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robininthelabyrinth · 5 months

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The Other Mountain - ao3 - Chapter 32

Pairing: Lan Qiren/Wen Ruohan

Warning Tags on Ao3

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Dear Shixiong,

Welcome back! I hope you had a very enriching and meaningful year in seclusion.

I wanted to –

(Note to self: when you write the second BETTER version of this, add some formal greetings & well-wishes here first before you get to the actual stuff. DO NOT forget this time! EVEN IF it’s boring! Remember that Shixiong likes it when you’re being properly formal!)

I know it’s a little inappropriate to leave a letter under your doorstep for you to read as soon as you rejoin the world. I know you’re supposed to be spending your final moments of seclusion and your first moments of coming back to the rest of the community in thoughtful contemplation, considering the concepts of transition and the transient nature of time, not immediately getting shoved head-first into the petty matters of the world. I would never want to interrupt you while you do that, since I know how important it is to you, and to your cultivation, and I would definitely never ever EVER do it lightly.

I even admit that sending you a letter like this could maybe be seen as a violation of Do not use frivolous words.

Despite all of that, I hope you can forgive your favorite Shidi for the impertinence. In case all of that wasn’t clear enough, this is Lan Zhijin writing to you. You remember, Lan Yueheng’s eldest son? Lan Yanyu’s little brother? The one who used to always follow you around everywhere -

I assure you, I actually have a very good reason for deviating from tradition in this case. After all, tradition is only tradition, and the rules supersede it, particularly Appreciate good people, see friends as neighbors, and be considerate of others. Also, if you disagree with my evaluation and decide that you’re going to report me to the Discipline Hall anyway, can you at least tell them not to hit too many times, okay? Scratch that, tell them kneeling is sufficient, no hits at all! I’m acting in good faith here, Shixiong, really!

Listen, when you read the rest of this, you’ll see what I mean, and you’re going to thank me for doing this for you, I promise -

You see, Shixiong, ever since you entered strict seclusion a year ago, there have been a number of changes in the Cloud Recesses which are rather more significant than the usual. To put it mildly

I know you must be thinking to yourself, ‘How much can things really have changed? It’s the Cloud Recesses, the Gusu Lan sect, it’s been the same for generation upon generation’ and before you complain, this isn’t a breach of Don’t make assumptions about others, I just know you and of course you’d be right. The fundamental core of our Gusu Lan sect is still there, still going strong, and there are even a few new rules on the Wall of Discipline, as you might have expected. But despite that, there have also been some fairly significant events which have resulted in certain changes that are sufficiently noticeable, and maybe even shocking, that I think that you would want to be prepared in advance before you went out and encountered them.

It’s not gossip if it’s news, you know!

I’m doing this for your sake, Shixiong, really! Not because I want to be the first to tell you –

Really, it would be much funnier if I could see your face when you read this ACTUALLY. But Be easy on others, be hard on yourself is a rule so I won’t prioritize my own amusement over your well-being. See, Shixiong, that’s how much I like you –

First, when you come back, you may very quickly notice a considerable decrease in the average age of the people you see. By this, I mean that you will probably notice pretty quickly that there aren’t any elders walking about the place stroking their beards and talking about the weather and sometimes lecturing innocent juniors who really didn’t mean to break the rule about running, they were just a little bit excited –

It’s not a violation of Talking behind the backs of others is prohibited if it’s true, Shixiong.

Well, when you notice it, rest assured that you aren’t missing anything, and you aren’t just seeing things. There really aren’t any elders around! They’re all temporarily absent, having each and every one of them either retreated into seclusion to go contemplate and cultivate themselves, or else out into the world to increase their virtue through night-hunts and other beneficent acts. Which you really wouldn’t have expected a bunch of old grandpas that usually like to sit around to play weiqi and gossip all day to be able to do but there you go. Don’t make assumptions, right?? Why would they do this, you may ask? Particularly in such numbers? Especially the ones who tended to be a bit more full of themselves? That’s a very good question. You may even now be thinking of all sorts of reasons and engaging in lots of speculation wondering what happened.

Well, you can count on your shidi for the answer, Shixiong, since there is absolutely NO way you are going to be able to guess. EVER. So I’m going to tell you out of the kindness of my heart what happened.

And what happened is this: the elders are all gone because Teacher came back and gave them such an incredibly harsh talking-to for breaking the rules that they all felt so bad about themselves that they decided they needed to do some self-reflection.

Yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds. I KNOW! But on the other hand you’ve got to give it to Teacher, he’s REALLY good at scolding people – you know the type the ones that make you feel both really guilty, like he expected you to do better because he knows you’re better than that, but also really proud, because he has full confidence that you will do better going forward because you’re good like that – anyway, the point is, they all temporarily resigned from their usual duties of supporting the sect through advice and counsel and went to go do other things. All of them. Every single one of them!

Except for one that we’re all pretty sure Teacher just flat-out killed.

Yes, killed. As in dead. As in totally dead. That’s crazy, right? Teacher! Teacher! LAN QIREN! Old righteous and rigid! Who would have thought he had it in him, right???

Trust me, I know it sounds crazy and I know how crazy it sounds, too. If I hadn’t seen it myself – okay, no, Do not tell lies– if I hadn’t seen Teacher come back to the Cloud Recesses with his Someone Did Something Wrong And It’s Actually Serious This Time face, go meet with all the sect elders, and then leave half a day later, and then not very long after there was the announcement about the funeral and Lan Zhengquan wasn’t even that old, okay, and then all the sect elders were talking about their resignation – oh drat, I haven’t explained why Teacher would be coming back yet –

On second thought, let me start from the beginning chronologically, as that may make things a little more less confusing. [Note to self: do NOT send this version of the letter to Shixiong. Remember what Teacher said – use one piece of paper to write down all of your ideas, figure out which ones you want to use and where, and only then use the second to write your final version with elegance and restraint.]

Okay, so –

I need to stop starting sentences like that, it’s actually not a very good transition. Do better!

Do you remember all those times when we were younger when we’d talk with all the other disciples about the Sect Leader? Not Teacher, since he was only ever technically acting sect leader, but the real one, Qingheng-jun, you know, the one who went into seclusion something like ten or eleven years ago and never seemed to come back out? Anyway, remember how we all said that he sounded really cool what with the way everyone always talked about his amazing swordsmanship skills and his handsome looks and the way he was supposed to be both smart and personable and really clever? Remember about how we all said that it sounded like it would be super awesome and cool if he ever came out of seclusion?

Well, about half a month after you went into seclusion, he really did come out.

It was NOT COOL AT ALL.

I mean, okay, it wasn’t that bad, I guess. The Sect Leader really is very smooth and charming and he’s an amazing swordsman from what little I saw, but obviously he’s also Sect Leader and very busy so I didn’t see very much of him at all. But it was so weird! He did everything so differently from Teacher! And not in good ways, I didn’t like it them at all, but in all sorts of weird ways, like the curriculum or discipline or sect priorities.

Shixiong, the older disciples nearly went to WAR!

If you had to go your mother would have been so upset! I would have been upset! I mean, what if you’d gotten hurt or something! I was so happy you were in seclusion and didn’t have to go. Not that I’m saying it’s a good thing you missed out on everything – wait, I got sidetracked.

Everyone was really excited to see the Sect Leader at first, especially the elders that remembered him well from before, and the seniors that were his friends from before he went away. It was a little sad, though, because Madam Lan had just died – you remember, his wife, the one who was sick and never came out? – and little Xichen and Wangji were really sad about that, as you can imagine. And since Teacher is the one raising them, he was really busy dealing with that, or trying to as much as he could, so maybe he didn’t have as much time to tell him about how things in the Cloud Recesses were supposed to work normally.

Personally I think it’s a little weird that the Sect Leader came out right at that time? I mean, his wife had just died! You’d think he’d have more reason to be in seclusion, grieving, rather than less. Jiejie said that some people deal with grief by needing to do work, so maybe that’s the reason? I mean, I don’t really understand why he went into seclusion for so long in the first place, and none of the seniors will explain. Shixiong, if you know, you have to promise to tell me, all right?

I’m sure Teacher would have eventually gotten around to explaining, which might have made it all right, but unfortunately, not long after, Teacher went into seclusion.

Before you start telling me Do not tell lies, I know it sounds weird, but it really did happen!

