Chapter Text
A/N - Ok, this is an idea that has been keeping me daydreaming for the past few weeks and I wanted to test the waters to see if you are interested! It's been a fun distraction for me as the world is going crazy (especially my country), and I just liked the idea of someone being able to look a history and then go back and fix the really bad stuff. This fic is really just a concept at this stage (related to the series of questions I posted on BlueSky on this a while back), so if you have ideas of things you'd like to explore with me on this, please let me know!
Thanks to ZazGeek for gently nudging me to get back out there with some of my writing, and for beta'ing this chapter.
It is set in canonverse, but in a universe where wwx originally died on the streets at 5 years old, so the 'history' that modern wwx has studied is an alternate universe based on what would have happened during the war if wwx had never existed (yes, it's bad, but it all gets changed in this fic). I also wanted to explore Madam Lan's character a bit more, since I've never done that, so she will be appearing here as well!
T/W - descriptions of food insecurity and child homelessness.
Wei Wuxian heard the screech of metal tearing and a terrible pressure on his spine as the train derailed from its tracks.
Time seemed to both speed up and slow down as he realized what was happening. His golden core was strong, but there would be no time to heal the wounds ripping through his body.
He wasn't ready to die.
At only 19, he was the youngest PhD student at the university. His fascination with ancient cultivation history and techniques had consumed him ever since he was a child, and the uncanny ease with which he was able to decipher them had led even the most elite cultivation archivists to open their vaults to him. He was a rising star in the academic circles of cultivation, with an entire career path laid out before him.
But it wasn't going to matter.
At least he had no family that would miss him. His friends probably would, but they would move on. He made casual friends easily, but there was no one that he really mattered to. He supposed that was a good thing. He wouldn’t want anyone to grieve for him, he thought as he felt his body slowly going numb, the world going grey.
Perhaps in his next life, he would live long enough to accomplish something.
Long enough to put down roots.
Long enough to matter to someone.
He expected to find himself at the Bridge of Forgetfulness, preparing to drink Meng Po’s soup. Instead, he found himself hovering over a small child who was dressed in tattered clothes, shivering in an alleyway filled with garbage.
There were no street lights, only the moon that shone above, looking oddly bright in the darkened, cloudless sky. The buildings around him looked like something out of the drawings from the ancient scrolls he had studied as part of his research.
Was this a death hallucination? Was his dying brain latching onto images from the last sets of things he had been thinking about?
In any other situation, Wei Wuxian might have laughed.
He’d been so obsessed with his research that even his fellow graduate students had teased him that he had been living more in the stories from the ancient texts than in the real world. He supposed it shouldn’t surprise him that his last thoughts would be of the time period that had so captured his imagination ever since he was a child.
It is real , a voice sounded in Wei Wuxian's mind.
Somehow he knew that it wasn't spoken in the night air around him, but that the words had appeared directly inside his head.
He felt himself pushed toward the tiny, shivering child at the same moment that he realized he did not have a physical body himself.
While the initial push had come from the owner of the Voice, the closer he came to the small, huddled figure, the more he noticed a strange pull drawing him in closer.
You have a chance to make a difference , the Voice said.
His being, his… soul? was getting closer and closer to the body of the child.
He tried to resist pulling himself back. He knew, somehow, instinctively that if his soul touched the boy's body, he would be pulled inside it. Would whatever soul was currently residing in the child be expelled?
As much as he had wanted to live, he didn’t want to take the life of a child to do so.
“You would have me take this child's life? Killing him, and taking over his body?” Wei Wuxian asked, desperately. He wasn’t sure if he spoke the words aloud, or just… transmitted them the same strange way the Voice had communicated with him.
The boy will not survive the night, the Voice replied. His life is already ending, regardless of your choice.
“Do I have a choice?” Wei Wuxian asked, feeling the inexorable pull of the body of the child increasing the more he tried to resist.
There is always a choice , the Voice said.
Wei Wuxian found himself pulled closer and closer to the child huddled figure.
“Why him? Why here?” Wei Wuxian asked.
Because he is you. Because this is a life where you could have made a difference, if you had not died in this alley, the Voice replied. You were drawn to this time and this place for a reason. You sensed it, did you not?
Wei Wuxian wasn’t sure what the Voice meant, but he could definitely sense a pull from the child’s form.
