Chapter Text
The farmer is a sturdy man, with gray at his temples, standing straight still despite his age and the number of years he’d spent bent over, hauling hay and feed to his animals. He tells them he came across the small, ceramic pot at the morning market—the travelling merchant who’d sold it to him, claiming that it granted wishes and balanced the universe all in one fell swoop, had long since left the town. He tells them he’d purchased it to hold birdseed so that his daughter could hang it on the trees near her newlywed house when she’d marry.
“What did you wish for?” Lan Wangji asks.
The farmer never answers. He pushes the pot into Wei Wuxian’s hands, and tells them to take it far away from him and his daughter. He tells them to destroy it, if possible.
It is not possible.
“This,” Wei Wuxian huffs, breathlessly, taking up the large rock in his hands again, “is ridiculous.” He brings it down with the remainder of his strength—which, admittedly, is barely existent after half a day of trying to crush an apparently indestructible, wishing pot. They’ve tried throwing it into open flames as well. He’d considered, briefly, throwing it down a ravine, before Lan Wangji had said that would just end up with the pot in someone else’s unsuspecting hands.
The pot has withstood every blow from Bichen, as well as Wen Ning attempting to simply shatter it with the brute force of his bare hands.
“There’s no harm done as long as no one’s making wishes,” Wen Ning finally says, staring at Wei Wuxian’s attempts to direct Little Apple to crush it beneath her hooves. “Master Wei, you and Hanguang-jun should just take it back to Cloud Recesses. What’s the point in staying in this town to destroy it?”
Wei Wuxian pauses, the pot between the heel of his boot and the dirt road behind the tavern. He glances at Lan Wangji’s raised eyebrows. “All right,” he agrees. “Maybe we can use the Wall of Discipline to break it,” he adds as an afterthought. Lan Wangji hums, wry amusement in his eyes as Wei Wuxian picks up the dusty pot and hands it over to him.
Wen Ning departs first, and Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian remain at the inn for one more night. They take their meal in their room, the tavern downstairs too full of patrons for even another table of two. The pot sits on the windowsill, beside the bed. Wei Wuxian continues to glance at it, periodically, throughout dinner. He’d already gone through his usual tests, placing several talismans and wards on it to determine what sort of energy it stems from. Normally, these sorts of desire magics stemmed from some sentient being—or a part of something that was once sentient—trapped within the object.
He sensed nothing from it, however, and even Lan Wangji hadn’t been able to discern whether it was malicious or benign.
Wei Wuxian absently watches the stream of liquor from the mouth of the jug into the cup Lan Wangji is pouring out for him. He accepts it silently, brow furrowing as he considers how an object without any sort of spiritual energy—whether resentful or not—without any sort of sentience to draw upon, could conjure up materials for granting wishes. Something cannot be conjured from nothing—especially when the wishes of humans were normally rather demanding and dramatic.
“Should we just try it out?” Wei Wuxian says, even though he knows this is a horrible idea—and, from the clear look on Lan Wangji’s face, the other man is of a fairly similar opinion. “We could just ask for something really small. Just to see what happens—maybe then we can figure out how to break it, or at least inhibit it—it’d be worse if we store it without even a ward, right?”
Lan Wangji turns his head, eyeing the pot warily across the room.
Wei Wuxian stands to bring it over to the small, low table. He doesn’t return to his own seat, this time, however, opting to land in Lan Wangji’s lap, legs over the side, arm hooking around Lan Wangji’s neck. For all of Lan Wangji’s eyebrow-raising, an arm easily snakes around Wei Wuxian’s waist and steadies him closer. Wei Wuxian grins, and holds the pot to eye-level. “Make a wish, er-gege.”
Lan Wangji frowns in concentration, letting Wei Wuxian rest the pot on his upturned palm.
A moment passes.
“What did you wish for?” Wei Wuxian asks, when absolutely nothing happens other than Lan Wangji’s frown of concentration shifting into one of confusion.
“A glass of water,” Lan Wangji says, depositing the pot back into Wei Wuxian’s waiting hold.
Wei Wuxian snorts. “It probably can sense that you don’t mean it.” He shakes his head and focuses, sincerely as he can envisioning himself surrounded by limitless pouches of gold. When he begins to doubt whether the pot can conjure material wishes, he begins imagining himself taller—returned to the height of his own body, rather than the one he now inhabits. “All right, maybe it won’t change masters once it’s claimed one—maybe it’s sealed itself—or—oh! Maybe all the wishes were already used up,” he snaps his fingers, slamming the pot down on the table triumphantly. “Honestly, how didn’t we think of that sooner, Lan Zhan?”
Lan Wangji rests his chin against Wei Wuxian’s shoulder, golden eyes warm and liquid as they continue to gaze intently at the pot. “If there were no more wishes,” he murmurs curiously, “why were we told to destroy it?”
Wei Wuxian glances back to the pot as well, one hand idly coming up to drag through Lan Wangji’s dark hair. “Maybe he thought the number would renew with a new master—but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it was spelled for a single cycle. Though,” he tilts his head at the utterly innocuous object, “there’s just—nothing coming from it.” He hovers his palm around it, trying to feel for any tendrils of energy. “Nothing.”
“Mm,” Lan Wangji’s voice vibrates against the skin of Wei Wuxian’s throat. He shivers, as the arm around his waist turns to fingertips digging into his hips. “We’ll bring it back—consult my brother.