And no, I don’t mean seclusion like all those times Teacher tried to take a half-month off of work in order to go play music, which don’t really count because he was in his own house and you could still ask him questions as long as you sent them to him by writing, and he was still grading tests and doing sect paperwork (last time around I helped pick it up every morning and drop off the new requests every night, and ooh boy was there a lot of it, you should’ve seen, I NEVER want to be sect leader!!!), and of course Xichen and Wangji were still visiting him every day for dinner. In other words, definitely NOT seclusion. Anyway, I don’t think Teacher actually managed to stay in his house the whole half-month even a single time he tried it, so it really doesn’t count.

No, in this case, I’m talking about real serious business seclusion, like what you have been doing for the past year, the sort where you don’t talk to people on the outside and not even answer notes from your favorite shidi when they get shoved through your window, because you’re mean like that. Would sending one note back really have killed you…?

There were a lot of rumors at the time about why he did that. It just seemed so weird, you know, and badly timed? I’m not saying Teacher isn’t entitled to go into seclusion whenever he wants, of course he is, and he’s even entitled to go into seclusion to have a nice relaxing break because his brother is back and willing to take over sect leader duties, the way some of the sect elders seemed to suggest was the situation, but…it seemed weird and wrong.

I mean, what about poor Xichen and Wangji? Their mother just died! They were so upset already, especially Wangji – he was refusing to talk and tried to sit outside in the snow and it was awful, Shixiong, really awful. And then Teacher, who’s been raising them like they’re his own sons all this time, suddenly goes into seclusion? Something was definitely going on there! Something wrong!

Jiejie says I have a suspicious personality.

Someone claimed that Teacher got into a fight with the Sect Leader and the Sect Leader ordered Teacher to go into seclusion to reflect on himself, as a punishment, but that’s completely crazy, right? I mean, it’s Teacher. Even if he’s going to break a rule, he’s going to do it having drafted his own punishment in advance, and I’m pretty sure he’s never picked seclusion as a punishment. Probably because of all that paperwork.

Someone else said it was because he was actually on a super-secret mission for the sect to do something, but that didn’t really seem reasonable either. I mean, Teacher’s great and all, but he’s not really the super-secret mission sort of person, is he? He’s a little too straightforward.

Anyway, we were all really curious, but no one ever figured it out. The Sect Leader just smiled kind of a weird smile honestly, I’m not going to lie, and even jiejie agrees with me so you know it was really weird and shook his head whenever he heard people speculating, but that doesn’t really mean anything. I guess we’ll never really know. The sect elders never tell people anything if they think they don’t need to know it…

At any rate, as you might expect, the situation with Xichen and Wangji only got worse after Teacher went into seclusion. Xichen got super anxious about everything, really anxious, and Wangji reverted back to biting people and throwing temper tantrums, really bad ones, like some sort of feral street child. He even hit people! None of the teachers or caretakers could do anything to make him stop.

And Teacher didn’t break his seclusion to come help them, which makes it even more suspicious, in my opinion. It just seems so unlike him…I really wish a-Die had been around instead of on that long trip down to the south to get ingredients. He was always one of the few people who could talk to Teacher about things, and he’s always willing to tell me things he hears. My best source of gossip I mean my best source of NEWS abandoned me in my time of need!

Everyone was speculating an awful lot, though, and of course the teachers were handing out punishments for No talking behind the backs of others left, right, and center. And also down, up, and upside-down, but it still didn’t stop anyone.

One time, our whole class derailed because some of the older students wouldn’t stop talking about it in the context of discussing the importance of Honor your teacher and respect his teaching. It was super interesting and really quite clever, but I think it maybe made the teacher kind of uncomfortable? Probably because they were being really aggressive and pointed about some stuff, though I’m not entirely sure what point they were trying to make. That was one of the better teachers, though, because he let us have the debate anyway. Some of the other teachers just canceled class any time someone started talking about it or made us do self-study or whatever. Even after I pointed out that we were starting to miss things on the curriculum Teacher set out at the start of the year, no one seemed to care!

It occurs to me that you don’t care about any of this, so I’ll leave it out of the final version.

After Teacher went into seclusion, a lot of things began changing. At first it seemed just like curriculum changes, like there was a lot more sword training than usual, and also a lot of the seniors got really busy all of a sudden, so we juniors had to pick up a lot more of the chores. But later on we found out that the seniors were getting ready to go out on a super important mission that no one was allowed to know the details of – which was very exciting, at first. Everyone was talking about how it was the Sect Leader’s doing, that it was going to be something really exciting, an opportunity to win glory and honor for our Gusu Lan sect, you know, all the usual.

Except later on (much later, I’m skipping ahead a little), it turned out that the mission was going to be a war. Yes, a war, an affirmative war, by our Gusu Lan sect! I know, it sounds unbelievable, but it’s true. It was supposed to be a little border skirmish, the type everyone does well we usually don’t but OTHER PEOPLE do, but still, there was a lot of preparation and a lot of the seniors got dragged into it, whether they wanted to participate or not.

And before I forget, Xichen and little Wangji, remember how I said they were unhappy? Well, it turned out they were SO unhappy that they ran away from home. For real! They’re not even ten yet! And they MANAGED it! They managed to get out of the Cloud Recesses and all the way to the Nightless City where Teacher was staying!

Actually I’m kind of impressed with that. Even if Cangse Sanren found them nearby by coincidence and took them with her, ending up in the Nightless City by accident because of the war and all that, it’s still an achievement, especially given their ages…

Yes, you read that right, the war stuff happened after they disappeared. It wasn’t that people weren’t looking for them, because of course they were, but then the Sect Leader came back and said not to worry, so people stopped because they thought he knew where they were, and presumably he’d heard from Cangse Sanren or maybe from Teacher about it. I don’t know, the whole thing confuses me, I still don’t understand why we needed to go to war at all – I’m getting away from the point.

And lest you think that’s everything, there’s more to it than that!

See, at some point, Teacher left seclusion to go get married.

Without telling anyone.

Yes, Teacher. Yes, a marriage. Yes, left – he married out, not in. Yes, it was a secret marriage.

YES I KNOW IT’S CRAZY BUT IT’S TRUE!!!

The Sect Leader must have known about it, of course, because he’s both Sect Leader, the head of the clan, and Teacher’s older brother, and we all know that Teacher would never fail to obey proper protocol even if he was going to run off to elope.

Shixiong, I swear I go a little more crazy every time I think about it. I can’t believe Teacher eloped! Teacher! TEACHER!!!

Jiejie says that it’s possible that the Sect Leader arranged the marriage for Teacher, rather than it being at Teacher’s instigation, and that maybe he decided it wasn’t enough to make him go into seclusion but rather that he had to go away entirely. And she says I have a suspicious mind…

I mean, that would be ridiculous, right? If it was an arranged marriage, why would Teacher agree to it? Much less to marry out? And the Sect Leader would have to be the rottenest sort of bastard to set up an arranged marriage and then not give any of us the chance to give Teacher a proper send off, and he’s presumably not like that. I mean, that’s based mostly on my experience with Xichen and Wangji since obviously I’ve never met the Sect Leader myself, but it stands to reason, right? Teacher’s his little brother! No one would be that mean to their little brother, right, Shixiong?

I swear that was a genuine question, not a hint.

But wait – if you think Teacher eloping in a grand romantic fashion is weird, just wait till you find out who it was that he married. See, normally this is when I’d tell you to try to guess, Shixiong, but there’s no way that you’d get it, not even if you guessed a thousand times! And that’s why I’m your favorite shidi, because I’m not going to leave you in suspense about it.

The answer is:

Teacher married Qishan Wen’s Sect Leader Wen.

And before you ask, no, there hasn’t been some sort of coup in Qishan Wen or something. I really am talking about Wen Ruohan. Yes, THAT Wen Ruohan. The Wen Ruohan with the torture palace and the professional army and his fingers in every sect’s pie, the one who’s older than dirt but looks like a pretty boy, except you’re not supposed to say that part out loud. The one that everyone says is completely crazy but also really sneaky and clever, the one everyone says is going to take over the cultivation world one day and oh boy have I got news on that front for you, just be patient –

But you want to know what’s even stranger?

(Yes, Shixiong, I know you must be thinking to yourself: what could be stranger than Teacher marrying Sect Leader Wen?? And in fairness in normal times you’d be right to ask, because that was incredibly strange, but in this instance, the world is weirder than you could have possibly imagined!)