“I don't understand. If I stay, will he live? Will I?” Wei Wuxian asked.
You are already dead. The boy will die within the hour. Whether you are able to live or die in this body will be up to you.
Before he could say anything else, his spirit brushed up against the body of the boy and he found himself pulled inside.
If dying had been traumatic and painful, transmigrating was a thousand times worse. The pressure of the train accident was nothing compared to the pressure of squeezing his adult mind and ill-fitting soul into a body where another soul already existed.
If Wei Wuxian could have screamed in agony, he would have, but the body was not connected fully with him yet.
Just when he thought that his soul was going to be rejected, there was a release in pressure and he felt the soul of the child shifting and connecting with his own. He was relieved that he wouldn’t be the death of the boy.
It appeared as though the Voice had been correct because the soul that was inside the boy was familiar and somehow seemed to recognize him. Rather than expelling the boy's soul, the body pulled him in and… merged them.
Wei Wuxian gasped in the body of the small child that he had now become. The cold of the night air that he had not felt as a spirit hovering above the body now cut like knives into his tiny, emaciated frame. The Voice had likely been right that the child would likely not survive much longer without shelter.
He could feel the gnawing emptiness of the child’s stomach, and the pain of wounds on his arms and legs from some unknown source. There was a brief flicker somewhere in their merged consciousness of dogs, which drew another full-bodied shudder from the child.
His new body weakened, and fading fast.
His mind was sluggish, possibly from the cold, possibly from the fact that his spiritual cognition was still not fully settled into his new/old body. He had a vague notion of what he knew about the physiology of childhood brain development, but it was gone before he could pin it down. A shiver wracked his tiny body, reminding him that his first priority needed to be to find shelter.
He doubted he’d be given a third chance, if he died again.
Wei Wuxian knew better than to try to look for a family or home that the child belonged to. Even in the brief time he spent looking down on the boy, it had been obvious that the child was an orphan living on the streets by his clothes and emaciated state. He was not quite sure what time period he had found himself in, if it really was exactly the time he’d been studying, but there were very few periods in history where homeless orphans were treated well. He struggled to get his thoughts to focus, but his mind was hazy, with ideas and images flitting in and out of his grasp.
Wei Wuxian also noticed an insanely large amount of resentful energy not very far away. It seemed impossible that such an amount could even exist in one place, but—whatever it was—it was not the thing that was going to kill him first if the cold did the job in the next hour, as the Voice had warned.
He looked around, but whatever time it was it was late enough that all the shops were boarded closed and the windows dark. He briefly considered trying to break into a home but he could tell from the weakness of his new limbs that he would not have the strength to do so, nor the stamina to run away if caught.
Freezing to death in an alleyway was preferable to getting his hands chopped off if mistaken for a thief.
That meant he had to create his own shelter, and fast. A tremor wracked his too-small frame, and it made him realize that the body had mostly stopped shivering from the cold.
That was not a good sign.
He could feel the lethargy of death seeping into his muscles and bones. He couldn’t delay any longer if he was going to take this second chance he’d been given. He looked around the alleyway and saw a small crate that would have to do. He stumbled over to it and lifted the lid, finding it empty. The wooden slats of it were not tight enough to keep the wind out but he could fix that.
His mind was muddled from still not being able to fully connect with the body he was in, but he had known basic talismans since he was 8 years old. He felt inside his new body and was surprised to find spiritual pathways already fully developed, though still small. Whoever the child had been, his parents had been teaching him cultivation before they had died. Not enough that he'd formed a full golden core yet, but he could at least channel a small amount of spiritual energy.
Wei Wuxian could make do with that.
He climbed inside the crate, gasping at a sharp pain in his leg. He tried not to wince at the sight of the bite mark on it, but at least he wouldn't have to cut himself to get blood to work with. He dipped his finger in the wound and carefully drew out the characters for the heating talisman, combining it with another to block drafts.
The fingers of his new body did not have the fine motor control that his adult hands had, and it didn't help that he was shaking with the cold. Wei Wuxian drew the sigils slightly larger to make up for any mistakes he might make. Fortunately (or unfortunately), the wound had enough blood to finish the seals. He channeled a tiny amount of spiritual energy—which was really all the small body had in it—into the activating character and sighed with relief as he felt the instant warmth fill the small crate.