“In the meantime?” Wei Wuxian inquires, amused and knowing at the way Lan Wangji’s voice had gone low and deep—even deeper than normal.
Lan Wangji tips Wei Wuxian’s chin so that they are face to face, so that Wei Wuxian’s eyes are filled with molten gold, warm and bottomless. The kiss Wei Wuxian gets pressed to his lips is almost infuriatingly chaste and brief. He loops his arms around Lan Wangji’s neck fully, and lets himself be lifted up and carried onto the bed.
“Lan Zhan?”
They’ve been sitting in the bathwater long enough that it would feel nearly cold if not for the press of their naked bodies against each other. Wei Wuxian was already drifting when he was carried into the hot water, bites and bruises littering his skin, sweat and fluids painted on his body. Now, he’s so close to sleep, he’s certain that he’ll pass out before he’s carried out to be toweled and clothed.
That doesn’t mean he can’t still talk—not when something so seemingly unsolvable still sits atop the low table at the center of the room.
Lan Wangji’s chest rumbles against Wei Wuxian’s back, a sound of assent to let Wei Wuxian know he’s listening. He’s always listening. His hands are caressing up and down Wei Wuxian’s thighs in the water, massaging and preventing him from sliding down in the water.
“What if it needs to be bigger than that?” Wei Wuxian mumbles sleepily—thoughts flowing out of him. “What if it needs to be more than money or looks or—or food or drink or—or normal things?”
Lan Wangji’s hands pause. “Changing an event,” he says, eventually, something odd and fascinated in his voice. “Changing time?”
“Bringing back the dead,” Wei Wuxian continues to mutter out his chain of consciousness, fingertips drumming on Lan Wangji’s forearms in the water. “Saying something you wish you said. Saving someone’s life. Being somewhere you should’ve been. Not marrying your spouse. Not having your child. Not moving somewhere. Taking a post you didn’t—not taking a post you did.”
Lan Wangji is quiet, then, arms wrapping around Wei Wuxian’s waist, holding him close. “Wei Ying.”
“It would have to have resentful energy if it was capable of that, though,” Wei Wuxian says, around a yawn. He leans his head back against Lan Wangji’s shoulder, closing his eyes. The water is no longer warm, but Lan Wangji’s body definitely is. So, so warm. “Or, it would have to have spiritual energy so great that we would’ve been able to feel it the moment we came to this town. You can’t make something from nothing.”
Enough silence and stillness passes that Lan Wangji’s warmth and the soothing feeling of being surrounded by water nearly lulls Wei Wuxian straight into sleep—it wouldn’t be the first time, far from it, that he’s slept in the bath and woken in the morning, dry and warm and clothed in Lan Wangji’s arms.
When Lan Wangji next speaks, it nearly feels like a dream. “What would you wish for?”
Wei Wuxian doesn’t open his eyes, simply shrugging—even his shoulders feel so, so heavy now. He feels weightless, the pull of unconsciousness creeping quickly upon him. He grasps around in the water so that he can use his remaining energy to thread their fingers together. “I don’t know—my parents?” he whispers, wondering if Lan Zhan can even hear him, he’s nearly just mouthing the words against Lan Wangji’s skin. “Just,” another yawn, somehow, he’s so tired, “just to see them—just for a bit.”
He feels Lan Wangji’s lips against his forehead. “Sleep, Wei Ying,” and Wei Wuxian doesn’t need to be told twice.
He wakes up in a forest.
All right—not the entire picture—he wakes up, on the forest floor, pain spasming over his ribs, as if he’s been struck awake by a boulder. He attempts to right himself, the pain at least beginning to ebb away as he takes care to move slowly, sitting up.
Wei Wuxian freezes.
The shock whips through his body like a single, piercing, flash of lightning.
His hands are not Mo Xuanyu’s small hands—the only scars on them from being beaten, scars that healed after a few months of Wei Wuxian inhabiting his body. Instead, he has familiar sword calluses on his palms and fingers. He looks lower, taking stock of his clothes—the regal pale and dark violets of Lotus Pier—of the Jiang Sect.
He stares.
Suibian is at his hip, and this is not Mo Xuanyu’s body—and these are Jiang Cheng’s robes.
Or rather, they are Sect Leader robes—the robes Jiang Fengmian also once wore.
Perhaps, even more jarring, is that Wei Wuxian doesn’t recognize some of the adornments on his belt as Jiang Cheng’s or Jiang Fengmian’s or—or at all. He recognizes them as things he would imagine he himself might choose to wear—a strange, strange feeling where they are familiar in that he feels preference towards them but has no memory of them.
One glance around at his surroundings, and he realizes he recognizes this forest.
“Uncle!”
Jin Ling?
Wei Wuxian sees a familiar figure running towards him through the thicket, and relief floods through him. The relief, however, is short-lived when he realizes Jiang Cheng will be nearby and if this is the type of paranormal situation where reality has shifted and Wei Wuxian must explain his existence all over again, he doesn’t know if it will be easier or harder to muddle through with Jiang Cheng, his temper, and Zidian crackling at the ready on his finger.
“Uncle—what—what was that?” Jin Ling appears, gasping for breath after his quick pace, doubled over with his hands on his knees, peering down at Wei Wuxian with a furrow between his brows.
