

Jiang Yanli also smiles, plates breakfast, and brings it to the boys. Well. One boy, and one immortal who acts like a boy.

“Incidentally, Immortal Wei,” she says, ignoring Wei Wuxian’s grimace and A-Cheng’s snicker, “you never informed us about your marriage plans.”

Wei Wuxian puts down his chopsticks and blinks up at her, looking faintly hunted. “Uh…”

“Yeah, why did we have to hear from Lan Wangji that you’re marrying him? You should’ve told us that!”

“I never said I was marrying him!” Wei Wuxian cries. “He apparently just decided that on his own when he was eight! He didn’t even warn me! If you think it’s weird that you heard about my marriage plans from Lan Zhan, think about how weird it is for me that I heard about my marriage plans from Nie Huaisang.”

Jiang Yanli covers her mouth and bravely refrains from laughing until she can’t breathe.

“So you’re not marrying him?” A-Cheng demands, looking of two minds about the prospect. “Because he seems pretty set on the idea. Wei Wuxian, are you really going to break the Second Jade of Lan’s heart like that?”

“Look—no, I mean. I’d love to marry Lan Zhan! That would be amazing. But the thing is, Lan Zhan has only spent one day of his life with me, and he was eight at the time. It seems a little…are we really sure Lan Zhan wants to marry me? What if he just wants to marry the fairytale version of me? Because, you know. Real me is a mess.”

The Yiling Patriarch is being insecure. Fascinating.

“He calls him Lan Zhan,” A-Cheng points out, smirking. Jiang Yanli smiles demurely back, which she likes to think is worse. Wei Wuxian makes an incoherent noise of indignation.

“You really haven’t heard from him since he was a child?” she asks.

“Well.” Wei Wuxian looks shifty. “We write, I guess.”

“He guesses they write,” A-Cheng informs her helpfully.

“I see,” Jiang Yanli says gravely. “What might they have been writing about all these years, I wonder.”

“I hate you both and I never want to see you again,” Wei Wuxian mutters, sinking down slowly until he’s hidden behind his bowl, practically under the table. “Get out of my haunted graveyard. Who let you in, anyway?”

“You did,” A-Cheng points out.

“It was certainly you, Immortal Wei,” Jiang Yanli agrees.

“She’s calling me that to hurt me,” Wei Wuxian tells A-Cheng. “Make her stop.”

“My sister can call you whatever she wants and you’re going to like it,” A-Cheng declares unsympathetically.

“Would you mind showing us one of Lan Wangji’s letters?” Jiang Yanli asks, ignoring this byplay. She has a horrible suspicion and feels the need to test it out. “Something recent. Not one with anything too personal in it, but I’m curious about what sort of letters he writes to you.”

“…Let me see if there’s one he wouldn’t mind you seeing,” Wei Wuxian mutters, grabbing a quick bite of food and then scuttling off to wherever he hides Lan Wangji’s letters.

A-Cheng turns to her, faintly accusing. “You know he can’t say no to you.”

“I know it’s wrong to take advantage,” she agrees. Wei Wuxian really can’t say no to her, not that they’ve been able to figure out why. He seems to delight in saying no to A-Cheng. “But this time, I think it’ll help him.”

Eventually Wei Wuxian returns with a single letter, and shyly holds it out to her like a boy of twelve. She accepts it as if it’s precious—because it clearly is.

By the end of the letter, she’s discovered that things are even worse than she’d suspected, and she’s ready to cry. She passes the letter to A-Cheng, puts her head in her hands, and takes a moment.

“Wei Wuxian!” A-Cheng shouts a few sentences in, but swallows his complaints when Jiang Yanli puts a restraining hand on his shoulder. He reads through the rest of the letter with his face turning a series of interesting colors, then he turns to Jiang Yanli in exasperation, waving the letter incredulously.

She nods and takes the letter back, then breathes deeply and braces herself. “Immortal Wei,” she says, “Lan Wangji refers to your upcoming marriage three separate times in this letter alone. He says, here, ‘Soon you will be my husband.’ I don’t think you can complain that he didn’t warn you.”

She’s spoken with Lan Wangji several times, and she really couldn’t picture him taking liberties like that. She could picture him being too vague for Wei Wuxian to understand, but no, it’s not even that. Lan Wangji has been remarkably clear—downright chatty and confiding, in fact, by his standards. Wei Wuxian is the problem, here.

“I thought he was joking!” Wei Wuxian insists.

A-Cheng makes an incoherent, enraged sound, and Jiang Yanli sighs. But even for Wei Wuxian, this is a little much. He must have some reason to have doubted Lan Wangji’s sincerity. What could it be? Lan Wangji would certainly have formally proposed at some point, and would not have persisted in these assumptions if he’d been rejected. He proposed. Wei Wuxian accepted. Why did Wei Wuxian not take that seriously, especially in the case of Lan Wangji, the world’s most serious person?