He drew a slow, shivering breath as the warmth slowly began to seep into his tiny frame.
He didn't know what was happening and he didn't know what to do about any of it, but he was suddenly so overwhelmed with exhaustion and the physical relief of being warm that he couldn't think about it any longer.
His eyes drifted closed and he fell asleep.
He woke to the sounds of merchant's setting up their tables in the marketplace. The voices were easy to hear, but he couldn’t make out any of the words that they were saying. It took him a moment to realize that it was because the ancient dialect of wherever he was was definitely not modern Mandarin, or any version of Chinese he recognized.
Panic flooded through him.
How was he going to survive if he couldn’t communicate? Sure, he knew how to write ancient Seal Script, as well as some of the other ancient written forms. But he also knew that most people couldn’t read, and the ones who could were unlikely to want to talk to a ratty orphan from the streets.
He tried to calm down, and found himself looking at the clothing he was wearing. He hadn’t studied ancient textiles specifically, but they had come up enough in some of his classes that he knew that the clothes had originally been of moderately good quality. Not the silk of a noble family, but not the rough spun of the peasant class.
It made sense, if his parents were cultivators from either a small sect, or—more likely, given his current situation—rogue cultivators. They were only slightly short on him, which meant that he had been living on the streets for under a year, maybe two, even given the effects of malnutrition on a child’s growth rate.
He wondered how old he was.
At the thought, he felt vague memories in the child's mind stirring, and an answer appearing in his mind: five. Wei Wuxian got flashes of a beautiful woman laughing heartily, while a quiet, handsome man smiled at her. The memory was tinged with sadness and loneliness, and Wei Wuxian knew that these had been the child’s (his?) parents.
He wished he had memories of his own parents, from his original timeline.
The shared grief seemed to help in settling his mind… a nexus for the fragmented memories of his future life and his past self’s life to begin to blend.
Wei Wuxian sat in the quiet warmth of the crate and began to meditate, hoping it would help to settle his soul more firmly in this new body, as well as allow him to better access the memories of both his lives, however short they had been.
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed before he became aware of louder voices at the entrance of the ally.
A man was shouting. More importantly, Wei Wuxian was able to understand what he was saying.
“They're cold! I paid good money for these, and they aren’t even warm!”
Wei Wuxian lifted the lid of the crate so he could see what was happening. A moderately well-dressed man threw a bag full of what Wei Wuxian somehow knew was food. The air was still bitterly cold, and he couldn’t help but think it was unreasonable of the man to be so angry about temperature of his food.
The bag tumbled into the entrance of the alleyway, landing in a dusting of snow that had fallen since Wei Wuxian had taken shelter in the crate.
“Well, you aren’t getting your money back!” the food stall owner shouted back. “You threw them to the ground, so now they’re yours!”
Drawing on a knowledge that wasn’t fully his, he knew that this was a rare chance to get food that was relatively fresh without getting beaten by the vendors in the marketplace. With practiced ease, and ignoring his injured leg, he crept out and grabbed the bag while the man was still arguing with the shopkeeper.
He raced back and climbed into the warmth and safety of his heated crate before opening up the bag to see what his prize would be.
The hunger that he had felt gnawing in his belly the night before was fiercely reawakened by the scent of steamed meat buns that greeted him.
He ate the first one so quickly that he barely chewed and then remembered all the stories he'd heard about starving children eating too quickly and then making themselves sick.
He couldn’t afford to waste it by eating it too fast and not being able to keep it down.
He forced himself to not eat the remaining three buns while he waited for the first to settle in his stomach. It was surprisingly difficult to do and he felt his small hands shaking with the effort to restrain himself.
He was so hungry .
He had not had an easy childhood in his prior lifetime, but he had never been on the verge of starvation like the body he was in now. His heart ached for the child he had merged with, and he found himself even more determined to survive.
For both their sakes.
His mind was still too fragmented to make any sort of a plan, but he knew that he needed to form a golden core as soon as possible. Luckily, he had been a strong cultivator when he’d died. Cultivation came to him as easy as breathing now, and wouldn’t require a lot of conscious thought on his part.
His high level of cultivation hadn’t saved him from getting killed in the train crash, but it would help him form a core much more quickly in his new body, especially with the meridians already mostly developed.