At the discussion conference that wasn’t – wait, I’m getting ahead of myself again

After they eloped, Teacher showed up with Sect Leader Wen to a discussion conference that Yunmeng Jiang sect had organized at the Lotus Pier, and that’s where they ended up announcing their marriage.

(Yes, that was the first announcement we had here, too. The Sect Leader didn’t tell anyone about Teacher marrying out, even though he must have known – he didn’t even pretend to be shocked, to hear some of the people who were at the discussion conference tell it. I guess that’s brotherly solidarity for you. Or something?)

Anyway, while they were there, they didn’t just formally announce the marriage – they also announced that Teacher had been married in as the husband. The HUSBAND!!!

Which, yes, means that Sect Leader Wen is the wife.

His wife.

And Sect Leader Wen agreed with it.

Which means: Wen Ruohan! Is! Teacher’s wife!!!

(As you might imagine, everyone immediately went to the library to read up on the rules regarding honoring your teacher’s wife. There was that one treatise written a few generations ago, the one that goes into detail, you may or may not remember it – well, it got so popular that the librarians had to make a request to the Discipline Hall for assistance in having the disciples who were assigned to writing out lines to make extra copies of it. There was such a fuss over it that I think it even got to the ears of the Sect Leader! I don’t know what he thought about it, but I bet it was really funny. Don’t you agree?)

Anyway, I’m going to let you pause to think about that a little bit more.

Wen Ruohan! The master of torture, the near-god, the would-be madman tyrant…is, to all appearances, extremely happy in his role as our Teacher’s beloved little wife!

I mean, I have no problem believing it of Teacher, if you know what I mean – everyone knows that when Teacher says jump, you say how high, it’s practically an unstated rule, and of course Teacher has always been very doting when it comes to people he loves. Look at how meticulous he’s always been about Xichen and Wangji! I bet that now that he’s married, he probably spoils his wife rotten…not that I think that Sect Leader Wen is easy to spoil. I mean, just think about the size of that dowry, right?

I mean, the Qishan Wen sect is all Sect Leader Wen’s, and he doesn’t even have sect elders to worry about because he’s so old and powerful. Even his wives don’t cause trouble and by all accounts seem to be pretty content with Teacher managing him, which is only reasonable, because Teacher managing anything makes it better. Practically a rule. Qishan Wen really are the sun in the sky, spreading their influence everywhere – I think they control a third of the cultivation world, if not closer to half.

Well back then anyway, before everything went down…I shouldn’t have crossed that out.

Well, it would be correct to say that Qishan Wen controlled a third or maybe a half of the cultivation world before you went into seclusion. There have been a few changes since then.

First off, before I get there, let me start with the mountain, and to explain the mountain, I need to explain the war. I unfortunately can’t tell you too much about exactly what was planned for the war, Shixiong, since I don’t actually know. The long and the short of it is that the Sect Leader decided we were going to have a border skirmish with one of the small independent sects, the sect elders didn’t object (or at least they didn’t succeed in objecting, which I personally think Teacher would have), and a lot of the seniors had to go to fight.

A lot of them were very stressed about it, some of them to the point of throwing up, but there wasn’t any choice. We were all so worried about them, Shixiong! Especially once all the other sects found out about it and it turned into a really big deal – we kept hearing all sorts of updates, about Lanling Jin hiring mercenaries and the local sects activating their defenses and the Wen sect’s army moving into the area – it was very frightening, Shixiong. I’m completely in earnest, it was terrifying. The thought of all of our shixiongs and shijies going to war and maybe getting hurt or even dying…I threw up once or twice myself, actually.

But don’t worry! Despite what a lot of us were afraid of, it all turned out all right in the end. Not because war isn’t as bad as we think it is, but rather because in the end we didn’t end up having to have a war at all.

There was an earthquake instead.

Some people said that it was caused by –

Well, some of the seniors were a little silly and believed –

There was this whole thing with Baoshan Sanren’s mountain supposedly moving –

In a somewhat amusing turn of events, Cangse Sanren, disciple of the celestial immortal mountain of Baoshan Sanren, apparently came by and made a joke that got a little out of hand –

Well, Teacher says that it was obviously a joke, anyway. But on the other hand, according to the seniors the timing was really suspicious and all, and also I think Teacher and Cangse Sanren are friends, so theoretically they could be engaged in some sort of cover-up, who even knows –

Listen, Shixiong, even if it’s fake it would be SO COOL if it were true –

There was an earthquake.

The earthquake was so powerful that it shook the foundations of one of the local mountains in the area (it was in a place called Xixiang, you wouldn’t have heard of it) and kicked off a terrible landslide, which was going to destroy the nearby towns and poison the local reservoir. I say ‘going to,’ because it didn’t, because Sect Leader Wen stopped it.

‘What are you talking about, Zhijin?’ I can hear you saying now. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, everyone knows that it’s impossible to fight a natural disaster, not even if you have a whole bunch of cultivators.’

WELL.

GUESS WHAT.

Turns out that when they say that Sect Leader Wen is powerful, they really, really mean it.

I mean, the entire cultivation world was absolutely shocked by what he did, so it wasn’t just a surprise to us. No one can entirely agree on what exactly he did or how he did it, but they do agree that he used some sort of secret cultivation art and just blasted all the rocks coming down from the mountain into dust before it could hit the towns.

Just…imagine that.

Shixiong, isn’t that so cool? And he’s our Teacher’s wife! Get it, Teacher!

Reminder: implications aren’t a violation of the rule against vulgar language.

Anyway, while or maybe shortly after Teacher’s wife fought a mountain and either won or at least got to a very respectable draw, a bunch of evil spirits (ghosts, spirits, corpses, everything) that had been hiding in the base of the mountain got out and started swarming everywhere. Luckily all the sects or at least many of them were already there, because they were expecting to have to go to war, and so everyone was able to go deal with them at once. It was a whole big thing! Everyone was fighting them, the whole cultivation world working together instead of competing against each other.

(Sadly something like that is not likely to happen ever again in either of our lifetimes outside of something artificial like a discussion conference or a big celebration. And we both missed this one, me because of age and you because of seclusion. Oh, well.)

Anyway, I wouldn’t be wasting your precious just-out-of-seclusion time with this update, Shixiong, unless I really thought it was important – I’m NOT gossiping just for the sake of gossiping – but rather I’m just giving you the background for all the stuff that happened after that. We’re talking big massive shifts in the entire cultivation world, Shixiong, stuff you really need to know about, you understand?

We’re talking about the change of power in multiple Great Sects, the rise of the Wen sect (well, continued rise anyway), and Teacher becoming the second or maybe first most important person in the entire cultivation world, which is so cool I sometimes think about it while daydreaming and then someone scolds me for violating Do not smile foolishly. I’m not the only one, either, everyone is violating that rule these days.

Now, because Do not tell lies,I will admit that I don’t know exactly what happened, since it’s still unclear – some things are really best left to later historians and record-keepers – but I can at least give you the general gist to the best of my understanding.

So, remember how I mentioned all those ghosts and spirits and corpses? Rumor has it that Lanling Jin’s Sect Leader Jin got possessed by one of them, apparently a libidinous ghost. Supposedly that’s how it got through all of his defenses as a cultivator and sect leader, because he was himself so libidinous that it attracted the ghost’s attention and it used that to get him. Jiejie says that it took the form of a beautiful woman and he couldn’t resist grabbing at her and THAT’S how it got him, which just goes to show that our ancestors were right about Do not indulge in debauchery and Promiscuity is forbidden.

It must have been a really super powerful ghost to manage to get to a sect leader like that, and it was a very vicious ghost, too, because it made Sect Leader Jin make a whole bunch of cursed gold coins which then got passed around to everyone in the cultivation world. It was really dangerous, Shixiong – everyone accepted them because it was polite (they were really ugly), but because they had a commemorative design, the sect elders were planning on letting people keep them. Imagine what might have happened if they hadn’t figured out that they were cursed! It would have been awful!

What we THINK happened is that the Sect Leader and Teacher must have met up somewhere on the battlefield and figured out something had gone wrong, somehow, because they were the ones that ultimately solved the issue. The Sect Leader went off to hunt down the libidinous ghost’s tracks, or at least that’s what must have happened because there’s no other reason why he would have just disappeared like that right after a big battle while Teacher and Sect Leader Wen went to investigate the rest of the cultivation world.