Oh. Oh no.

“Immortal Wei,” she says slowly, “how old was Lan Wangji when he started mentioning your marriage?”

“I mean, he sent me a letter around a month after he left here, and he said we should get married then. I said sure. He was eight! I thought it was cute! I called him my little husband!”

Oh no.

“…What do you call him now?” A-Cheng asks with morbid fascination.

“I mean, I asked him how tall he was, and he’s taller than me, so I said he’d have to be my big husband, now—why are you looking at me like that?!”

Jiang Yanli shakes her head in amazement, truly unsure where to even begin. At least Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji seem to deserve each other.

“Did you go like a hundred years not talking to anybody or something?” A-Cheng demands. “Is that why you’re like this? You lived in a hole in the ground all alone and cultivated to immortality and idiocy at the same time?”

“Haha,” says Wei Wuxian, but any true amusement has drained out of his voice. Suddenly he looks very haunted, though he’s trying to hide it.

Jiang Yanli puts her hand on A-Cheng’s arm to stop him, and delicately changes the subject. She’ll discuss this with A-Cheng later—they will not be making further reference to Wei Wuxian cultivating to immortality or to him spending long periods of time alone.

“Immortal Wei,” she says gently, “If you’ve been exchanging letters with Lan Wangji since he was a child, I’m sure he knows you very well, as you seem to know him. He wants to marry you, and you want to marry him. Possibly you should begin to think about…well. The logistics of that.”

“Oh, we’re not having a party,” Wei Wuxian says definitively. “He hates parties, I hate parties—and I start feuds at them, which is worse. No parties.”

“Feuds?” A-Cheng asks in a judgmental tone.

“There was a thing with Wen Ruohan,” is Wei Wuxian’s apology of an explanation, “but then he mysteriously died and so did everyone who might have wanted to avenge him. So that’s lucky.”

“Very lucky,” Jiang Yanli murmurs. “But that’s not quite what I meant. If Lan Wangji is going to be your husband, you need to tell him a great many things. Facts. About yourself, your life, your history.”

“Unless it’ll actually kill you to do that,” A-Cheng mutters. “Because you sure as hell act like it would.”

Indeed, Wei Wuxian clearly hates the very idea of sharing any personal information with anyone, but Jiang Yanli is right about this, so she spends the next hour gently browbeating him into conceding with enough sincerity to satisfy her.

She knows she’s right. She’s spent almost twenty years watching her parents test out Wei Wuxian’s preferred method of marital communication, and look what’s become of them. Jiang Yanli won’t stand by and watch that nonsense happen again.

* * *

Dearest husband-to-be,

I must apologize for mentioning our engagement to some of your acquaintances. I had never met anyone who knew you before, and spoke without thinking. Please tell me if you are offended, and how to remedy this offense, if so.

In three years, we will be married, which feels both too far, and yet closer to me than it really should. Possibly this is because my uncle has finally become resigned to the idea (for which I can only thank the efforts of my brother), and that gives me a sense of reality I may have lacked before.

Your acquaintances are all very interesting, but all in different ways, as expected of people you would find worthy of your concern.

Nie Huaisang tells me your name is Wei Wuxian.

Please let me know if I have overstepped.

With all my affection,

Lan Wangji

* * *

Lan Zhan!

Did I seriously not even tell you my name? Ugh, how do you stand me. Yes! Wei Wuxian is my courtesy name, but you shouldn’t call me that. You should call me Wei Ying.

Lan Zhan, of course you can tell anyone you want about your own engagement. I just worry about what will happen if you change your mind about me, you know? I’d love to marry you, but you decided to marry me when you were eight. You’re only seventeen now! What if you find someone better than me to marry? Trust me, it wouldn’t be hard. I wouldn’t hold you to our engagement in that case, but the cultivation world will if you start telling people about it. Don’t trap yourself with me, Lan Zhan. I never want you to feel trapped.

Ah, the friends, yes. Have you met Wen Qing yet? You’ll love her when you do. She’s so mean, it’s great.

The idea of you and Nie Huaisang talking gives me chills and I don’t know why.

Anyway, Lan Zhan. Spend your last few years of freedom seeing the world and meeting people, and when you’re twenty, come visit me. We’ll see how you feel then.

With all my love and worry,

Wei Ying

* * *

Lan Wangji knows he shouldn’t have been telling people about his engagement without his fiancé’s permission, but it turned out that when confronted with people openly affectionate toward the Yiling Patriarch (his future husband, Wei Wuxian, Wei Ying), he was unable to stop himself from speaking. He didn’t think to anticipate this problem, as it’s one he’s never had before.

And everyone he told was extremely, almost disturbingly, surprised.

He’s well aware that he is not worthy to be the husband of the Yiling Patriarch, no matter what the Yiling Patriarch himself seems to believe. (The Yiling Patriarch seems to believe that he is not worthy of Lan Wangji, which is patently ridiculous.) He knows he isn’t worthy, so all he can do is strive to become so.