Wei Wuxian’s head snaps to the side so fast, he thinks he hears his own neck crick.
“Uncle?” Jin Ling gets down on one knee, looking and sounding even more concerned as Wei Wuxian turns back to him when it’s clear there is no Jiang Cheng—or anybody, for that matter—behind him or on either side of him.
It’s a split second before Wei Wuxian hears a very unfortunately familiar bark, and Fairy is bounding over at the speed of sound, right towards his lap.
He’s jumped up onto the branches of the nearest tree before Jin Ling even has time to startle backwards, nearly knocked over by Wei Wuxian himself. Wei Wuxian registers, briefly, then, that he’s nearly flown up onto this tree—the surge of spiritual energy easy, warm, and strong at his core.
The likes of which he hasn’t felt in a long, long time.
“Uncle—what—uncle, what are you doing?” Jin Ling shouts, sounding increasingly agitated and alarmed. He’s staring up at Wei Wuxian, and then down at Fairy’s wagging tail in equal parts irritation and utter confusion.
“Why is she here?” Wei Wuxian yells back, from the tree branch he’s determinedly kneeling on. He doesn’t know why Jin Ling is suddenly calling him uncle, but he does know that if Jin Ling knows who he is, in whatever terrible reality he’s been spirited away into where he still has his golden core and his sword and is wearing the purple that’s never matched him, then Jin Ling should very well know why he doesn’t bring his godforsaken dog near Wei Wuxian.
Jin Ling stares harder.
“Lan Zhan! ” Wei Wuxian shuts his eyes, and calls, more on instinct than anything else, if he were to admit to himself. He doesn’t even know where the magic of that terrible pot had deposited Lan Wangji, but if he’s nearby, Wei Wuxian is going to take that cursed chance.
He opens his eyes to see Jin Ling still utterly confused, but shooing Fairy away at least far enough that she becomes a furry speck in the distance. There is, very apparently, no Lan Wangji in the vicinity—there is, however, a gaggle of Jiang Sect disciples now arriving and staring up at Wei Wuxian with even greater confusion than what is on Jin Ling’s face.
“Sect Leader?” one of them asks, in a hushed, disbelieving voice, eyes trained directly onto Wei Wuxian’s face.
Wei Wuxian nearly falls out of the tree.
“I think whatever that blast was hit him,” Jin Ling says, out of the corner of his mouth, one of his hands on his hips as he frowns over at the disciples. “The energy wasn’t here anymore when I came, but—”
Wei Wuxian’s mind tunes out the rest. Sect Leader instead ringing in his ears with foreboding incessance.
When he tunes back into this farce of a reality, Jin Ling is waving up to him. “Uncle? I called Fairy off. Maybe, you should come down?” his tone is as if he is speaking to a spooked animal, and Wei Wuxian’s only thought as he hops out faintly is that he doesn’t think he’s ever really heard the Jin Ling that he knows speak like that. The tone is more reminiscent of how Sizhui would speak.
All right.
So—there is no Lan Wangji to be seen, Wei Wuxian is apparently Sect Leader of the Jiang Sect. Jiang Cheng is nowhere to be seen, and Wei Wuxian is also apparently not afraid of dogs, and Jin Ling treats and calls him as if he is his own, biological maternal uncle. He thinks he would be truly certain if he’d wished anything as absolutely ludicrous as this before he fell asleep in the vicinity of that pot, but even in his own wildest dreams, would he ever be able to even imagine any of this. He’s never cared all that much, in retrospect, about being deathly averse to dogs—he certainly has never wanted to be Sect Leader—and nowadays, his relationship with Jin Ling doesn’t even leave anything to be desired.
Jin Ling is still watching him warily as Wei Wuxian dusts himself off and walks up to his—well—nephew. “Maybe you should fly together with me,” the boy suggests, eyeing Wei Wuxian up and down. “I told everyone to head back first—unless you really want to finish up today, but I don’t think there’s anything out there anymore. It’s probably fled, whatever it was.”
For the first time, Wei Wuxian is able to take a good, long, close look at Jin Ling.
Everything about him seems unchanged visibly from how Wei Wuxian knows him. Perhaps, a little less in height—a year or two younger—closer to the age Wei Wuxian first met the boy in when he was reincarnated. It isn’t until Wei Wuxian’s gaze falls to his belt that he jerks slightly, blinking. He doesn’t recognize the sword—only that it isn’t Suihua.
“I’m fine,” he says, eventually. “Just—disoriented.” He looks around, one more time, at the forest. He wonders if there’s any significance that he awoke in the same place where he was found by the people most closely tied to him in his first life when he was reincarnated into his second. “Let’s go.”
Nothing could have prepared him for what awaited him at Lotus Pier.
For who awaited him.
“Mother!” Jin Ling calls briskly, and Wei Wuxian stands as still as stone at the edge of the landing port—close to the water, his entire body so numb that he doesn’t even register Jin Ling letting Fairy down from his sword to run amok.
He feels his lungs squeeze, as if refusing to let in any of the air Wei Wuxian is inhaling through gritted teeth. His body runs icy cold, then scorching hot, and then back to feeling as if someone has thrown him into a river in the depths of winter. He thinks maybe his heart really stops beating for a solid moment. His eyes feel too warm, and too tight, and his throat is so dry that he coughs trying to wet his mouth again.
