Work Text:
jiang yanli grows up at her mother’s knee.
long before jiang cheng or wei wuxian come into the picture, before she is even bestowed her courtesy name, a toddling a-li takes tea in the quiet lotus house attached to the main quarters.
already, she is the gem of the jiang sect, jewel of the violet spider’s eye, and yu ziyuan will move heaven and earth for her daughter.
yu ziyuan did not earn the title of violet spider by being soft, or gentle; she grew up as the third lady of meishan yu, the spare of the spare. had she not fought with the ferocity of a beast and an intellect as sharp as her chosen weapon, she would not have been allowed to learn cultivation at all.
yu ziyuan fought her entire life to avoid becoming the trophy wife of some rich man who cared little for her, suffocated under the weight of a loveless marriage in a foreign sect. she fought to be strong. she would shatter the expectations of all those who looked upon her if she died trying.
she was strong, but she failed in the ways it mattered, couldn’t avoid the betrothal; the spare of the spare is an easy price to pay for the ear of the yunmeng jiang sect head. spiders do not have razor-sharp claws to remove or gleaming ivory fangs to file down, but she was chained down all the same. and she will be damned if her a-li suffers the same fate.
so she takes tea with her daughter, and jiang yanli grows up with her mother’s bitterly learned lessons whispered in her ear, away from the prying eyes of servants or her father’s gentle touch.
yu ziyuan loves her daughter, but she is not soft, not gentle. cruel to be kind is the motto by which she teaches her daughter, and the ultimate kindness—one that will persist long after any memories of soft encouragements and tender forehead-kisses fade away—is sparing her daughter of her fate. if she must beat the weakness out of yanli to do so, she will.
so a-li learns to grip a sword before she can run, learns to find peoples’ weaknesses and crush them before she’s taught the history of her sect. her cultivation is not weak, because she is a woman. she cannot afford to be weak in a world that will prey on her if she lets it.
so she is not weak.
(her mother makes sure of this.)
but jiang yanli is not only her mother’s daughter.
she sees the way that the disciples flinch at the swish of her mother’s robes, how the servants don’t dare to meet the violet spider’s eyes. jiang yanli is not weak, but—
no, she thinks. i will rule with love, not fear.
(it’s not a question of if she will rule—that is a given. she knows she will, it is only the particulars that need to be hammered out.)
so she takes early mornings to help the cooks prepare breakfast. head cook—who has been at yunmeng jiang sect so long that nobody remembers her by any other name, not even the sect leader—gives jiang yanli a gimlet stare and promptly puts her to work. cook’s gnarled hands still slice open lotus pods better than any other, and her almost toothless mouth still barks out orders that are never disobeyed.
jiang yanli, as in all things, settles herself down with gleaming eyes and learns.
and so the servants, when they see her, bow to hide their smiles rather than their fear.
when jiang yanli is ten, has just formed her golden core, yu ziyuan storms into jiang fengmian’s quarter and tells him, lowly, dangerously, that jiang yanli will be heir, not jiang wanyin.
look at your daughter, she demands. nobody in this sect’s history has formed a core this young. she is already my heir, and she will be yours too.
jiang fengmian would never have declared her heir on his own. but in this, as in most other matters, he cannot help but bow before his wife’s might. he fears and hopes for his daughter in equal measure.
jin zixuan is not an appropriate suitor for jiang yanli the sect heir. maybe in another life, maybe if she was jiang yanli, firstborn and daughter of yunmeng jiang's sect leader, she would have a future with him—but no. jiang yanli, heir of yunmeng jiang, will never be the madame jin that jinlin tai needs. (she will never be a stranger in her own home, as her mother was before her.) any wife or husband of hers will be taken into the jiang household or not at all.
she spares a second to mourn what might have been, and moves on.
the servants bow to jiang yanli first, not to her father.
the whole of yunmeng knows by the time yanli is twenty. freshly returned from a study retreat in the cloud recesses—a retreat everyone knows is a pretext for a meeting of the gusu lan and yunmeng jiang sect heirs—she has been making diplomatic rounds for years now, leads the sect in all but name.
jiang fengmian, soft as ever, has mostly resigned himself to his daughter’s ascendancy. his one concession to his vanity as a father is this: greeting her at the gates of the cloud recesses, come to escort her home.
(jiang yanli allows him this: she knows that he has, in many ways, lost his daughter, was left with an heir in her place.)
when the fleet of disciples in yunmeng-purple robes approaches the landing pier, jiang yanli and jiang fengmian keeping pace at the front, they're greeted with the sight of the entire yunmeng household—including yu ziyuan, whose robes are extra ornate and crown extra pointy today, and jiang cheng and wei wuxian, who are plainly scrambling over themselves to catch a glimpse of their sister first.
(as much as a-xian would yelp at the descriptor and a-cheng would grumble at being compared to his brother, they remind her of puppies—gangly, overexcitable, utterly devoted. it makes her smile.)
this is mostly a mostly-normal reception, bar the presence of her mother, but jiang yanli has only a moment to wonder: the moment she steps off of her sword and onto semi-solid ground, in the eyesight of every dockmaster and vendor on the pier, the rows upon rows of servants and disciples bow deeply to jiang yanli as one, their foreheads almost brushing the ground.
in front of them, solemn for once, her brothers have done the same, jiang cheng’s back inclined far more than necessary. protective of her as always, she can’t help but note fondly. (jiang cheng has always been the first to bristle at those who question the legitimacy of her position, the propriety of a woman leader. he has been telling the world in ways loud and quiet that he will never be heir if he has anything to say about it since he was eight and she was ten.)
even her proud mother, who she has never known to as much as bend her neck, has sunk into a bow—exactly the right angle for greeting the head of household.
it is only as jiang yanli steps forward, walking into a sea of purple, that they begin to rise, eyes following her path as if she were the sun and they caught up in her orbit. it isn’t far from the truth, after all.
yu ziyuan’s face is fiercely proud, and the look she aims at jiang fengmian is triumphant. look at our daughter, it says. look what she has become.
jiang fengmian can only smile back. she is his daughter too, after all.
in an hour, the entirety of yunmeng knows. by the end of the week, the whole cultivation world has heard: jiang fengmian is stepping down—and jiang yanli, twenty, is the first female yunmeng jiang head in written memory.
in this life, jiang yanli grew up at her mother’s knee. she is the daughter of the violet spider and twice as fierce.
this much is true in any universe: jiang yanli will always protect what she loves with sweat and tears and blood and bone. she will always have a gentle smile to spare and an unwavering hand to guide. she expresses her love in pork rib and lotus root soups and never, ever loses her nerve.
and in this life, as in any, jiang yanli has the power to rule yunmeng jiang with an iron fist. (she doesn’t. instead, she rules with an open palm, unyielding as a mountain and just as strong. she does not need to threaten her servants for them to obey: in the end, when people hand her ever-increasing amounts of power and authority, they do so with gratitude and a desperate desire to see that serene smile of hers one more time. they aren’t the only ones.)
in this life, though, yunmeng jiang aren’t the only ones who know.