In his letters, Wei Ying mentions that he often goes on night hunts. He finds it highly amusing that no one ever recognizes him—that he doesn’t even need to bother with a disguise. People assume he’s a rogue cultivator and treat him accordingly, and he seems to find that pleasant. He also mentions with bitterness that if he didn’t take these night hunts, no one would, because they’re beneath the notice of the sects. Not enough glory or honor, not quite in the right territory, not on behalf of worthy (wealthy) enough people. It’s amazing, Lan Zhan, he once wrote, what thin excuses the righteous sects will dig up to allow themselves to turn a blind eye to evil.

Wei Ying is, Lan Wangji decides upon consideration, entirely correct. And so as soon as he’s considered old enough to travel on his own, he heads to the locations of any night hunts he’s heard other disciples dismiss as too small, too boring, or too inconvenient.

He’s done no particularly outstanding work, in his own opinion, and yet, in a few short years, he’s become a hero to the common people. It’s proof of just how negligent cultivators have been—that so little can be seen as so much.

I hear they’re calling you Hanguang-jun, Wei Ying writes. My future husband, famous already! I’m so proud.

Many are envious of my title, Lan Wangji writes back. It does not seem to occur to them that they, too, have the option of making themselves useful to those in need.

Funny how those connections never get made, huh? Wei Ying agrees.

So Lan Wangji travels, as Wei Ying wished. He meets an exhausting number of people and learns many things. Often, he learns about Wei Ying, because the people he most commonly encounters on less prestigious night hunts are people who know Wei Ying—Jiang Wanyin, Nie Mingjue, Wen Ning, and sometimes Wen Qing. He even meets Jin Zixuan on occasion, always accompanied by a woman named Luo Qingyang, who is practical, sensible, lighthearted, and altogether someone one wouldn’t expect to find associated with the Jin.

Jiang Wanyin assures Lan Wangji that Wei Ying is a well-meaning moron who treats the truth as if it’s blood drawn directly from his veins.

Wen Qing agrees with Jiang Wanyin, and adds that Wei Ying is self-destructive, and bears constant watching lest he sacrifice himself to save a passing donkey. Distressingly, this example does not seem to have been chosen at random.

Wen Ning firmly insists that Wei Ying is a good and kind man, and that’s all he’ll say on the matter.

Nie Mingjue says Wei Ying is a menace and a mooch, but he says it while rolling his eyes and smiling affectionately.

Jin Zixuan assures Lan Wangji that Wei Ying is protective of loved ones and terrifying to everyone else.

Luo Qingyang says that Wei Ying is funny and cute, and that Lan Wangji chose well. Apparently Wei Ying saved her village from a fire when she was a child, and she still seems to think of him as a friendly and invincible big brother.

Nothing Lan Wangji encounters over the final three years of their separation makes him love Wei Ying any less. Quite the opposite.

* * *

Lan Zhan is twenty this year, and despite everything Wei Wuxian’s told him, he’s still planning to come live in the Burial Mounds. He claims he wants to be stuck with the Yiling Patriarch forever, and he actually seems serious about it.

Wei Wuxian is afraid. It’s been a long, long time since he was last afraid. A very long time since he had something he loved that he might lose. Maybe it makes a weird kind of sense that it would be Lan Zhan.

The problem, of course, is that he’s thought he had forever people before, but he lost every single one of them. It wasn’t even anybody’s fault, except maybe Wen Chao’s—but dicks like Wen Chao are sold by the dozen, and Wei Wuxian would be a fool not to anticipate running into at least a few more.

Things don’t even need to go Wen Chao levels of wrong, either. Lan Zhan still hasn’t spent more than a few hours with Wei Wuxian, and it’s not like they’d gotten along especially well last time. Not at first, anyway. He likes to think they were steadily getting along better the better they understood each other back then, and they do understand each other pretty well now. Sometimes, he lets himself think this marriage might just be fantastic. Still, he’ll have to make sure Lan Zhan understands what he’s committing to before they go through with it.

He doesn’t normally overthink his plans. He doesn’t normally give himself time to overthink—he just does the ill-advised thing and regrets it later. This time, though, he had a literal child Lan Zhan on his hands, so a horrible amount of time to think was built right into the situation. It’s been awful and he never wants to do it again.

In the course of freaking out, he’s demanded Lan Zhan-related advice from many of his living friends and all of his dead ones. Combined, they amount to some thousands of years of experience on how to manage a relationship—though admittedly, some of the advice was a little questionnable. He rejected everything that weird, one-eyed ghost said out of hand, for a start, even if she got huffy about it. She poisoned like three husbands in a row, though, so her advice on marriage is just, it’s suspect. Still, he asked people who had long and happy marriages a lot of questions, and he’s prepared. This should work out. They can do this. They can have this.