Jiang Yanli is here, standing in front of him, patting her son’s cheeks and kissing the top of his head neatly—eyes sparkling, smile as quiet and kind and warm as Wei Wuxian remembers. She is here, turning her eyes to him, the beginnings of lines at the corners of her eyes—the age she would be if Wei Wuxian hadn’t spiralled out of control, if Wei Wuxian hadn’t destroyed everything he tried to save. She never had the strongest cultivation—she would age, slower than just another human, but sooner than Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng.
Jiang Yanli is alive.
He wants to call out to her, but the boulder on his chest refuses to budge. The hand around his throat refuses to loosen.
“A-Xian,” she says, smiling at him, hands folded over her robes—a mix of Jiang lavenders and pale, Jin golds. “Did the hunt go well?”
By the skin of his teeth, Wei Wuxian swallows down a sob and exchanges it for a smile. “Shijie,” he says, and thinks that he’d managed that without a break in his voice—his voice, his head notices now, dizzy at the thought, not Mo Xuanyu’s. “It—we might have to go back again. Not much to find this time,” he adds, keeping his response as broad as he possibly could about a nighthunt he has no memory of organizing.
At her side, Jin Ling is still looking strangely at Wei Wuxian. He can’t exactly blame him—all he can do is play this part as normally as he knows how, so that the amount of people who suspect something odd doesn’t increase from everyone who saw him scale a tree over a phobia that no one in this universe apparently realizes he ever had—or, rather, he supposes, a fear that whoever he is in this universe doesn’t have.
For some reason, something that he can only explain as instinct stills his tongue on inquiring about Jiang Cheng.
A day passes, and Wei Wuxian gleans a number of things about who he is here, but not much about why any of it came to be.
He sleeps in the Sect Leader’s chambers—the ones that had belonged to Jiang Fengmian and Madame Yu, and then Jiang Cheng after Lotus Pier was rebuilt. This Lotus Pier is not like either of the ones he’d remembered. Instead, some odd mix of the Lotus Pier of his childhood and one that he had never experienced. The disciples are more carefree, the hierarchy between martial siblings looser, and they all greet him with respect but many of them tease him and fully expect to be teased back.
Jiang Yanli and Jin Ling leave for Lanling in the evening, and directly before their departure is when Wei Wuxian learns, through a passing mention from Jiang Yanli, that Wei Wuxian has a niece—Jin Ling has a younger sister. Jin Zixuan is alive, and he and Jiang Yanli have a daughter. A second child. Just some few years younger than Jin Ling.
He sees them off on the boat headed outwards on the river, against the setting sun, and wonders what the hell he’s supposed to do now.
Wei Wuxian falls asleep in a bed that is too big, too unfamiliar, and wonders if Lan Wangji was also transported by the pot into some nonsensical alternate reality. Or—he wonders if Lan Wangji is in this same reality, as confused as Wei Wuxian is. He wonders, if it is none of those, what could have possibly happened that the Lan Wangji of this world seems to have nothing at all to do with this Wei Wuxian.
He hasn’t slept alone in years.
There are no more surprises on the second day, and Wei Wuxian thinks he does a passable job at muddling through everything he’s seen Jiang Fengmian and Jiang Cheng do on a daily basis—at the very least, it seems as if this world’s Wei Wuxian had set the sect up so that the disciples more or less run themselves. There also seem to be no cultivation world crises at the moment, thanking all higher beings, so while Wei Wuxian knows he should be wary about the odd peacetime, he’s also grateful that he doesn’t need to actually lead the sect through anything particularly dire.
He thinks he has quite enough on his plate trying to determine any conceivable way of undoing whatever was done to land him here—it would help, probably, if he could trace back to what the hell the pot thought he was wishing about to transport him to this version of his world in the first place.
Wei Wuxian was ever only told about his mother by Jiang Fengmian—once, when he was young, and then never again. Just the once was overheard by Madame Yu, and the already tenuous relationship between her and her husband, the complicated begrudging allowance she felt towards Wei Wuxian, worsened exponentially after that single instance.
He was told he was his mother’s spitting image—his father’s height and build once he was older. Some of his martial elders at the time had let him know about when they’d trained with his father, how he was quiet and taciturn—how all of the straight-laced tension in him would ebb away the moment his mother was present nearby. He was told, that once—that lone instance—by Jiang Fengmian that his mother was beautiful.
On the third day, Cangse Sanren lands in Lotus Pier.
Before Wei Wuxian can even begin to wonder how he can pass this off—how he can unfreeze himself, how can he stop staring, what does he do, how he can be normal, how can he speak—what does he say—she has already run into his arms.
He wonders, the thought dulled by shock as he numbly raises his own arms to wrap around her in response, how he knew that it was her without a trace of doubt. He wonders—as he breathes her in, the top of her head grazing just beneath his chin. She smells nostalgic—like the dust on a travelling road, like the leaves in a forest after it’s rained—she smells like something from the dreams he hasn’t had since he was a boy, newly picked from the cold streets and tucked into a warm bed for the first time that he could remember.
When she pulls back, all too soon, he can’t help his eyes from roaming over every inch of her face.