Maybe because Sect Leader Wen was the one who fought the mountain landslide, Sect Leader Jin the ghost possessing Sect Leader Jin also tried to have him killed right in the middle of the Lotus Pier. (Yunmeng Jiang sect was hosting a party to make up for the fact that everyone went home after the discussion conference; it’s not really important to the story, Shixiong, but if you have questions I’ll tell you all about it later because it is SOOOO funny). Teacher had to go rushing in to save his wife, like a hero rescuing a damsel in distress, a scene right out of a novel – I wish I was there to see that, even more than the mountain thing. Not because of how good a swordsman Teacher is (the Sect Leader is probably better, I GUESS) but, well, the idea of Teacher waving his sword around and charging in through a door to save his wife just sounds like it would have been amazing, right?

Especially because the wife is Sect Leader Wen. I mean, you’ve got to admit that’s funny, right??

After that, Sect Leader Wen took his army to Lanling City, Unfortunately, they weren’t in time to keep the libidinous ghost from killing Sect Leader Jin – supposedly he died in bed with a whole bunch of prostitutes because the ghost kept going and going until his heart exploded, if you know what I mean – and then possessing someone else, though I’m not sure exactly who. From what I hear, the Sect Leader ended up fighting and killing it in some sort of epic showdown, fighting side-by-side with Sect Leader Wen or something like that, but he was hurt really badly in the process and ended up dying.

Which is heroic and all, I guess, but also a little sad?

He spent so long in seclusion and died so shortly after he got out – it doesn’t seem fair.

Jiejie says that what actually killed the Sect Leader was more likely a broken heart. She says that even though the ghost must have been super powerful if it took over Sect Leader Jin, it wasn’t enough that it would have defeated our Sect Leader – certainly not with Sect Leader Wen to help out, even if he was still super tired from fighting the mountain – but that the Sect Leader was still so sad about his wife dying that he’d just wanted to do one last thing for the sect before he died, so when he defeated the ghost he was satisfied with what he’d done and so he died.

It sounds like a ridiculous load of romantic nonsense to me, but don’t tell Jiejie I said that –

On reflection, the suggestion made was a totally reasonable theory which I definitely don’t doubt in any way and also Jiejie says to say hi and best wishes on your return to you, Shixiong. Which I’m doing, because she’s the kindest, most beautiful and most forgiving jiejie in the world, with the sharpest eyes for READING OVER PEOPLE’S SHOULDERS, and also the one with the strongest pinching fingers with unerring aim right for my ear. Which still hurts.

Anyway.

My point is, think about that, Shixiong: both our Sect Leader and Sect Leader Jin died! And in our case, we didn’t even have Teacher around any more, because he married out, and then he comes back and does the most epic scolding in Gusu Lan history, causing all the sect elders to retire, leaving us completely bereft…!

It’s madness, Shixiong, I’m telling you, madness!

Okay, maybe not madness, I’m exaggerating. It could be much worse. At least we still have Teacher! Even if he is going to be mostly managing the sect providing advice on managing the sect from where he lives in the Nightless City, though of course they’re going to be promoting a lot of the sect seniors that were already doing things to do most of the day-to-day stuff (but more importantly we’ll still have Teacher, too, because Sect Leader Wen has already agreed that they’ll spend a little time out of every season or two in the Cloud Recesses, as needed, until Xichen and Wangji get old enough to start apprenticing as future sect leader/second-in-command).

Before you start worrying, Shixiong, we’re not actually becoming a subsidiary sect of Qishan Wen. Teacher would never let that happen.

Least of all to Xichen and Wangji, who are going to inherit it eventually!

Anyway, we’re still definitely in a better situation than, say, Lanling Jin, whose only option for sect leadership is a six-year-old child. His mother, Madam Jin, is temporarily acting as sect leader in his place, but given everything that happened with the ghost, Sect Leader Wen has stationed a battalion of his army at Jinlin Tower to make sure that nothing goes wrong.

Now THAT is called becoming a subsidiary sect, even if Lanling Jin will never admit it.

At this point, Shixiong, you may be thinking to yourself – wow! That’s a lot of change! The Qishan Wen sect has extended its influence over two Great Sects and all of their subsidiaries!

BUT THERE’S MORE.

It seems like, either during the events of Xixiang or shortly before, Qinghe Nie’s Sect Leader Nie suffered from a minor qi deviation – and you know how Qinghe Nie sect leaders tend to be with qi deviations. Anyway, since he’s friends with Teacher and Sect Leader Wen, they all put their heads together along with the Nie sect doctors and they seem to have come up with a way to keep him from having any more qi deviations. Now obviously I don’t know what that method is, since no matter how it was created, it’s officially a Qinghe Nie sect secret now, but what I do know is that whatever the method is, it involves Sect Leader Nie needing to retire from being sect leader in another year or so.

Apparently he’s going to go travel the world with Cangse Sanren and her husband, because he’s promised to kill some sort of beast for her in exchange for something that she’s doing for him that helps with his qi deviation problem. Jiejie says that Cangse Sanren is so funny that she can use jokes to make his qi travel right and that’s why he needs to be with her all the time, but that seems dumb, right? Maybe? DO NOT TELL JIEJIE OR SHE’LL GET MY EAR AGAIN.

Interestingly enough, Shixiong, they came to check out something in our Cloud Recesses’ library once, and it turns out that Cangse Sanren’s husband – you know, Wei Changze, formerly a servant in Yunmeng Jiang – is actually a historian with an interest in curses and unorthodox cultivation styles. Cool, huh? I think he’s going to stick around for a bit, too, or at least until he’s made his way through most of the library, which will take a while.

What this means, though, is that his son, Nie Mingjue, is going to have to take over, and he’s not even fifteen yet. I think? Maybe he is. He could even be older. You know how the Nie are. Either way, I don’t think the Nie sect is going to install a regent for him, but obviously, at that age, he’s probably going to need a lot of help in running sect matters. His father will be able to help somewhat, but otherwise he’s probably going to need to reach out to his sect’s allies.

Which, if you think about it, are: Gusu Lan and Qishan Wen.

And more specifically, Sect Leader Nie’s good friends, Teacher and Sect Leader Wen.

If you’re keeping track, that’s now three Great Sects that Qishan Wen has somehow managed to get its claws into (with Teacher’s help, which only goes to show you how awesome Teacher is).

Now, Shixiong, you may be thinking to yourself: ‘Okay, I think I see where this is going. Now tell me who died in Yunmeng Jiang!’

Well, I’m pleased to tell you: nobody died. They’re all okay. For once.

They’ve actually had a very positive change for the better. You see, apparently, Madam Yu or maybe we’re supposed to call her Madam Jiang now? Madam Yu got inspired by Sect Leader Wen being Teacher’s wife despite being more powerful and the proper sect bloodline and all that. She apparently went and demanded that Sect Leader Jiang let her be the husband, because she was more suited for the role than he was. And he AGREED!

(Only Yunmeng Jiang, am I right? Attempt the impossible!)

So now Madam Yu is running Yunmeng Jiang and Sect Leader Jiang is helping her do it, I guess, but either way the rumor is that they’re both much happier now. Or at least you don’t hear stories about them fighting all the time anymore, anyway.

Oh, and their kids are also all right. Uh, I may have forgotten to mention, but actually Cangse Sanren temporarily took the two Jiang sect heirs with her so that they could get to know her son while spending time together on a road trip, which turned out to be the same road trip where she happened to trip over Xichen and Wangji. What a coincidence, right?

Which leads me to the best part: TEACHER IS GOING TO BE TEACHING AGAIN!!!

It’s not going to be at home, of course, because he lives in the Nightless City now. But all that means is that all of us juniors get to go to stay at the Nightless City (which is supposedly HUGE) so that we can all do our lessons there together! It’s going to be year-round classes, with month or two month breaks around all the big holidays, and it’s going to be great. Qinghe Nie is sending their young master, Nie Huaisang, with Nie Mingjue going to go as well to learn how to run a sect from Sect Leader Wen, and Lanling Jin’s Jin Zixuan is going to be there (he doesn’t get a choice), Xichen and Wangji are obviously going to be there because Teacher is there, the Wen heirs (I think there’s two of them? maybe more if you count in some of their cousins?) already live there, and the Jiang sect heirs got brought there by Cangse Sanren along with her son…listen, Shixiong, you know how Teacher always invites some people from other sects to join our lessons with him, right?

