Chapter Text
“Hanguang-Jun! You are Hangang-Jun, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Hanguang-Jun, how lucky you’re here!”
The speakers are a middle-aged man and woman in shabby clothes and worn straw hats. They’d been leaning against the outer wall of the inn, but leapt to attention as Lan Wangji passed them. They were waiting for him, Lan Wangji realizes, and feels a moment’s blade-sharp panic. If the townsfolk in Yiling know who he is, and even know where he’s staying, do they also know in whose company he spent the day? Has his presence brought unwanted attention to Wei Ying, perhaps even endangering the Wen settlement? Has he endangered A-Yuan?
“Hanguang-Jun, you must forgive our imposition. We are in dire need of your assistance!” the woman exclaims, bowing frantically and repeatedly.
“Yes, yes, the most dreadful need,” the man echoes, bowing even more frantically, if possible. Lan Wangji has encountered his share of nervous non-cultivators, but these two with their jerky, frenetic movements might be the most nervous he’s ever seen. He doesn’t know quite how to respond to the whole display, so he waits.
It takes a while. Gradually, amidst over-frequent pleas for forgiveness and preemptive thanks, a familiar story spills out of them: a teenage daughter gone missing in the woods, then her brother gone to search for her and never returned. No bodies or any other trace to be found; surely some dark monster or spirit must have snatched them both; won’t Hanguang-Jun please help? Slowly, Lan Wangji relaxes his grip on Bichen. This is familiar territory. Most importantly, the couple are now spinning ever-wilder hypotheses about what manner of evil thing might have taken up residence in their woods, and the Yiling Patriarch features nowhere in their list of suspects.
“Where did this happen?” he asks, wrenching his attention back to the problem at hand.
“Of course, of course, we understand your concern,” the woman assures him. “Such things are to be expected in the Burial Mounds, and we would not ask you to risk yourself if that were the case. But our children disappeared near the foot of the mountain, in a stretch of woods that until now has been safe. It’s as though the darkness of the Burial Mounds is spreading.”
The Burial Mounds Lan Wangji saw this afternoon aren’t so dark, anymore. But if Wei Ying drove something out of its lair and down the mountain, and now it troubles the town… well. Good thing Lan Wangji is here to take care of it for him.
“Show me.”
They set a quick pace, the woman almost jogging. Lan Wangji’s long stride lets him keep up easily, and he follows them past the outskirts of town and into the woods extending down from the mountain. Dusk turns to full dark under the trees, and Lan Wangji fleetingly considers suggesting that they wait until morning to continue the hunt. He dismisses the idea quickly. Waiting will give the creature hours in which to claim more victims, and if rumors take hold about a danger in these woods, those worthless gossip-mongers from the tea house will inevitably attach the Yiling Patriarch’s name to it. Best to finish the matter tonight, with no one but the couple in front of him the wiser.
A few more minutes’ silent walking, and they come to the edge of a small clearing. Lan Wangji sees at once that something has been here: something big or determined or both, and definitely aggressive. Branches have been ripped away at the clearing’s edges, trees broken and toppled, undergrowth dug up and scattered. He wonders if the clearing even existed originally, or if it was cleared by force.
Both Lan Wangji’s guides stop in their tracks and point toward the clearing with shaking fingers. There’s an eerie stillness to the place, moonlight casting strange jagged shadows and glinting off—is that blood, on the ground? Lan Wangji shifts his grip on Bichen and steps forward for a closer look.
He senses the array the instant it activates.
He jumps straight up, feeling the near-brush of offensive energy like the wind of a passing arrow. Beneath him, glowing red lines flare to life in intricate shapes. From a height he sees what he’d missed at ground level: branches arranged just so, lines scored in the earth between them, splashes of blood peeking out here and there. He can’t decipher it on sight, but it’s definitely an array.
He throws himself backward, towards safety—and something slams into him from behind, stopping his momentum. Trap, he realizes, far too late, and hits the ground inside the array.
The spell strikes in a flash of blinding pain, shooting through his meridians, burning him from the inside out. He’s collapsed in a heap on the ground, limbs spasming uncontrollably, what is happening—then, as quickly as it began, the pain and the light vanish. Lan Wangji stills, panting, wrung out like a wet rag.
“Ha! It worked!” he hears behind him. “Get the sword, quickly.”
Lan Wangji lunges blindly in the direction where Bichen most likely fell. He collides with another body, tackling the man to the ground as the man raises Bichen in its sheath to block him. He’s somehow tangled in his robes, the fabric twisting and sliding around him. He tears the fabric out of his way and tries to grab Bichen. His hand slips off the sheath. What? That wasn’t his hand, that was—
A looped chain catches around his neck. He whips around, twisting free before the chain can tighten, and launches himself at the new threat. This time, he gets a clear view of his own hands and forearms as he grabs for the chain. They’re stumpy, rounded, covered in pale fur. Claws catch in the chain’s links, painful and throwing him off-balance. He hits the ground again.