Jiang Cheng is Madame Yu’s mirror, sharing the exact shade of stubborn violet in their cold gazes. Jiang Yanli is warm, with Jiang Fengmian’s smile in her own and Madame Yu’s sharp beauty mixed into the sunlight of her expressions. Jin Ling is his father’s son when he scowls, when he’s frowning at his target, about to release an arrow—he is his mother’s son when he lets himself smile quietly at Jingyi’s jokes.
Sizhui has shadows of Wen Ning in the way his eyes are set deep into his face, the high nose of the Wen Clan—Wen Ning and Wen Qing share it as well, the bright-eyed, delicate bearing. Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen are different shades of the same, elegant, beautiful blue—something noble and brilliant in their handsome features. As different as they are, even, Nie Huaisang and Nie Mingjue could never hide that same thick, jetblack hair—the strong brows and striking cheekbones; etched on more softly on one brother than the other.
Wei Wuxian has never resembled anyone. No one resembles Wei Wuxian.
Only when he breathed in Mo Xuanyu’s body did he finally look into a mirror and find, staring back at him, the defined, upturned nose unmistakable of the Jin Clan—the round eyes, and pale skin. A stolen body, stolen blood, stolen lineage. Nothing that was his own.
Now—now—the eyes that are blinking up at him in bemusement—are his eyes. He sees himself in the twist of her smile, the dancing expressions across her face, the careless way her robes are tied together, as if she was windswept on her flight here and couldn’t be bothered to pull herself together even upon alighting from her sword.
A dull ache stabs through his chest at the thought of having lost this, too, in his own reality. He’s seen her face now, absorbed it into his memories with the full knowledge that he resembles someone—he resembles her—but in his world, he no longer has the body that does. He no longer has her gray eyes, almost feline in their shape—he no longer has her laughing, upturned lips—he does not have her flowing, straight, dark hair; her warm skin tone, her tall nose.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she says, with an amused tilt of her head. Her hands squeeze his arms. Her voice rings like bells. “It’s only been a month—I did ask you to come with me, last time. Have you forgotten your mother already, Sect Leader?”
Wei Wuxian wants to laugh. He wants to scream. He wants to cry.
As with Jiang Yanli, he settles for a smile instead. “Never.”
The week goes by in a daze.
His mother stays at Lotus Pier often enough, it seems, that she has her own quarters. She never remains for more than a week at a time, however, he finds out. The last time she was here for more than a week was during the war. This is all he is able to find out without arousing attention—he isn’t able to discern what war or which war.
He never asks, but he’s certain his father is still dead in this world.
His mother drinks more than even he can, and two nights before she’s set to leave, they both get drunk, just the two of them, in the Sect Leader’s private parlor. She’s slumped back on her hands, away from the table while he leans against the wall beneath the window screens. “You look so much like your father,” she murmurs, and her expression is caught between happiness and sorrow. Wei Wuxian feels the floor moving beneath him and, as is becoming terribly usual since he’s landed in this reality, doesn’t know what to say.
“You’ve told me this, before,” Wei Wuxian tries, whispering, wondering if he’ll be able to pass all of this tomorrow as the alcohol speaking, “haven’t you?”
She laughs, and he wonders if her cultivation is so strong that she hasn’t aged since the day of her death in his world. It doesn’t look like it. She looks so young—she looks like him. “I know you must be tired of hearing it. At least, you don’t have to hear it from everyone else.”
“I look more like you,” he says, watching her twirl her cup in her fingers before she trades it for the entire jar of liquor completely, holding it by the round base in a way that is so hauntingly familiar—so recognizable to him—that he shivers subconsciously.
She hums. “When you were small, you looked much more like me.” Her smile shifts into a grin, all teeth, at odds with the softness of the dark wisps of her falling around her cheeks. “If you were a little less reckless, Sect Leader, not always throwing yourself in front of the bloodthirstiest ghoul you can find, others would see your father more in you.”
He can’t help it. He laughs along with her.
Somehow, after a week of trying to find out who he is from vaguely loaded questions to his disciples, it feels like he’s breathing fresh air again finally to hear that he isn’t so changed from who he knows he is. “You can’t tell me he never chased after danger, either. He married you.”
Her eyebrows shoot up, the amusement bright in her gaze. “I’m not quite certain what you are implying, Sect Leader, but it would be best for you to close your mouth and pick up your drink.”
The warmth in Wei Wuxian’s chest spreads to his fingertips as he does what his mother says and takes up the remaining filled jar, popping open the cork and disregarding his cup entirely.
He doesn’t want her to go.
He tells her as much, while she’s wrapped in his arms again, out on the docks, surrounded by floating lotuses and the warm evening air. He tells her that he wants to go with her—he silently wonders why this Wei Wuxian hadn’t gone with her when she’d asked the last time she was here, he wonders why this Wei Wuxian even agreed to become Sect Leader when this life was never for him. He wonders if this Wei Wuxian constantly searched after dangerous beings, undead and alive, in the neighboring forests in order to quell what he couldn’t satisfy as a Sect Leader otherwise—stationary, and law-abiding.
She holds his face in her hands, and strokes his hair back. “I don’t think I’ve seen you wear it long in years,” she muses curiously.
He swallows, nervous—it was true that he’d woken in the forest with his hair pulled away from his face, worn piled on his head around the Yunmeng Jiang crown in intricate braids and pins. He’s worn it plain, over his shoulders with only half of it piled through the crown since then, and has only received strange but silent glances in the first few days from his disciples. He hopes a mother’s intuition won’t undo all of his other efforts to remain inconspicuous.