He wouldn’t need to learn through trial and error the way children had to the first time. Wei Wuxian knew exactly how to harness spiritual energy, how to focus it down and spin it into an ever-growing core. It would take time, but not nearly as long as forming it the first time.
He stayed safely inside his heated crate for another half hour letting the food settle in his stomach before slowly eating the next bun. He would save the other two for later.
At the edges of his consciousness, he could still feel the ominous morass of resentful energy, making the small hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He had studied resentful energy, despite it being forbidden, curious to understand it more. But he’d never encountered anything like what he was sensing. Dying seemed to have made him even more attuned to it. He was able to tell that it wasn’t stemming from a single creature, but from what felt like thousands of them. Yet it wasn’t attacking… just staying in one place.
As though bound.
In all of history, there really was only one thing it could be.
The Burial Mounds had existed for many centuries before it was slowly purified over time by generations of cultivators, so it didn’t really tell him exactly when he was, but it did tell him where .
When Wei Wuxian died, he’d been on his way from ChengDu to Shanghai to meet with a professor who had studied elements of the ancient Gusu musical techniques. The man had seen a draft of Wei Wuxian’s research, and had been excited to discuss it with him. The train had crashed not far from the Three Gorges Dam in the Hubei region… right near where the ancient village of Yiling used to sit at the foot of the Burial Mounds.
So he had died here, only… at least a thousand years in the future. Maybe two thousand.
The idea made his head hurt, and sent not a small amount of terror through him at the thought of being so far from everything and everyone he knew. There were some memories from his new body that he could access, but the child’s memories were few and blurred, due to his age and the trauma he’d been through.
You have a chance to make a difference , the Voice had said.
Wei Wuxian sighed. If he was supposed to do something specific, it would have been good to have a bit more information.
He supposed he’d already changed things by being reborn. The Voice had not been wrong that the body he was in would not have survived the night without his intervention. Wei Wuxian had saved the boy (himself?) with the heating talisman, at least for now. The fact that he had drawn it in blood meant that it would last a lot longer than if he had drawn it in cinnabar. Of course, a beggar like this child would have had no money for purchasing something like cinnabar anyway, so blood would be his only option.
But what else could he really do as a starving, five-year-old beggar?
Once the food had entered his system, he felt his mind clear a bit. He was still exhausted, but he needed to try to think about what to do next..
He had no way of knowing how long the crate would be left in the alley untended. It was possible that it was left there as garbage, but it was equally possible that it was set out only temporarily and would soon be used for whatever purpose it had been built for.
He was young and alone with nothing but the clothes on his back and the still very scattered thoughts in his head. Anytime he tried to think too hard about his original life, the pressure of the sheer volume of memories was too overwhelming and he couldn't get very far. Equally, when he tried to access the memories of the body he was in, he got only very muddled images of dogs and shouting people.
He had some vague understanding of the rate at which brains developed even though he couldn't recall the details at the moment, but he knew that he would not be able to think about that. His current brain was not going to be able to access everything in the way his older brain had. At least, not for several years.
He didn't know if his memories from his original life would fade or not or if they would somehow be stored for him to retrieve as he grew. How much of Wei Ying was his memories versus his soul?
Existential questions like that were interesting, but they wouldn't keep him from freezing to death or starving.
He needed to focus on the current moment and deal with that first.
He thought about the argument that he'd heard that morning that had lucked him into a free breakfast.
The vendor who had been selling the buns had not been able to keep them all warm enough in the bitter cold snap that had descended on the ancient village he'd found himself in.
Wei Wuxian knew how to make heating arrays that would keep the food warm. It was possible he had gone back far enough that heating talismans and insulated vessels were not widely available.
As long as he could remember some of the basic talismans, Wei Wuxian might be able to trade the use of them for food.
Of course, that would mean that he'd have to have a vendor that was willing to let a homeless 5-year-old write in blood on some of their containers. Wei Wuxian grimaced as more images of angry, shouting adults filled his head.
That could prove challenging, but Wei Wuxian didn't really have much to lose.
He dusted himself off and straightened his clothing as best he could. He watched from the heated warmth of his crate until the lunch rush had died down and the vendor didn’t have any customers waiting for her.
He carefully made his way out of the alley towards the market.
To be continued…
A/N - ok, so that's the concept! Now we see how wwx can find a way to leverage some of his adult knowledge to get himself to safety.