“Shit, did you have to make him something with teeth?” the one with the chain demands. He loops the chain again, poised for another attempt. Lan Wangji gets his feet under him—four of them, okay, worry about that later—
“I’m sorry, would you rather be fighting the actual Hanguang-Jun right now?” This voice comes from farther away, outside the edge of the clearing.
Lan Wangji lunges again. This time, his claws rake deep scratches through the chain-holder’s sleeve and into his arm. The man yells in pain. Lan Wangji spins away, overbalancing in this strangely-weighted body but managing to slam into a third attacker coming up from behind, with enough force to knock them both down.
“I meant couldn’t you make him a—a field mouse, or a rabbit, or—”
Wait. Teeth.
“If you know a spell for turning a man into a field mouse, the time to share it would have been yesterday!”
Lan Wangji bites the throat out of the man beneath him.
He almost retches. Blood fills his mouth and splashes up his nostrils, the smell overpowering. The man’s mangled trachea is chewy in his mouth. He spits it out and coughs, a weird wet sound.
“Stand back. I’ll handle this,” says a new voice, followed by the metallic ring of a drawn sword.
He dodges, almost quickly enough. The sword catches his hip in a glancing blow. He stumbles but keeps his feet, instinctively drawing on spiritual energy to ignore the wound. He coils, preparing to dodge a second strike.
“Wait!”
There’s a clash of sword on sword. Another man—by his voice, the one responsible for the spell—has drawn his own sword and blocked his comrade’s.
“Su-zongzhu wants him alive.”
“Su-zongzhu said alive if at all possible. Better dead than escaped.”
Lan Wangji uses the distraction to finally assess his surroundings. The two nervous villagers have vanished. Instead, he counts five cultivators: two arguing with blades crossed, one dead on the ground, one standing back and holding Bichen, one approaching yet again with the chain. He shifts his four feet, distantly aware of a pull from his injured hip. He’s got a feel for this body, now.
The one with the chain goes down in a mess of claws and teeth and dark blood. Lan Wangji doesn’t wait; he kicks off the still-falling body to launch himself at the one holding Bichen. That one blocks him several times before he gets in a killing bite. He whirls in time to evade a sword strike—looks like ‘better dead than escaped’ won the argument—and for almost a minute he’s locked in an intense life-or-death duel, steel blade against claws and teeth. The cultivator gets in another slash along his side, shallow but bleeding freely, and in a flash of incongruous realization Lan Wangji recognizes the move as belonging to the Jin style. Adjusting his angle of attack, he darts past the man’s guard and dispatched him as well. He spins a tight circle, looking for the last opponent.
He see no one. He sees corpses on the ground, their swords beside them, his own robes in a torn heap where he clawed his way out of them. The last cultivator is gone, and so is Bichen.
His back legs don’t collapse to the ground, but it’s a near thing. These cultivators laid a trap for him. They stole Bichen. They turned him into… what is he, a wolf? A panther? His claws don’t seem long enough for a panther’s. He cranes his neck and steps his front legs to the side, till he can catch sight of the tail hanging between his back legs. Long fur, like a wolf’s. Also soaked in blood, probably mostly his own. He’s drawing hard on spiritual energy, just to stay upright. And his golden core feels… distant. In something of a panic he pulls on it, aiming for a burst of power like what he’d need to maneuver the sword. He feels nothing. His core is still there, and he can tell his body is pulling on its energy, unconsciously. But he can’t seem to impose his conscious will on it. This must be a side effect of the transformation array. The realization brings a sick feeling to his stomach, and the dark, twisted trees overhead suddenly loom closer and more ominous than before.
He needs to leave this place immediately. The cultivator who left won’t be content to let him be, surely. He’ll come back with reinforcements, and Lan Wangji needs to be far away when that happens. He picks his way to the discarded pile of robes and noses through them till he’s found his qiankun pouch. He has supplies and some herbs for basic first aid, which he’ll hopefully be able to apply in his current state.
With any luck, the spell is a temporary one, only meant to last long enough to subdue him for transport to Lanling. He’d like to keep his robes with him, in optimistic anticipation of waking up human tomorrow morning. But the only way to carry them is in his mouth, and the care he’d need to take to avoid tripping with every step would slow him down too much. He leaves the robes and bites carefully on the strings of the qiankun pouch. On second thought, he digs through the robes again until he finds his forehead ribbon. He gathers both the qiankun pouch strings and the ribbon in one mouthful, and sets off at a not-quite-walk, not-quite-trot, the fastest he can comfortably manage.