“I felt like a change,” he says simply.
Something sharpens in her eyes, in stark contrast to her perpetual smile, and he wonders if this is how Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli always felt when Madame Yu’s gaze honed in on them the way only a mother could. His body tenses, anticipating a question that he finally won’t be able to answer—a question he won’t be able to explain.
“I should be back within the month,” she says, her hands falling back down to her sides. She unsheathes her sword, and even though he realizes the question isn’t going to come—not today, at least—his body doesn’t relax. She steps lightly onto her sword, and it begins to rise. “Don’t get into too much trouble, before then, A-Xian,” she says, her voice dancing in the air as she flies away.
The day after his mother leaves, Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen, of all people, arrive at Lotus Pier.
Both of them alive and whole.
Xiao Xingchen is the one to greet Wei Wuxian first—the clear, dark eyes that he hasn’t seen in nearly two entire lifetimes. Song Lan bows to him next, radiating quiet contentment at his friend’s side. The sight of both men makes something in Wei Wuxian’s body thrum with longing.
“Shijie came before us, I believe,” Xiao Xingchen says, and Wei Wuxian feels a brief second of panic—wondering if one thing that needs to remain the same is the fate that these two suffered in his world, and if there was time to prevent that from happening here, or if Wei Wuxian would just be one of the many to witness it all over again. “We were supposed to come along with her, but we were waylaid.”
“You took up some cases?” Wei Wuxian asks, as they walk with each other down into the sect’s keep. He waves a hand at some of the disciples who are his close staff, signalling them to prepare quarters for the two cultivators. “Anything interesting?”
Song Lan cracks a smile, exchanging the brightest look Wei Wuxian has ever seen on him in any of his lifetimes.
“Some townspeople on the border of Yunmeng coming across a house of cursed objects—nothing harmful, just,” Xiao Xingchen also looks amused at the glance given by his partner, “interesting.” He throws Wei Wuxian a smile that somehow manages to be graceful even though it is utterly wicked—Wei Wuxian thinks they are familiar in this world, as familiar as childhood friends. It is a smile that he’s shared with Jiang Cheng or Nie Huaisang, when recounting their time as adolescents.
He never thought he would see such expressions on cultivators so peerlessly decorous. This Wei Wuxian must be so, so intensely familiar to them. The pang in his chest is sharper than he’d expected at that thought—at the consideration that they are to this version of him what Jiang Cheng was in his world. Were they raised together, somehow? Did they only meet as adolescents when Xiao Xingchen came to cultivate with his mother’s teacher?
“Well,” Wei Wuxian stretches a welcoming arm in towards the parlor of his quarters. “Don’t spare me a single detail, and I’ll keep the tea flowing. It’s been documents and meetings all week, even my mother said she was bored to death just watching me.”
Xiao Xingchen laughs lightly at that and Song Lan gives another shadow of a smile.
Since arriving, there are a handful of things Wei Wuxian has endeavored not to think about until he’s managed to allocate enough investigation and alone time for himself. Unfortunately, such time is harder to come by than he’d anticipated for a Sect Leader.
Following Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan’s arrivals, Wei Wuxian has another boatload of documents to sign, an invitation for a conference in Lanling in two weeks’ time, and he goes on a nighthunt with the two cultivators and no Jiang disciples at all. They deal with a rather standard cropping-up of vengeful spirits due to a few serial murders by highway robbers happening along the more dangerous roads through the Yunmeng border.
Wei Wuxian tries not to think about how much precisely he never realized he missed the feeling of Suibian in his hand, his golden core filled to the brim with vital spiritual energy—pulsing with every burst of spells he throws from one hand, with every slash of his sword he pulls with his other. He tries not to think about how long it’s been since he felt like this—since he danced around evil spirits without having to balance his own harnessing of their power in order to fight against them. He tries not to think about how quick and strong and light it is to move in his original body—how strong his cultivation is at the age he never reached in his own body, with his own core.
After the hunt, he goes to the Ancestral Hall without thinking.
He doesn’t bother cleaning himself up first, doesn’t think about how disrespectful and inappropriate it is to be dredging himself covered in sweat and dirt into the hall lit with candles and stacked with the clan’s gravestones. Suibian is still pulsing with power and hunger at his hip as he stumbles his way into the one place he’s avoided this entire time, afraid and yet knowing of what he’ll find there.
He falls to his knees in front of Madame Yu and Jiang Fengmian’s stones, and finds a third one there nestled at the center. There is a small wooden divot amidst the candles in the middle of all these stones, Zidian cradled and sealed into it beneath a small pane of glass—no one else to wield it—perhaps its last wielder dying before it could be given to its next master.
He stares at the name engraved on the frontmost tablet, the one closest to Zidian’s case.
The spiritual energy whirling inside of him feels like an accusation—a condemnation. The purple of his robes, reflected on the shining surfaces of the stones, is jarring. The crown holding his hair up feels like thorns digging into his scalp. He sees himself around the name on the third gravestone—his own face, what he wears, what he is here, and bile rises in his throat.
None of this is his.
It shouldn’t be.