Well, imagine that, except EVERYONE is going to be there. It’s going to be so much fun!

Yes, you read that right – it’s going to be fun, for me, because your favorite shidi is going to be one of the people that gets to go! I’ve never been happier to be one of the age groups that Teacher teaches…if you come out of seclusion early enough, maybe you can try to get a spot too? You’re not that old, you could probably get in with the older group!

Please, please please, Shixiong? It would be so much fun to have you there!

And even if you can’t get a spot, maybe you can come help teach or something? Teacher has already had to start recruiting extra people to come help with the classes, since there’s probably going to be a fair number of us there. Someone to supervise self-study, keep an eye on the sword training, help the ones who don’t know music with the basics – that sort of thing.

Supposedly Sect Leader Wen even volunteered to personally teach a class on arrays!

Jiejie says Teacher might not let him do it if he doesn’t behave. Then she giggled for some reason? I’m pretty sure it’s some sort of innuendo, but I’m not sure I understand what she was referencing…

Speaking of Sect Leader Wen, if you’re worried about the Fire Palace, don’t be – he’s apparently working on dismantling most of the torture palace aspects of it and turning it into a hobby palace instead. Or, well, apparently it’s always been the Wen sect leader’s hobby palace, only the sect leaders before Sect Leader Wen made it a pleasure palace and he made it a torture palace.

And now it’s going to be a…study palace, I guess?

I don’t know exactly. I think it’s supposed to be a place where people do experiments with arrays, which are Sect Leader Wen’s specialty. I don’t think I know enough about it to really understand, I think, but there was something about studying what happens to spiritual energy when it gets really small or really big and how it interacts with all sorts of things, coming up with rules about how it works and then trying to break them and stuff like that…anyway, all of a-Die’s alchemist and artificer friends got really excited, and a lot of the sect’s philosophers did, too, so I’m taking that to mean that it’s a good thing.

At minimum, it’s lots better than a torture palace, anyway.

Not that I would expect anything less from our Teacher, of course. They say that he can make a gentleman even out of a waste – why not make a good wife out of a tyrant?

Don’t tell Jiejie I said that. Or anyone else. Just imagine if Sect Leader Wen heard about that…!

Actually, I don’t know, maybe he wouldn’t mind?

I actually saw Teacher and Sect Leader Wen recently. They came together to the Cloud Recesses on some sort of business – maybe related to that time Teacher just straight up murdered a sect elder for breaking the rules? Teacher is SO COOL – and they were walking together through the Cloud Recesses, their heads bent together as they spoke with each other. Sect Leader Wen really does only look like he’s only in his twenties, particularly when he smiles, and he was smiling at Teacher, who looked content and pleased and warm in the way he does when he’s had some time to work on his music or spend time on things that make him happy.

His whole face was softer, you know? And for once, he was actually getting the chance to walk around without getting bothered by either the sect elders (not present) or the juniors (too afraid of Sect Leader Wen). I don’t think I’ve ever seen Teacher look so peaceful.

They’re obviously in love.

It’s just nice to see, you know? You hear about all those stories about Gusu Lan as compared to other sects, and particularly about the idiosyncratic yes I know big words too, Shixiong, I can be elegant when I want to be ways that the Lan of Gusu Lan go about falling in love when they end up falling in love. It’s just so - so - why are words hard And in this case I just feel like it sort of feels like the right end, you know? You know the way that Teacher always seemed a little lonely sometimes, like he wanted to be one of the ones that fell in love like that, but he just happened not to have had a chance yet.

And now he found his chance.

I mean…okay, sure, he found his chance and his love with possibly the weirdest person ever. There are definitely people in the sect that are never recovering from the shock they got when word of Teacher’s marriage got out. But you know what, if it works for him, good for him.

I’m glad they’re in love.

And they were obviously in love.

Really obviously in love, even if they weren’t putting it on display or anything.

I mean, they were glowing. Both of them – I think it might even be a bit literally true? They seemed brighter than the surroundings, somehow. I called Jiejie over to look, and she agreed that they were cute! Which wasn’t actually my question, but I guess it’s true.

And I guess I can understand why Teacher decided to elope with him.

(But only because we still get to attend Teacher’s classes. If Sect Leader Wen took away Teacher for good, I would be sooooo mad!)

Anyway, Shixiong, I hope that this is helpful…

Uh, sorry shixiong, it looks like I may have misunderstood the exact time and date and uh, everything, and now I really have to go pack RIGHT NOW because otherwise I’m going to be super late and I mean SUPER LATE so uh I guess you’re just going to have to get this letter as is, hopefully I haven’t forgotten to cross out anything too embarrassing, have a nice time back from seclusion bye!!!

~ Lan Zhijin

P.S. FIND A WAY TO COME TO THE NIGHTLESS CITY! WE’RE ALL GOING TO HAVE SO MUCH FUN!

#mdzs #lan qiren #wen ruohan #my fic #my fics #Megafic

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robininthelabyrinth · 5 months

Text

The Other Mountain - ao3 - Chapter 31

Pairing: Lan Qiren/Wen Ruohan

Warning Tags on Ao3

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Perhaps sending an urgent message to summon Lan Qiren back to his side at once was a little excessive, given that there was no genuine need for such urgency, but Wen Ruohan did not especially care. Would it be thoroughly undignified to admit that he was sulking?

Because he might be sulking.

“Oh no, you are definitely sulking. Unbelievable amounts of sulking,” Lao Nie said, quite cheerfully.

“I’m not sulking,” Wen Ruohan informed him firmly, only to have Lao Nie nod at him with an air of deep wisdom and exactly zero belief, an expression which he somehow managed to make simultaneously both condescending and scornful. “I am not!”

“Of course not. What a ridiculous thought. Why would you ever sulk? What possible cause could there be for your sulking?”

Truly, Lan Qiren had been indisputably correct when he had described Lao Nie as the most obnoxious man in the cultivation world.

“Are you going to help or not?” Wen Ruohan scowled at him. He hated having to need Lao Nie for anything – as he unfortunately now did.

Qingheng-jun had surrendered, and so, out of lack of better options and cursing himself for a fool the entire time, Wen Ruohan had taken him prisoner. But with Qingheng-jun’s strength and cleverness, Wen Ruohan didn’t dare entrust him to anyone he wasn’t certain could defeat him in battle, and never mind that he was disarmed and technically had surrendered voluntarily.

Tragically, that left only himself and Lao Nie.

And between the two of them, it couldn’t be him, because if Qingheng-jun didn’t stop smirking, Wen Ruohan was going to give up on all of his good intentions and just haul off to murder the man.

It would feel so good, too.

“Yes, yes, I’ll take custody of him,” Lao Nie said, rolling his eyes at him and even sticking out his tongue at him like a child. “I’m always willing to help, Hanhan, you know me. Now go off and pine for your sweetheart like some adolescent with a crush.”

“I do not pine.”

“Mm, right, right. And you don’t sulk, either.”

“I am not sulking,” Wen Ruohan sulked. “It would be immature.”

“Hanhan,” Lao Nie said, with great affection. “You are immature. It’s part of your charm.”

Wen Ruohan had been so offended by that suggestion that he’d nearly managed to forget about Qingheng-jun for a whole shichen thereafter, which in retrospect was probably at least part of what Lao Nie had intended. Wen Ruohan would reluctantly admit that he did have something of a bad tendency to dwell overmuch on things that had gone wrong, or which did not please him – which was not the same as sulking – and at present there wasn’t time for that. He had more than enough to do, between managing the increasingly worried residents of Lanling City, managing the increasingly irritable Madame Jin, and managing his own army, which had finished collecting the cursed coins…not to mention figuring out what to do with the coins now that he’d started to amass quite a collection of them.

Currently he was thinking of just throwing them in the smelter and calling it a day.

Yes, he could probably figure out a way to remove the curse if he put some time and effort into it.

No, he did not care enough to do that.