Wei Wuxian has a plan. He even has backup plans. He doesn’t anticipate anything going horribly wrong with Lan Zhan.

He’s still afraid.

* * *

Lan Wangji has been waiting for this day for years—the day he’d finally meet the Yiling Patriarch again, the day he’d finally be permitted to stay, forever, in the company of the only person other than his brother he’s ever been fully comfortable around.

As usual, the Yiling Patriarch is surprising him. Unusually, he isn’t enjoying it.

But neither is Wei Ying, who looks miserable.

“Okay, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says, pacing anxiously back and forth in front of the cave he apparently lives in. “Here’s the thing. You should…you should know what you’re getting yourself into.”

“I do,” Lan Wangji argues, puzzled. He knows that his future husband is an immortal and possibly slightly demonic cultivator of unimaginable, almost mythical power. He also knows that his future husband is just, kind, and clever, and has a strangely low opinion of his own worth, despite being loved by many discerning people. He knows that his future husband loves him. He even likes his future husband’s friends. He feels that covers everything most critical to a marriage.

“You don’t,” Wei Ying insists, clearly distressed. “I’m—I have to tell you how I got here. I have to tell you how all this happened, and then…if you still want to marry me after you hear everything, that’s fine. You’ll know, and I won’t feel like I’m tricking you. Okay?”

Lan Wangji nods agreement. Learning his future husband’s history is hardly a trial. Indeed, he’s always wanted to know the truth of it. He just wishes Wei Ying didn’t seem so incredibly unhappy about sharing it.

“Right,” Wei Ying breathes, looking off toward a lotus pond and bracing himself. “I was born…around the same time you were.”

Already this story is nothing like what Lan Wangji expected. “I met you when I was a child,” he points out. “You were an adult.”

“Yeah, well. That’s where it gets weird, Lan Zhan, because I really was born around the same time you were, but…anyway, my parents died, and I ended up living on the streets for a few years. The streets of Yiling. It’s why I’m afraid of dogs, there were so many dogs, and they’d bite you if you—that’s not the point.”

Already this story is much more horrible than Lan Wangji had hoped.

“The point is, I think there was a connection to Yiling made there. When I was ten, Jiang Fengmian picked me up and took me to Lotus Pier because he knew my parents, and I was raised there…almost family. The first disciple.”

The Yiling Patriarch is certainly not the Yunmeng Jiang first disciple. The Yunmeng Jiang’s first disciple is a young woman with a loud voice and an evil sense of humor who teases the heir relentlessly and without any apparent fear. While she has certain, superficial character traits in common with the Yiling Patriarch, they are not at all the same person.

“It’ll make sense eventually,” Wei Ying reassures him, looking tired. “But not right away, because here’s the thing—when you and I were both sixteen, I went to the Gusu Lan lectures. That’s when we first met.”

Lan Wangji clings to Wei Ying’s reassurance that this will eventually make sense.

“We became…friends? I’m not sure you could call us friends. I was a very annoying teenager, Lan Zhan, and I was in your house breaking all your rules and laughing about it, and I drove you insane. It was kind of on purpose. Really, I think I just wanted you to look at me.”

Though he still understands essentially nothing, Lan Wangji is prepared to do this other version of himself great injury for putting such a sad look on his future husband’s face.

“We got closer over the years, though. We had a whole quest together, we killed a famous monster together…I think we could have fallen in love, Lan Zhan. If we’d had more time.” Wei Ying’s look of sadness deepens, and Lan Wangji clenches his fists in an effort not to speak—an effort he only ever needs to make in matters concerning Wei Ying.

“There was a war,” Wei Ying continues eventually, strangely, distressingly quiet. “The Cloud Recesses burned—you and your brother and uncle survived, but there were a lot of losses. After that, the Unclean Realm was attacked, and Lotus Pier was…slaughtered. The only survivors were Jiang Yanli, Jiang Cheng, and me. And then I lost my golden core. After that I was caught, and thrown into the Burial Mounds.”

At this point, Lan Wangji is in no danger of speaking—horror is choking the words right out of him.

“I don’t know how long I was here,” Wei Ying says in the tone of someone recounting a nightmare. “Decades, maybe. Centuries. It all starts to blur together after a while, the pain and the darkness and the screaming of thousands of the unquiet dead in your ears and your mind and your soul. I tried everything. I tried fighting them, but that was worse than useless. I tried music to control them, and it worked to an extent—but it didn’t get me out. And then I tried something like my own bastardized version of Inquiry.”

“…On so many?” Lan Wangji asks, almost as fascinated as he is horrified.

“I went one at a time, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying tells him, smiling wearily. “I really don’t know how long it look. That’s how my wish-granting started—I granted wishes to ghosts. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. More. Wen Qing says that somewhere in there, I managed to form a new, resentment-based core, but I don’t know how or when. In any case, once the ghosts were all settled, or at least content enough to wait, I finally left this place—which really wasn’t such a bad place, by then. Plants were growing and everything. But I felt like I should leave, to see if anyone I’d loved was still alive—to see just how much time had passed.