On his way to his rooms, he spots Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan seated near the water on the veranda leading out from the guest quarters. Their heads are close together, limbs tangled up in each other—so clearly visible even despite the darkness and their robes. Wei Wuxian pulls his eyes away from them quickly, walking onwards and trying not to dread with such certainty the empty room, the empty bed, waiting for him.
He knows he won’t sleep much tonight. He hasn’t sleep much at all, since he came here, with no warm arms to pull him in, no low voice, no scent of sandalwood and home.
Jiang Yanli comes back on the same day that the two wandering cultivators return to wandering. She’s alone this time, stating that Jin Ling and Jin Fei are helping with the upcoming cultivation conference now that both of them are old enough to start becoming acquainted with sect duties. She lets him know that she’ll most likely be staying to help him with Jiang Sect duties until they both depart for Lanling together.
“I also haven’t come to see them in a while,” she says, as they walk through the pier. He follows the gentle motion of her shoulder towards the general direction of the Ancestral Hall. There’s no trace of sadness in her eyes as she speaks. Jiang Cheng must have died close to the time that his parents did, if it was so long ago.
Killed, Wei Wuxian’s mind corrects—a beat too late. Jiang Cheng must have been killed.
He doesn’t notice how much time passes with him ensconced in ponderings of which step of the war must Jiang Cheng have been caught up in—where was Wei Wuxian not present that changed something so drastic. His mind whirls with various scenarios—it’s so difficult to imagine where else could he have been if not the forefront. He thinks that even if he’d wandered with his mother rather than remain in any sect to train, he would’ve still followed the call to arms when it was needed.
“A-Xian?” Jiang Yanli’s small hand taps at his elbow. He tears his gaze away from the wooden sign atop the doorway of the hall, setting his gaze on her. She’s a mother, in this world—a mother of two children, and a wife, for many years already. She’s also as familiar with him, clearly, as she was in his own world.
He must have been close with the Jiang Cheng of this world as well, then.
“Sorry,” he says, and the smile he pastes on his face feels brittle, this time. From the look in her eyes, she’s also hardly convinced by it. “I’ve been busy.”
She slips her hand into his and squeezes, placing her other hand on top. Something burns behind his eyes—it’s been long, so long, since he’s felt her hands, and the warmth of them. “You’re always busy,” she says lightly. “You’ve never been bothered by that. A-Xian?”
He breaks her gaze because he doesn’t think he can look at her face while he says this. He doesn’t think he can say it at all, and he’s proven by the way his voice breaks, trembles, as he breathes out quietly, “He would’ve done better. This is his, not mine.”
She steps in front of him, until all he can see is her. The expression in her eyes is fierce and gentle all at once and he’s missed her so much that it permeates his entire being—it fills his lungs and grips his heart. He thinks that this is something she’s heard before—it isn’t hard for him to believe, that if Wei Wuxian in this world is still him, at the core, he never would’ve wanted this and he would’ve confided to her dozens upon dozens of times that it shouldn’t be him seated on that blooming lotus (the first time he was required to call a meeting sitting there, every particle in him was revolting against it).
“The decision was mine,” she says, firmly. “Or do you keep forgetting who I am? I don’t count as part of the clan because I’m not a cultivator? I’m not the last of my family? The decision was mine, A-Xian, and I couldn’t rebuild alone—I can’t lead the way that was needed. But I could choose someone who I knew, over the graves of my parents and my brother, could. A-Xian, I chose you.”
He lowers his eyes from her face and the thought refuses to leave his mind, rebelling and shaking with the injustice of it all.
You shouldn’t have had to.
He finds out that night, his head pillowed on Jiang Yanli’s lap, her hands stroking through his hair (if he’d been too old for this at nineteen, he was definitely far—far—too old for it now), that Jiang Cheng had been killed in Xuanwu’s Cave. He’d accepted the call to Qishan, to protect the sect as all the heirs who were called did, and never returned from the Nightless City.
Wei Wuxian had been with his mother and father, trying to chase Xue Yang and imprisoning Jin Guangyao (Meng Yao—Jin Guangyao never existed in this world) in the process. They’d found the bits and pieces of the Tiger Seal in the former’s possession and had confirmed what Nie Mingjue had already suspected at the time. Both men had been executed, never leaving the walls of the Unclean Realm alive.
“The war would’ve been longer—worse,” she says, her fingers as soothing as he remembered, “if you hadn’t been there. You can’t be everywhere, A-Xian.”
He learns that Xue Yang had killed Wei Changze, and that Jiang Cheng had been killed making sure everyone else escaped the cave.
Wei Wuxian and his mother had continued to wander, joined by Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan, never joining in the fighting again for the remainder of the war because they were not soldiers—they had done what they could, suffered losses, and they would not be commanded.
He knows then, somehow, there was no hoping in this world for Wen Ning or Wen Qing.
His mouth opens and closes on a sob that he barely holds back in his throat.
A-Yuan.
He still has heard nothing, not even the barest mention, of the name he misses the most.
He wonders if that would be the final blow—if he were to fly to the mountain that is no longer his home in this world, to the house that he has never stepped foot in in this reality, and find that it is empty. Unlived in. He wonders if the reason he has heard hair nor hide of someone who is surely still prominent even in this cultivation world is because Wei Wuxian’s absence at some point or another has caused a ripple effect in that direction as well.
He wonders if the Wei Wuxian of this world even knows how much he doesn’t have.