There was really no point in studying the coins themselves – if he wanted to learn more about the curse, he could just ask Lan Qiren to dig up whatever weird Lan sect book he’d found it in, or for that matter interrogate Qingheng-jun himself. On the other hand, melting down the coins would help break down the curse, making it easier to banish it using standard arrays and talismans against resentful energy. The only reason to go to the effort of preserving the actual coins themselves in their present form was if someone wanted to keep them as they were.

Which, being as they were cheap gaudy trash no one actually wanted, no one did.

Wen Ruohan supposed that there was some argument to be made that the coins represented the last thing Jin Guangshan had created in his life, give or take some bastard children yet to be born, and therefore ought to be maintained as some demonstration of respect.

Which settled it. They were going into the smelter for sure.

There was also the matter of arranging for both Jin Guangshi and his family and little Jin Zixuan to go to the Nightless City. Wen Ruohan had thoughtfully managed that matter on Lan Qiren’s behalf, mostly through a combination of loudly blaming Madam Jin for the various issues they’d encountered since arriving in Lanling City (assassinations, deliberate obstruction, and so forth) and making a number of pointedly implied threats related to exposing the depth of her husband’s involvement in the matter of the cursed coins.

It wasn’t that difficult an accusation to make. There were already all sorts of rumors going around Lanling City (and indeed the entire cultivation world) about Jin Guangshan’s so-unfortunate death, the nature of the Wen sect’s quite justified retaliation for what had happened at the Lotus Pier, and even some clever people who’d made an effort to connect it all to what had happened so recently in Xixiang. Madam Jin and Wen Ruohan both knew quite well that it wouldn’t have been hard at all for Wen Ruohan to push the rumors in a direction that would have been utterly disastrous to Madam Jin’s attempts to retain legitimacy and maintain Lanling Jin’s face and power in the cultivation world. Even for someone who was as cunning as she, there was no choice but to yield in the face of evidence that her husband had tried to murder not merely a rival sect leader, but the entire cultivation world, though Madam Jin certainly made a decent effort.

She particularly hadn’t wanted to give up her son.

Such a pity for her, then, that the person extorting her was not Lan Qiren, who would probably have tried to appeal to her better nature (likely non-existent) or the health and happiness of her son (probably irrelevant to her beyond him being healthy and alive) or maybe even to the greater good (even less relevant), but rather Wen Ruohan, who had no problem skipping the solicitude and going straight to outright blackmail.

Wen Ruohan might have had more sympathy for Madam Jin’s position if she hadn’t shifted so smoothly over from genuine concerns about Jin Zixuan’s well-being – which had faded rather quickly as soon as she’d realized that Wen Ruohan intended to put Lan Qiren in charge of him, right alongside his own children, thereby guaranteeing him both the most prestigious education in the cultivation world and a chance to make valuable future political connections both – to political calculations designed to shore up her own power as regent. It wasn’t as though Wen Ruohan couldn’t respect someone using wits and ruthlessness to get ahead, but for personal reasons he felt a particular level of distaste for Madam Jin’s obvious attempts to use the taking of her son as hostage to as leverage to get all sorts of assurances that Wen Ruohan would replace the benefits of her son’s presence with his own promise of support.

As it was, Wen Ruohan simply ignored her requests, whether implicit or stated outright, and instead followed Lan Qiren’s idea of referring her to his army any time she had an objection to his proposed plan. It was objectively hilarious how many colors her face turned every time he reminded her of it.

Coins handled, army settled (and military discipline strictly maintained, as promised), Lanling City’s domestic leadership reassured – really, Wen Ruohan had been very productive. Far too busy, certainly, to be said to have been sulking.

Not that he would be. Because he wasn’t. Just like he wasn’t pining, because that would be absurd.

Why would he pine?

Lan Qiren was his. They were married, together for a lifetime. They had all the many years of the future to be together, and if Wen Ruohan had anything to say about it, there would be very many years indeed. Lan Qiren had given him his heart, had fallen in love with him, and the Lan of Gusu Lan took such things incredibly seriously – and Lan Qiren more seriously than most.

It wasn’t as though he were suddenly going to change his mind just because he’d gone home for a visit.

Lan Qiren didn’t change his mind easily about anything. He didn’t like change at all, and he’d already gotten accustomed to the Nightless City. There was really no need to worry that he would be swept by a wave of nostalgia and homesickness upon visiting the Cloud Recesses and refuse to return. Nor was he so lacking in spine that his Lan sect elders would be able to bully him into staying by demanding that he return to his duty, or succeed in any effort to try to split them up, to force him to request a divorce…not that Wen Ruohan would ever grant one.

There was no need to worry, so Wen Ruohan didn’t worry.

He certainly didn’t pine.

He’d called Lan Qiren back because he needed help in managing all the things he had to do, and that was all.

Yes, fine, technically, none of the things Wen Ruohan was doing at the moment actually required Lan Qiren’s presence, much less urgently. Lan Qiren’s particular talents aside, Wen Ruohan was far better suited to diplomatic political maneuvering of the sort he was currently engaged in with Lanling Jin. His army was largely self-sufficient, he was accustomed to managing all sect matters on his own, and there wasn’t much he could do to help encourage the coin collection in the other Great Sects, since they would only grow less cooperative if he got involved. Even dealing with Qingheng-jun wasn’t that urgent, though naturally it’d be better to resolve that matter sooner rather than later.

There was no actual need to summon Lan Qiren back.

Wen Ruohan just wanted him back.

Which had nothing to do with pining, no matter what Lao Nie might imply. Life was simply more interesting when Lan Qiren was around. Life was simply better when he was around.

Really, Wen Ruohan had to hand it to himself: with each passing day, he grew increasingly assured of his own brilliance, both in general and specifically for his genius move of having sought and obtained Lan Qiren in marriage when he had. He would never again encounter such a heaven-sent opportunity to steal such a precious treasure from another Great Sect, not even if he destroyed them all and raided their treasuries to claim them for his own. Lan Qiren was the finest treasure he would ever be able to find, a pearl beyond pearls, priceless and unique, and he was his.

Wen Ruohan wasn’t giving him up, not for anything. Even if the Lan sect now regretted giving him up, as surely they must, it was surely too late…

“Sect Leader, report! Senior Lan has arrived.”

“Good,” Wen Ruohan said, brightening and setting aside the paperwork he’d been dawdling over. “Send him over to me at once.”

He was admittedly curious to know how Lan Qiren’s efforts to scold his sect into virtue had gone. Wen Ruohan was, on account of his personal age, one of the only sect leaders not to have to deal with the baggage of sect elders, and he greatly appreciated having that freedom. Still, he certainly remembered what sect elders were generally like – and not especially fondly.

They were always a bunch of old farts that thought they were due deference if not outright groveling by the younger generations just because they’d managed to not die, each one of them puttering around and opining on things that didn’t concern them as if unable to resist the urge. His Wen sect was well rid of them, in Wen Ruohan’s view! Still, during the period that his own sect elders had been alive, that seemingly endless collection of uncles, aunts, older cousins, grand-uncles and the like, even he hadn’t dared go forth and lecture the whole lot of them for their unethical behavior, as it seemed Lan Qiren had been planning to do. Whatever happened, it would make for an interesting story, even if Lan Qiren was almost certain to tell it in the dullest way possible; he was the sort of person to treat miracles as commonplace.

Anyway, Wen Ruohan had his own news to share. The matter with Qingheng-jun…

No, he wasn’t going to think about that at the moment. Nothing was going to spoil his reunion with Lan Qiren, not even his own sulking.

His own bad mood, he meant. Not sulking. Because he wasn’t sulking.

And then Lan Qiren walked in, healthy and here, and Wen Ruohan really wasn’t sulking any longer.

“You’re back,” he said, unable to hide his pleasure.

“And you are well,” Lan Qiren said, looking visibly relieved – and notably more powerful than the last time Wen Ruohan had seen him.

Not literally glowing, the way he had immediately after their dual cultivation, so filled with spiritual energy that his skin had seemed almost luminescent, but nevertheless genuinely more powerful, in a solid and stable sort of fashion. He’d somehow managed to assimilate all the power they had generated into his golden core, rather than using it up or needing to break it down over time.

Very impressive.

Not that he would ever be anything less.

“Of course I’m well,” Wen Ruohan said, arrogant as always, and enjoyed how his self-aggrandizement only made Lan Qiren look amused. “Are you implying that you doubt my skills…?”