“So you can imagine how confused I was when I left the Burial Mounds and ran into myself, four years old and homeless on the streets of Yiling.”

“…How?” It’s the only question Lan Wangji is capable of at this point.

“Oh, I don’t know, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says dismissively. “I’ve lived in the Burial Mounds forever, and I still can’t say I really understand the place. That much resentment makes for a lot of power, and apparently so does its dissipation. How that led to time travel is between the Burial Mounds and the gods.”

The gods, he says, as if he isn’t one of them. As if he hasn’t noticed that his presence cleanses the land, that people pray to him and he answers their prayers. Lan Wangji wonders what, exactly, his fiancé is the god of. He wonders when he’ll notice that he’s become a god. Surely he ascended at some point? But he may have been in such a confused state of mind at the time that he didn’t notice. He may have tried to solve the gods’ problems, too, thinking they were simply unusually powerful spirits. Perhaps the other gods sent him back to the Burial Mounds because he frightened them, or perhaps he descended on his own once he felt his duty in the heavens was accomplished. Lan Wangji supposes they’ll never know, and feels there’s no point in discussing it, so he sticks to something simpler. “…Your younger self?”

“Ah.” Wei Ying bites his lip and looks away. “I think I…absorbed him? I touched him—I told him I knew his parents and I’d take him somewhere safe, and he believed me, because the kind of kid I was—hell, I didn’t have anything to lose. Or at least, I didn’t think I did. So kid me took my hand and he just—disappeared. And I had memories of that age much clearer than anything I’d had before.” Wei Ying’s hand drifts to his chest, and he grips the front of his robes, looking sad and disturbed.

Lan Wangji is also disturbed. He’s disturbed to know that fate would dare to be so consistently, extravagantly cruel to such a clearly wonderful person. He would like to find someone to fight about it, but there seem to be no logical candidates.

“According to the local legends, I was here long before I met myself, though,” Wei Ying goes on, eyes staring vacantly at nothing. “My impact on the Burial Mounds was felt about a hundred years before I stepped out of them and into Yiling. So I’m at least…What? A century and a half old? If not more, because I don’t have any idea when the time travel happened.” His eyes focus and he gives Lan Wangji a haunted smile. “So that’s the story, Lan Zhan. I’m old and I’m broken, and I’ve done cultivation your sect thinks is evil possibly for centuries. I’m everything your uncle would want you to stay away from. Do you really still want to marry me?”

He looks very certain that the answer will be no. He looks, Lan Wangji imagines, like a child on the street, expecting nothing from anyone, but reaching out anyway, more from despair than hope.

Lan Wangji has never had a gift with words. He’s never kissed anyone before, either, but at least he’s confident that even an inexpert kiss will get his message across, which is not something that can be said for words.

Wei Ying melts into his kiss and his arms as if a hundred years of burden have been lifted all at once. Wei Ying, beautiful, passionate, and kind. And now he’s Lan Wangji’s.

It’s a relief to be the one able to give this lonely god some peace.

* * *

The Yiling Patriarch and the newly titled Hanguang-jun marry privately in the spring of Hanguang-jun’s twentieth year.

* * *

Meng Yao likes Wei Wuxian. That’s the most infuriating insult in this entire mess—he genuinely enjoys the company of the man who murdered his father, destroying all of his mother’s hopes for his future in the process. All of Meng Yao’s plans and dreams and schemes rendered useless on what seems to amount to a whim.

Except it wasn’t a whim. Meng Yao knows that perfectly well, and even admits it to himself when he’s feeling fair. The Yiling Patriarch is a god, not that he himself seems to realize that, and he’s not a particularly merciful one. Jin Guangshan was an arrogant, petty little man who tried to play games with a trickster god and lost. Meng Yao’s father, upon whom he had rested so much hope, is now nothing more than an object lesson.

However, there’s no point in hating the dead, which leaves Meng Yao no option but to hate the living. If Wei Wuxian would refrain from making it so difficult, that would be appreciated.

Meng Yao has just been handed a marriage announcement. It’s been handed to him because no one wants to deal with the excessive Nie Sulking that will result when the main family realize that their beloved Senior Wei didn’t invite them to his wedding. Meng Yao, unfortunately, is at just the right rank to be unable to refuse the honor of telling them. He’s the end of the responsibility line, and most days, he enjoys that. Not today, however.

He’ll never be a Jin now (despite his half-brother’s attempts to mend fences, which are so infuriating they make Meng Yao idly dream of burning all of Lanling to ash), but he must admit his position with the Nie is...enviable. It hadn’t seemed, at first, as though it would be. Nie Mingjue had promoted him from obscurity to right-hand man, mainly out of spite and as a warning to others. Others, who predictably took out their unhappiness about the situation on the nearest safe target, which is to say, Meng Yao.