Ten Jiang disciples accompany him and Jiang Yanli to Carp Tower.
Wei Wuxian discovers that Jin Guangshan is, unfortunately, still alive and Sect Leader. He also discovers that Jin Zixun is also still very much alive, but has no choice but to quell his tongue around Wei Wuxian considering their positions in this life—even more so now that Wei Wuxian is the respected, adopted brother of his cousin’s wife. Wei Wuxian would like to believe he’s left that level of pettiness behind, but if he wasn’t around to save Wen Ning, Wen Qing, and Sizhui from him in this life, the least he can do is to insult Jin Zixun directly to his face, and watch the man turn purple while utterly unable to retaliate.
Nie Mingjue is dead, with no Jin Guangyao to have shortened the war by betraying Wen Ruohan. Nie Huaisang is Sect Leader, and when he arrives, the air leaves Wei Wuxian’s body in a way that he sorely had not expected. He’d welcomed all sorts of other surprises from the people he’s known, but this—perhaps this was not even remotely on what he thought he’d ever see in any reality.
Perhaps, this is just the natural course of things. Perhaps, Wei Wuxian should have expected this—with no Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian to ever protect him, without Jin Guangyao to plot against while hiding his true character, without a brother even earlier on in the war to shield him and lead the sect. Nie Huaisang is everything Wei Wuxian had seen in that single, split second of cunning when they’d spoken for the last time of Jin Guangyao’s demise. Only, here, he wears it as his true face—no smile, no cowardly head-shaking, still a fan in his hand, the eyes above it calculating and steady.
“Sect Leader Wei,” he greets, the fan snapping shut with a flick of his wrist. The smile that passes over his mouth is a shadow of anything Wei Wuxian has ever known from his old friend. “Even we heard about your enthusiastic ghoul infestation last month all the way over in Qinghe.”
Wei Wuxian would honestly, if he could just say a singular thing to his self from this world, let him know that running after the undead was not the way to curb the utter tedium of being a Sect Leader. He knows that this is mildly hypocritic, but the Wei Wuxian in this world still has a golden core—he has no excuse for the dead spirits obsession. Also, Wei Wuxian is running out of Sect-Leader-ly reactions to give every time someone apparently questioned him about his infamous, necromancing plights.
“Anything to break up the monotony of paperwork,” Wei Wuxian says, smiling, and praying that this version of him isn’t so dead-faced serious with everyone who isn’t his family, adopted and otherwise, that this won’t be terribly out of character.
The rise of Nie Huaisang’s eyebrows lets Wei Wuxian know that he’s most likely cutting it close, but it isn’t as if dimension travelling is the first thing people suspect when someone acts strangely. He thinks his old friend’s eyes also pass with sharp curiosity over Wei Wuxian’s hair—there truly just hadn’t been enough time this morning before they had to depart for Wei Wuxian to employ Jiang Yanli’s or some disciple’s help with weaving his hair into whatever monstrosity he’d had it worn when he first woke up in this world. He honestly has no idea how early his self in this reality woke up every morning to do that all himself.
Lan Zhan would probably get along even better with this world’s me.
The thought hurts him as much as it amuses him.
Thankfully, he’s saved from further scrutiny by a small weight that hurtles itself at his middle, little arms wrapping tight around his stomach. He looks down into dark, round eyes, and a face that has him reeling—just a little—taking him back to the first time he came to Lotus Pier and met the strong, gentle girl who’d run after him whenever he took off, scared, from his nightmares. “You promised me you’d take me nighthunting before my birthday,” the girl immediately huffs, and Wei Wuxian can’t help but grin so widely that his cheeks ache.
He tugs at one of the braids framing her face. “If you visited with your mother, maybe I would,” he says, and she huffs again, her arms squeezing him tighter.
“A-Fei!” Jin Ling comes storming through the mingling crowd of cultivators within Carp Tower’s welcoming hall. “We’re not supposed to be in here—you’re definitely not supposed to be in here,” he says, prying her off of Wei Wuxian. He’s dragging her off by the arm, even though she’s putting up a good enough fight against her brother that her dress will definitely have wrinkles after all this. “But you really did promise us,” Jin Ling mutters, looking at Wei Wuxian meaningfully before he finishes pulling his sister out of the hall.
He watches after them, the grin still unable to leave his face. It’s odd to see Jin Ling here, as the oldest, when Wei Wuxian always had seen him only with Sizhui, Jingyi, and Zizhen, the youngest of the three—not quite acting the part of the younger brother, but still depending on them enough to be somewhat of one.
That hollow ache pulses again when he thinks of the three boys—when he thinks of how one of them will never have grown this old, would’ve never held a sword or strummed his guqin.
“Sect Leader Wei.”
The air in the room, in Wei Wuxian’s lungs, seems to press out of him in a single, expelled breath. The sound in the room seems to fall to a dull, ignorable roar. The voice—this voice—comes from behind him, and that’s the only reason he lets himself have a split moment to close his eyes and feel the rush of relief. His heartbeat is already speeding forward its thumping in his chest, loud and insistent.
He isn’t dead.
Wei Wuxian turns, and finds himself first looking into Jingyi’s startled eyes—Jingyi, whose hands are resting on the handles of a wooden wheelchair, upon which Lan Wangji is seated, Bichen hanging off of one armrest, his robes fluttering empty over the right footrest.