He heads uphill, not down. Without knowing who laid this trap or why, it’s safest to avoid human scrutiny for now. Besides, the miasma of resentful energy that wreathes the Burial Mounds will help obscure his presence, if anyone comes looking.
After an hour’s travel, he’s slowed to a painful limp, and the sun has set. He’s also found a stream with overhanging banks, which seems as promising as anywhere else. He drinks awkwardly from the stream, rinses the caked blood from his fur as well as he can, and follows the water until he finds a small dry alcove, not quite a cave but almost. Fighting exhaustion—a Lan does not nap when there’s work to be done—he teases open the qiankun pouch with his nose and manages to extract his first-aid herbs. Applying them to his injured side and hip proves its own challenge, as the bitter leaves end up stuck to his tongue and to his fur rather than directly to his wounds. Eventually he gives up, rests his head on his front paws, and falls asleep well before the normal nine-o’clock hour.
Lan Wangji wakes up confused and feverish, blinking blearily in the sunlight and taking far too long to remember where he is, why he’s sleeping on the ground, why his side throbs with hot pain, why he’s a wolf. He rouses himself, then stumbles, almost falling into the stream. He drinks, lapping water with his tongue without any of the self-consciousness he felt yesterday. He noses into the qiankun pouch and chokes down some bread. He wishes for his guqin, and even goes so far as to scrape one paw across the dirt, attempting the motion that would have summoned it into existence if he were human. Nothing happens, not that he expects it to. He couldn’t play it if it did appear.
He sleeps again.
The second time he wakes goes much the same. The third, his head is clearer and his flank no longer hot with infection. He stumbles stiffly into the stream, rinsing his filthy, matted fur and enjoying the feel of cool water against hot skin. He takes a long drink and eats the rest of the food he’d packed with him. He considers the sun: late morning. How many days has he slept? At least three, he thinks but can’t say for sure.
So much for the spell wearing off with time.
He needs a plan. There’s precious little he can do in this form, so to rephrase: he needs assistance. His brother is the obvious choice, but his brother is in Cloud Recesses, more than a day’s flight away and surely longer by foot, even given Lan Wangji’s improbable acquisition of a second set of feet. So what he needs is someone who can quickly send a message that will bring Xiongzhang to him. For that he needs someone close by, someone he can be confident isn’t allied with his attackers, about whom he knows nothing more than the clan name Su and a few sword strokes in the Jin style. He has an ugly suspicion about the identity of this Su-zongzhu, but firmer conclusions will have to wait until he’s gathered more information. He hopes Xiongzhang can reverse the spell quickly, because investigating such a mystery without access to his core, Bichen, or the capacity for human speech would be extremely irritating. Someone like Wei Ying might enjoy the challenge, perhaps, but—
Of course. Wei Ying. He’s on this very mountain. He might have turned his back on cultivation society, but surely he’d agree to contact Xiongzhang on Lan Wangji’s behalf.
To pick up the trail Wei Ying showed him days ago, when they sprinted from village to Wen settlement with A-Yuan in tow, would mean skirting the borders to the village again. He doesn’t want to risk it. He has a vague idea of where the settlement is, and a somewhat vaguer idea of where he himself is. But he thinks he fled the array in the right general direction.
He digs a shallow hole on the bank and buries the qiankun pouch and forehead ribbon. He’ll come back for them if he can—and if he can’t, whatever trouble he runs into will be better faced with his jaws unencumbered. Then he sets off, following the stream uphill. It’s the first opportunity he’s had to carefully observe the wolf’s form in which he finds himself. His hip still aches, but not badly. Four legs allow for an easy lope that covers ground faster than he expects. His vision is worse, though, the world even more dim and washed-out than he remembers the Burial Mounds being only a day prior. His vantage point is too low to the ground for a decent view of his surroundings. Experimentally, he closes his eyes to focus on other senses. He hears normal sounds of the forest—rustling undergrowth, the chitter of insects, wind in the trees, the flap of birds’ wings. Smell—he’s avoided thinking about that one, since the faint tang of the cultivators’ blood still clings to the inside of his nostrils. But reaching past that, he can identify the smell of the earth, the water, his own wet fur, gently decomposing tree bark and mushrooms, the unpleasant but faint smell of decomposing flesh, and—Wei Ying.
He hadn’t realized he knew what Wei Ying smelled like. He considers this, even as he picks up speed, following the scent.