And so things might have continued, except that Sect Leader Nie is nowhere near as naive as his eldest son. He suspected a problem, and therefore set Nie Huaisang to spy on Meng Yao for a month. At the end of that month, every one of Meng Yao’s tormentors was banished from the sect, including the one who was a relative.

“If they don’t respect my ability to choose my subordinates, they don’t respect me, and they don’t belong in my sect,” Sect Leader Nie explained simply (and within calculated earshot of several interested sect members).

And that was the end of any overt poor treatment of Meng Yao. Now all he has to tolerate in exchange for a shocking amount of power is a bit of passive aggression. This is fine. He’s never lost in a battle of passive aggression before, and he won’t start now. No, hostility from his fellow sect members is no longer a concern. His new concern is the haunting fear that Sect Leader Nie is training Huaisang to be his brother’s spy and hatchet man. Meng Yao is not sure he’ll want to live in the Nie Sect—or indeed, anywhere in the cultivation world—if that turns out to be the case.

Not least because if it turns out that Huaisang is capable of that sort of job, he might also be capable of working out that Meng Yao joined the Nie Sect in the first place in order to get close enough to the Yiling Patriarch to kill him. Then again, Huaisang might not be moved to care about that even if he does know, given how little success Meng Yao has experienced in his assassination attempts so far.

When he first came to the Nie Sect, he was very determined to kill someone he supposed, at the time, must simply be a powerful cultivator. He’d made so many plans, and over the years he’s tried them all. Poison, traps, bribed bandits—nothing fazed Wei Wuxian. Anything involving resentful energy or the undead was, of course, right out, so he tried gossip and mass panic. He hadn’t realized he’d be playing against both Madam Jin and Nie Huaisang on those fronts, but it turned out he was, and was thus doomed to failure.

And throughout these attempts, Wei Wuxian was constantly around, with his charm and his terrifying power and his street kid habits. And every time they met, it became more obvious to Meng Yao that the man he was attempting to destroy was far beyond human.

Wei Wuxian knows Meng Yao’s name and his mother’s name and his entire path toward his current position, and he shows every sign of being nothing but impressed that Meng Yao has done so well for himself. Wei Wuxian gives him an amused little nod every time Meng Yao tries and fails to kill him. Wei Wuxian is so far above the entire cultivation world that it’s a joke to think that all of them combined could take him down, let alone one son of a whore, alone, who hasn’t even managed to claim his own family name properly.

If Wei Wuxian would at least look down on him, that would lessen the sting a little, but no, the miserable bastard won’t even do that.

(If Meng Yao had known enough to offer himself to the Yiling Patriarch in exchange for his mother’s life, she would be alive today. If Wei Wuxian had saved his mother, Meng Yao would have cheerfully watched his father rot. He is expected, somehow, to live with these facts.)

Meng Yao delivers the terrible news of Senior Wei’s already accomplished marriage to the Nie family, and then he leaves behind all the wailing and whining that information engenders in order to prepare his own gift for the happy couple. After some consideration, he chooses a bottle of Nie Huaisang’s favorite wine, pours out half of it, tops up the bottle with yao blood (which is both poisonous and foul-smelling), and re-corks it. He considers the picture this bottle full of nasty-colored, reeking fluid presents, and decides it’s not enough. He smears a few streaks of leftover blood and a little charcoal on the outside of the bottle, and yes, that’s the image he’s looking for.

He firmly tells himself that he’s not having fun with this, and also that it can in no way be deemed an offering.

* * *

For once, when his brother storms into his room while he’s painting, Nie Huaisang ignores him and just belligerently continues painting. “It’s a wedding present,” he says waspishly. “I’m allowed—Father said.”

Da-ge heaves a sigh, as if basic social courtesies are too tedious to be borne—and why shouldn’t he? Clearly the grooms feel the same way. “Whose wedding?”

Da-ge had been on a night hunt and missed the announcement, which means Nie Huaisang will have to be the one to tell him. It’s just one more annoying nail in the infuriating coffin that Senior Wei’s building for himself.

“Senior Wei and Lan Wangji’s, obviously,” Nie Huaisang snaps. “Not that they had a ceremony or anything, the monsters—just ran off and got married and then sent a stupid letter telling everyone after the fact. Maybe I wanted to attend their wedding! Did they think of that? No! The selfishness.”

“If they invited people, they’d have to bow to memorial tablets in front of them,” Da-ge points out. “Senior Wei would have to admit to having parents. He’d even have to let people know their names.”

Nie Huaisang puts down his brush and turns to stare at his normally oblivious brother in amazement. “He would hate that,” he concedes.

Da-ge nods, eyes the painting, and says, “They’ll like it,” in the diffident tone of a man who knows absolutely nothing about art.