Lan Qiren snorted, the tension flowing out of his shoulders: it seemed he really had been worried, which might have been genuinely annoying if the battle hadn’t actually been quite difficult. “Merely your communication skills,” he said, his amusement settling into simple contentment. “You sent an urgent summons, so I thought something might have happened. You could have clarified in your missive.”

If Wen Ruohan had clarified, Lan Qiren might not have arrived so quickly. Though perhaps Wen Ruohan could see to it that next time, in his benevolence, he would include a small note confirming his well-being, if only because it would spare Lan Qiren some unnecessary panic.

Provided that Lan Qiren properly appreciated him for doing so, of course. He had ideas on how.

“I am nevertheless quite pleased to see you alive and well, even if it is no more than I had expected. Obviously I would never have left you to manage alone if I had had any actual concern,” Lan Qiren said, which was a very nice balm for Wen Ruohan’s ego. “What ended up happening in the end? Is my brother…?”

Wen Ruohan grimaced, his poor mood immediately rushing back to him at the reminder.

“He’s alive, unfortunately,” he said, lips twisting in disgust. “He surrendered, right at the very end before I could finish him off. He even had the gall to mock me for my restraint, knowing that I would not execute a prisoner on your behalf without a fair trial. I had to entrust him to Lao Nie just to keep from employing further violence…!”

He trailed off. Lan Qiren was smiling warmly at him, approval written in every line of him.

It was worth every single one of Qingheng-jun’s smirks.

“I assume that that approach meets with your approval,” he added haughtily, fishing for compliments. “Naturally I would have had no such restraint if it were up to me, especially since we both know that it will be easier to keep his misconduct secret if he is already dead. But I know you have scruples, and will undoubtedly insist on having all the relevant accoutrements…”

“A trial is not an accoutrement,” Lan Qiren said, but he was still smiling. “It may make things more difficult, I admit, but what will be will be; we will find a way through. You did very well.”

Wen Ruohan preened. Of course he had.

“I will be expecting an appropriate reward, of course,” he said, which made Lan Qiren laugh.

“Of course, that is only natural,” Lan Qiren agreed. “Positive reinforcement is a critical part of pedagogy. It is only reasonable that good behavior deserves a commensurate reward, and I intend to reward you thoroughly.”

Wen Ruohan smirked. “I should hope that you’re not using this particular type of positive reinforcement with any of your other students.”

Lan Qiren gave him an admonishing look, though the fondness he couldn’t conceal undercut the severity of it. “Do not be vulgar. Do I need to turn you over my knee again?”

Wen Ruohan wouldn’t mind.

In fact, he itched to take Lan Qiren to bed right away, forgetting everything else. Lan Qiren had come straight to him, not even having washed the (metaphorical, given Lan sect robes) dust of the road off his boots. He had not eaten, had not rested, had not deviated in the slightest, as if he was just as desperate to see Wen Ruohan as Wen Ruohan had been to see him.

It was immensely gratifying.

He wanted…but there would be time enough for that later, when Lan Qiren had had some time to recover and would be able to perform at his best.

“Tell me first about your visit to the Cloud Recesses,” he said, and Lan Qiren’s expression somehow managed to get even more approving. “I can already see that you had the opportunity to consolidate all that spiritual energy. I take it everything went well?”

“Very well. Better than expected, even.”

He then relayed the story, which turned out to involve a formal ethics debate – only in Gusu Lan, really, what unbelievable weirdos – and some really rather fascinating bits of information about what had happened in the past with Qingheng-jun and his unfortunate wife, as well as the ultimate result and disposition of events.

“Do you think Lan Zhengquan will be executed?” Wen Ruohan asked, mildly curious. “Or merely confined involuntarily?”

“Involuntary confinement is not ‘merely’ anything. But, in answer to your question – yes, in this instance, I believe it is likely that he will be executed following a proper, if confidential, trial. I may disagree with everything Lan Zhengquan has done, up to and including the justifications he put together for his behavior and that of his brother ten years ago, but I will not deny that he has the courage of his convictions. If he remains unwilling to abandon those justifications even in light of the evidence and final judgment against him, he is within his rights to demand an execution, which will be carried out at an appropriate location outside of the Cloud Recesses.”

“A pity.”

Lan Qiren arched his eyebrows. “I agree with the sentiment, but for whatever strange reason I suspect our regret comes from different sources. I regret the loss of life, and the loss of the wisdom, experience, and advice that Lan Zhengquan would have provided the sect, should he instead have been able to accept correction, sincerely repent, and live on. Whereas you…?”

Such sentimental tripe was most certainly not Wen Ruohan’s concern.

“It would have been more narratively satisfying if he suffered the same fate as your sister-in-law,” he explained, and Lan Qiren snorted. “What? It would have been. From what you say, he was the one who led the charge in favor of executing her back then, which is what caused your brother to save her life by marrying her, converting the sentence from execution to imprisonment. For him now to suffer imprisonment in the same manner would be an especially meet application of justice. You could have even put him in the same house!”

“Luckily, Gusu Lan does not determine its punishments by what would be narratively satisfying,” Lan Qiren said sternly. “And now I am clearly going to have to conduct a review to ensure that the Nightless City does not do so, either.”

Wen Ruohan would have complained, but in all truth the Nightless City’s justice system could probably stand to be reviewed, and he couldn’t think of anyone better to do it.

He shrugged in implicit consent, and changed the subject: “What about your sect elders? Was it entirely wise to leave them to debate the matter of their own punishment themselves? He who suffers the penalty ought not impose it, after all.”

“I have confidence that they will choose to do the right thing. And if they do not, I will go back and have further words with them.”

Wen Ruohan sniffed disdainfully. “It seems to me that you have already committed to going back already in order to evaluate their proposed solution anyway. Already planning trips without even consulting me…! How rude of you, Qiren. Whatever happened to ‘be attentive to your wife’s needs’…?”

“Would you be satisfied if I promised that by the time I was done with you, you would not want to lay eyes on me for the duration of my absence?”

That sounded amazing.

“At any rate, even if I return, I do not plan to be gone for very long,” Lan Qiren said, and that satisfied Wen Ruohan even more. “Even in this instance, I will admit that your summons came at a timely moment to excuse me from the debate, which was likely to be interminable.”

“And here I thought that interminable debates were what your Gusu Lan sect did best.” Wen Ruohan chuckled at Lan Qiren’s long-suffering expression. “Very well, I will be benevolent and lend you to them – briefly – to ensure that they do the right thing.”

“You do not need to pretend in front of me,” Lan Qiren said, now even more long-suffering. “You are tremendously excited by the possibility that they will carry through on their suggestion that they all resign and leave me to manage or at minimum advise on the management of the sect from the Nightless City, thereby putting it into your control.”

Wen Ruohan grinned. He wasn’t going to lie: they were definitely going to fuck about this later. “What can I say?” he drawled. “My husband gets me the best gifts.”

“On that subject,” Lan Qiren said, eyes narrowing, “an incident arose while I was at the Cloud Recesses…”

“Did they encourage you to divorce me?”

“Not seriously – ” Which meant that they had? “– and that is not the issue in question. Have you at any point instructed your disciples to refer to me as Madam Wen?”

Wen Ruohan was not an idiot.

“Certainly not,” he lied. “I can’t imagine why they would ever do such a thing.”

Lan Qiren sighed, clearly spotting the lie and just as clearly having no idea what to do with it. “It is inappropriate,” he said. “I am your husband, not your wife, and that means I am not Madam Wen.”

“You can be my husband and Madam Wen,” Wen Ruohan argued. “It would be funnier that way.”

“It would be confusing that way. Enough people assume that I am the wife already simply because you are more powerful both personally and politically, and that it is without further linguistic snarls.”

That seemed less important than the potential for humor, at least for Wen Ruohan.

“How do you see the roles of husband and wife anyway?” he asked, belatedly curious. “You don’t seem to associate them with household tasks, with sexual positions, or with power dynamics, or for that matter, as far as I can determine, with anything else. What exactly do you see as constituting your role as the husband, as opposed to the wife?”

Lan Qiren looked surprised to be asked such a question. “There are any number of applicable rules,” he started, and Wen Ruohan rolled his eyes: of course there were. “However, to sum up the relevant duties, as the husband, it is my duty to make you happy: to love you as I love myself, to honor you more than myself, to seek to do everything in my power to see that your needs and wishes are fulfilled. In return, as my wife, you are bound to love and honor me, to be faithful to me, and to trust me, abiding by my wishes even when they may contradict your own.”