The stream broadens into a shallow, still pool. There’s a grassy stretch between the trees and the water, and he finds Wei Ying in the grass at the pool’s edge, sitting with arms wrapped around his knees and chin resting on them, his back to Lan Wangji. Beside him stands a stiff and anxious-looking Wen Ning, a complicated mixture of dead and not-dead smells that makes Lan Wangji wrinkle his nose reflexively. He stays just inside the trees, not wanting to startle them. Wei Ying… isn’t moving. That’s unusual.
No, he’s moving slightly. He leans forward, then back. Tightens his arms and then relaxes them. Raises a hand to rub his eyes, hidden from Lan Wangji’s view. Is he crying?
Lan Wangji focuses his hearing, filters out the trickle of water and rustle of breeze, and finds Wei Ying’s breath. It’s short and staccato, irregular huffs of air. He is crying.
“I don’t care that they think it’s my doing,” he says, voice thin and cracking. He raises his head toward Wen Ning, who nods carefully.
“I never cared what they think. The ones who matter won’t believe it. Jiang Cheng and Shijie, they’ll know it wasn’t me. Zewu-Jun… I don’t think he’ll believe it either. I-I don’t know. He might.” He drops his chin to his knees again.
“It’s not how it looks, I don’t—I don’t care about that,” he goes on, wiping his eyes furiously. “It’s that it happened here. It must have been right after he left. I should have… walked him back to town, or something. I should have—I thought the Burial Mounds were safe. I thought I made them safe. I—how was I so—”
“Wei-gongzi,” Wen Ning cuts in gently, “I don’t believe there’s anything left on this mountain that could have killed Hanguang-Jun.”
Lan Wangji’s heart skips a beat, then thuds painfully to make up the lost time.
“Anyone can make a mistake,” Wei Ying snaps. “My mother was a great cultivator too, and she died in a night hunt. And now he’s—” His voice breaks on a sob.
Wen Ning opens his mouth and pauses, like he’s gathering his thoughts. “Still,” he ventures, “they couldn’t find the body. Maybe—”
“They found Bichen, Wen Ning. He wouldn’t just leave Bichen.”
No. No, no, wrong—he’s darting from the trees before he realizes it, a high whine in his throat. They both turn towards the sound.
Wei Ying leaps to his feet, eyes wide as saucers. Lan Wangji believes for a delirious moment that he’s recognized him in spite of everything—zhiji, I’m here!—but then Wei Ying jumps behind Wen Ning, gripping the latter’s shoulders, face bone-white and quivering all over.
“Wen Ning,” he whispers, white-knuckled grip tightening further. “Make it go away.”
Wei Ying is afraid. Lan Wangji hardly believes it, even as the clues slot into place—he’s never seen Wei Ying afraid. He wouldn’t believe his eyes if not for his enhanced sense of smell, picking up the sudden pungent odor of sweat. Wei Ying is terrified. What kind of monstrous appearance has this damned curse given him?
Wen Ning hesitantly flicks his fingers. “Shoo!”
Lan Wangji takes a desperate step forward, whimpering loudly and for once, not caring what noise he makes. Wei Ying stumbles backwards, hauling Wen Ning with him.
“Wen Ning! Don’t let it come here!”
“Okay, gongzi.” Wen Ning shuffles, working around Wei Ying’s clinging hands, to unsling the bow from his shoulder and nock an arrow to it.
Lan Wangji comprehends the danger just in time. He bolts for the cover of the woods, feeling the quick breeze of the arrow as it whistles past.
He spends the next several hours locating a pool deep and still and day-lit enough that he can observe his own reflection. Wei Ying looked at him and saw something dreadful, that much was clear; he needs to know what he looks like. At the same time, he considers what he overheard of their conversation. The cultivation world thinks he’s dead, because someone claimed to have found Bichen. A lie. They stole Bichen. They must have planned to stage his death while keeping him captive somewhere. He’s still free, but they’re going ahead with the first part of the plan, which means whoever-it-is will be eager to find him and get the second half of the plan back on track. He needs to break this curse, and quickly.
He finds a pool, finally, and studies the rippling reflection of his face. He looks like an ordinary wolf. Wild, sure, but not especially bloodthirsty. He’d washed his muzzle clean earlier.
Maybe Wei Ying was just startled. Lan Wangji had caught him unawares. Caught him in a highly emotional moment, actually. He seemed… really upset, by Lan Wangji’s supposed death. Surprisingly so, Lan Wangji thinks, then immediately feels a pang of shame. Lan Wangji has spent so long dwelling on the differences in their regard for each other—the things he wants that Wei Ying has never offered and now, given their circumstances, likely never will—that he forgets, sometimes, the affection that Wei Ying does hold for him. A capricious, chaotic, and tragically platonic kind of affection, but affection nonetheless. Of course Wei Ying would mourn him if he were to die.
He’ll try again, more carefully this time. He’ll find a way to tell Wei Ying what’s happened.