“Thanks, Da-ge,” Nie Huaisang replies indulgently.

After Da-ge leaves, Nie Huaisang takes a break from painting to write letters sharing this latest upsetting insight into Wei Wuxian’s choices with the unofficial worrying-about-Wei-Wuxian club. He thinks he’ll start with Jiang Yanli.

* * *

“What is it even for?” Wei Ying asks, eyeing the metal monstrosity Sect Leader Nie sent them as a wedding present.

“Is it for forging swords?” Lan Wangji asks dubiously.

“...Is it, Lan Zhan?”

They stare at each other in silent confusion.

“He died before I could meet him last time,” Wei Ying says at last. “To think, I could have gone my entire life without ever knowing what a weirdo that man is.”

Of all the gifts, the ones Wei Ying is most enthusiastic about are the food gifts—especially Jiang Yanli’s—and Nie Huaisang’s painting. The painting is very high quality, Lan Wangji must admit, though he’s not entirely sure about the subject matter, or, for that matter, the enormously passive aggressive letter that accompanied it.

The painting depicts the meeting between the Scrap Immortal and the Ghost King on Mount Yujun, both of them in festive wedding red, surrounded by silver butterflies, arguably overwhelming the eerie background with the strength of their love.

Wei Ying is not a deicidal ghost king and Lan Wangji is not a scrap-collecting god, and he’s not sure he likes the implications. However, the painting makes Wei Ying laugh until his eyes tear up, so Lan Wangji can do nothing but love it. Even if he must now talk Wei Ying out of the idea of hanging it in their bedroom.

The most troubling gift is a notably, almost comically, sinister bottle of wine.

“Ah, Meng Yao,” Wei Ying sighs, stepping outside to pour the entire bottle out on the ground and watching it smoke ominously. (Soon, undead hands emerge from the earth and scoop the tainted dirt downward, replacing it with fresh, clean dirt. This accomplished, the hands disappear. Lan Wangji resolves not to dwell overmuch on the implications of this.) “Did you have to ruin good wine like that?”

“…Meng Yao?” Lan Wangji asks hesitantly, because this must be an assassination attempt, but Wei Ying doesn’t seem at all upset.

“Yes, he tries to kill me every now and again, though he’s gotten hilariously half-hearted about it over the years, as you can see. He’s Jin Guangshan’s bastard, you know. Avenging his death, and so on.” Wei Ying considers. “He’s really very filial. It’s such a waste.”

Lan Wangji doesn’t know what to make of this statement, but there are times when trying to make Wei Ying make sense takes more energy than it’s worth, and frankly Lan Wangji doesn’t have the capacity to care about any Jins very much, legitimate or otherwise. Only one part of this story concerns him. “He’s not a danger to you?”

“Meng Yao?” Wei Ying seems amused. “No. His murder attempts are basically our little joke at this point. Besides, even if he were still serious, his only real play would be to ruin my reputation, and since I’ve somehow become a fairytale, that’s impossible. The mythical wicked monster and the mythical virtuous hero are equally unreal, and equally impossible to rally opposition against. Even trying to make me out to be mundane isn’t going to work, because I’ve been a myth since long before that little schemer’s slug of a father was born. It’s too late to drag me into reality now.”

“You’re my husband,” Lan Wangji points out, feeling that makes Wei Ying very real indeed.

Wei Ying laughs. “Lan Zhan,” he says brightly, “don’t you know that makes me even more of a fairytale? I even got to marry the handsome prince! Now we’re both mythical, and they can’t touch either one of us. And do you know how we maintain that mythical status, husband mine?”

Lan Wangji shakes his head, charmed and willing to go along with whatever nonsense his husband decides.

Wei Ying grins, running his hands teasingly up Lan Wangji’s chest and leaning forward to whisper into his ear, “We never, ever go to a single one of their stupid parties.”

Everyone who said he was being too hasty at age eight was a fool. Lan Wangji has married the perfect man.

* * *

This is Ouyang Zizhen’s first discussion conference. He was nervous about it, because it’s taking place at Lotus Pier, and everyone says the lady of Lotus Pier will whip you as soon as look at you—but maybe that’s just for her own disciples, because other than looking generally badass and scary as hell, she’s hasn’t done anything to anybody. (Well, she’s spent a lot of time yelling at her son, but he just stares at her with an attentive expression that doesn’t match his glazed-over eyes, generally giving the impression that he hasn’t listened to a single thing she’s said in years. The Jiangs! They’re a lot.)

Also! Zizhen has made friends! Which he didn’t actually expect. Not at his first conference, anyway. He thought he’d have to win his fellow junior disciples over slowly, maybe over years.

“I can’t believe you’re such an idiot,” Jin Ling says incredulously in response to Lan Jingyi’s latest reference to the Yiling Patriarch legend, and Zizhen beams, because he knows the intimacy of newfound best friends when he sees it.

“Tell the whole story,” Zizhen requests, delighted. “My father is weird about the Yiling Patriarch, so he won’t let anybody sing the songs or perform the plays or anything at home. I’ve never heard it all the way through.”

“See, Jin Ling?” Lan Jingyi demands, while Wen Sizhui sighs quietly in the background. “Zizhen wants to hear my story.”

“Whatever,” Jin Ling tells him. “You’re full of shit.”

“Once upon a time,” Lan Jingyi declaims, taking his story-telling duty seriously, “a man appeared in the Burial Mounds in Yiling. At the time the Burial Mounds were super fucked up—nobody who went in there ever returned, body or soul. But he just showed up there, carved a demonic flute out of the bones of a murderer, used the music to suck all the evil into himself and suppress it, and turned the place into a frigging park, because he’s a badass, is why. And so people started calling him the Yiling Patriarch, because he was that damn cool.”

“I cannot believe,” Jin Ling mutters disgustedly.

“And then, because he hadn’t done enough for our ungrateful asses,” Jingyi continues, talking over any editorializing that may be occurring, “people got the idea that since he was immortal, that meant he should grant them wishes. So, okay, he got kinda pissed, and some of those wishes were granted pretty cracked, like the kind of moralistic fairytale that gives you nightmares.”

“…He’s not wrong,” Sizhui remarks quietly to Jin Ling, who shrugs, apparently unable to argue.

“But if you had a selfless wish, he’d grant it right,” Jingyi declares, “like a boss. And that went on for decades, and people just kept on getting what they deserved, because the Yiling Patriarch knows all of everybody’s business, because the ghosts in the Burial Mounds tell him everything about everybody. Which is why he knew some evil shit was going down when a little Lan child showed up there. I’m not gonna lie to you, I don’t know what kind of evil shit that was, because if you try to ask any of the elders, they freak the hell out and make you do handstands for an hour.”

Zizhen nods, respecting the obvious voice of experience.

“Anyway, that Lan child was Lan Wangji, and he fell in love with the Yiling Patriarch at first sight. Which was awkward, because he was an actual kid. So the Yiling Patriarch said he had to go home and prove his worth, then he could come back when he was grown, and the Yiling Patriarch would test him to decide if he deserved to stay.”

“…Um,” says Wen Sizhui. “I’m not sure that’s…”

“And so!” Jingyi continues, refusing to be put off, “Lan Wangji came home to Gusu, and he worked and studied and tried to make himself worthy of the Yiling Patriarch’s love. Whenever he wasn’t working on his cultivation, he helped the common people, and they started to call him Hanguang-jun, because he brought light into the darkest places. And so it was that he came of age and returned to the Burial Mounds, and faced the Yiling Patriarch’s deadly tests.”

“His what now?” Jin Ling demands.

“And he passed all the tests,” Jingyi barrels on, clearly abbreviating recklessly, perhaps sensing that he isn’t going to be allowed to continue uninterrupted much longer, “and that’s how he healed the Yiling Patriarch, who, though he was righteous and just, had a heart frozen with despair until Hanguang-jun brought light to it! And now they’re immortal lovers who hang out in the Burial Mounds and chill. Which is what they deserve, in my opinion.”

And he stops, beaming.

Zizhen applauds, deeply moved. What a beautiful love story.

“You straight made half of that up,” declares Jin Ling, who is a good friend but has no romance in his soul.

“I did not!” Jingyi argues, indignant. “That’s all the most reliable poems and plays summarized right there, I’ll have you know. Even the weird one Nie Huaisang wrote!”

“Oh no,” Sizhui murmurs to himself. “What did Uncle Huaisang write? Oh no.”

“Okay, well it’s not what Uncle Wei or Hanguang-jun says happened, and I’d think they would know,” Jin Ling says, sneering.

“…Who’s Uncle Wei?” Zizhen asks before Jingyi can explode.

Jin Ling blinks at him. “Oh. I guess you really don’t get the stories. That’s the Yiling Patriarch’s name—Wei Wuxian.”

“You know him?!” Jingyi cries, all fight gone from him at the prospect.

“Yeah, he’s close with my mom and my uncle,” Jin Ling says casually, as though he hasn’t just admitted to a near-familial relationship with a living legend. “He gave me my courtesy name, which is cool I guess, even though it’s a stupid name. He’s so embarrassing.”

Jingyi and Zizhen both exclaim in shock, and demand explanations, and generally carry on for a while before noticing that Sizhui hasn’t had any sort of reaction to this at all. Apart from looking very awkward, that is.

“Sizhui?” Zizhen says eventually. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“Well…” Sizhui hesitates.

Jin Ling does not. “Obviously he’s not surprised. Hanguang-jun gave him his courtesy name.”

And with that, the evening dissolves into chaos. Honestly, it seems like it’s what the Yiling Patriarch would want.

It turns out that Zizhen loves discussion conferences.