The Gusu Lan sect was insane, Wen Ruohan decided, not for the first time. What sort of ridiculous definitions of husband and wife were those? No one else put it like that! No one else even thought about it like that! What sort of monastery had Lan An come from, anyway…?

Though Wen Ruohan supposed, if one put it in those terms, then in fact that it really was more appropriate for him to be the wife. He wasn’t exactly very good at living up to ‘honor another more than yourself’ and never had been, and he was too self-absorbed to really care to spend all his time worrying about someone else’s needs, but he was certainly capable of love, respect, faith, and trust. Certainly he was the one who kept compromising his actions in order to accommodate Lan Qiren’s ridiculous notions of morality…not that doing so had impeded any of his ambitions to date.

On the contrary, with the Jin sect in his pocket, the Jiang sect heirs secure in the Nightless City, and the potential for Lan Qiren to keep his nephews there as well – an idea that had very obviously not yet arisen in Lan Qiren’s mind, but which Wen Ruohan fully intended to use to convince him that the Wen sect temporarily taking over Gusu Lan until said nephews were of age wasn’t that bad an idea – it seemed that listening to Lan Qiren was suiting him quite well indeed. How convenient that one of Wen Ruohan’s ‘needs and wishes’ that Lan Qiren was obligated to try to deliver happened to include taking over the cultivation world.

In fact, if Wen Ruohan could somehow find a way to maintain the status quo, he would have in a single season effectively conquered, in practice if not in fact, not one but three of the other Great Sects. The only one left outside his grasp was therefore just Qinghe Nie…

Ah. Right.

He’d almost forgotten.

If one thought about it in a certain light, he also stood a good chance of making an inroad into taking over Qinghe Nie, because the current sect leader of Qinghe Nie, Lao Nie, was – imminently going to die.

He could take advantage of that, if he wanted.

He could, Wen Ruohan insisted to himself, even as he was swept by a wave of revulsion towards himself at the mere thought; it was just a matter of politics, and things like that happened in politics. It wasn’t as though this were anything like what had happened with Wen Ruoyu, the betrayal of someone who trusted him. Lao Nie didn’t trust anyone, even when he loved them sincerely – and he did love him in his own way, Wen Ruohan did not doubt, only that it happened to be the wrong sort of love for what Wen Ruohan really wanted.

Betraying Lao Nie…would be more like what he’d done to his first wife.

That had been a mutual tragedy. Their needs and wants had been incompatible from the very start, but they’d made a go of it anyway, and when it had started falling apart, they had not managed their reactions well, each of them blaming each other, each of them justifying their own actions against each other, hurting each other, betraying each other, and in the end –

In the end they’d destroyed everything.

Wen Ruohan instinctively grimaced.

No, he couldn’t do that again. He would have to find another way. Perhaps Lan Qiren would be able to think of something –

Wait.

Lan Qiren.

Lan Qiren, who had no way to know that Wen Ruohan’s expression of disgust and revulsion had nothing to do with their current conversation!

“I was thinking of Lao Nie,” he blurted out, trying to explain, and then realized how badly that statement could be taken. They were right in the middle of discussion about their married life, and he’d started thinking about his former lover..!

“Yes, it was very fortunate that he was here to assist you,” Lan Qiren said, nodding with approval, apparently missing the more unfortunate set of implications entirely. “And convenient, since we wanted to speak with him anyway. Have you had an opportunity to discuss his condition? Or were you planning to wait until I was present?”

“I avoided it entirely,” Wen Ruohan said. He’d never been so relieved at Lan Qiren’s lack of understanding of innuendo. Do not give your wife reason to doubt your fidelity… “Do you think now is a good time? There is still the matter of your brother to deal with. They were friends, once, too.”

He wouldn’t mind putting off the conversation a little longer, personally.

“It will never be a good time,” Lan Qiren pointed out. “It may as well be now. Anyway, it is not as though we are going to him to offer our condolences, we are going to offer our help. Didn’t his sect doctors predict that he had ten years left? He is hardly at risk of immediate decline.”

You don’t know that! Wen Ruohan wanted to protest. Each qi deviation could be the one that takes him away, and the only way to stop it will be to solve a problem that generations upon generations of Qinghe Nie have failed to unravel. Lao Nie will never stop cultivating with his saber, will never give up his clan’s traditions, and ten years is not as long as you might think –

Though, on the other hand, I am a genius among geniuses. Lao Nie’s ancestors might have looked before, but they never had me on their side. Maybe it’s not so hopeless after all.

“We should go see him,” Lan Qiren said, either not noticing or perhaps politely ignoring whatever was happening on Wen Ruohan’s face. Knowing him, it was probably the former. “Particularly if he’s been forced to safeguard my brother, which must be emotionally taxing given the state of their relationship. Tell me, where is he now?”

Wen Ruohan was about to answer, only to realize he had no idea, having not particularly wanted to pay any attention to Qingheng-jun for any longer than it had taken to hand him over to Lao Nie in the first place. Qingheng-jun had spent the first part of the journey back to Jinlin Tower in a dignified silence, but as they’d drawn nearer, something had changed, and he had started talking about Lan Qiren again, clearly trying to goad Wen Ruohan into a response. Wen Ruohan hadn’t let him succeed, of course, but the temptation to find a tall window and shove him out of it without a sword had been very strong.

(Sometimes Wen Ruohan missed his Fire Palace. He hadn’t even dismantled it yet, though he intended to, and he already missed it. Not that he’d be dismantling all of it. There were always people that needed to be properly interrogated, and his machines would still serve quite well for that, even if they’d now go unused the majority of the time. It was only a pity that Qingheng-jun had nothing to say that anyone needed to hear. Certainly not Lan Qiren, that was for certain.)

“Easily found,” he said with an idle shrug, and went to the door of the room he’d been using as an office, waving over one of the disciples waiting outside. “Where is Lao Nie?”

The disciple saluted. “Sect Leader, he is just outside, in your courtyard.”

“In my courtyard?” Wen Ruohan asked, surprised that Lao Nie was so close by – and in such an unguarded location, too. Lao Nie was confident in his own abilities, and rightfully so, but for all of his rage, he was typically a surprisingly cautious fighter. Normally speaking, he would not take unnecessary risks. Keeping Qingheng-jun in an open courtyard seemed a dubious choice, and yet abandoning his duty to watch over him when he had promised to do so seemed – out of character.

Not yet, surely…!

Lan Qiren frowned. “That seems unlike him,” he observed, confirming Wen Ruohan’s sudden apprehension. “Let us go at once.”

When they went out to find him, Lao Nie was indeed there, sitting on a bench and cleaning his saber with all apparent ease, seeming as though he did not have a care in the world.

Qingheng-jun…was nowhere in sight.

Wen Ruohan felt his eye twitch. “Lao Nie!” he bellowed. “What are you doing?”

Lao Nie paused in what he was doing.

Then, he very exaggeratedly looked down at his saber and the cleaning cloth in his hand, then up at the two of them. “Come on, Hanhan,” he said, opening his eyes excessively wide. “I know for a fact that it hasn’t been that long since you handled a weapon. Aren’t you married now?”

Wen Ruohan had been gearing up to shout at him, but, as so often happened, Lao Nie’s humor cut his anger off at the knees. It was impossible to remain properly angry when you were fighting off laughter, which made Lao Nie’s approach to dealing with Wen Ruohan’s anger simultaneously devastatingly effective and also incredibly irritating.

Also, Lao Nie was perfectly aware that Wen Ruohan had actually used his sword to fight against Qingheng-jun. More recently than he’d had the chance to take advantage of Lan Qiren’s ‘sword,’ too, tragic and in need of quick remedying as that was…

“That was not the purpose behind his question and you know it,” Lan Qiren said mildly. “Hello, Lao Nie. What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you two,” Lao Nie said, immediately actually answering the virtually identical question in what seemed like a thoroughly unfair display of blatant favoritism. “One of the Wen sect disciples said they saw you arrive, Qiren, and go to talk to Hanhan. So I came here to wait until you were done.”

That answer was all well and good, quite reasonable, everything in order, except for one critical point.

“Shouldn’t you be watching Qingheng-jun?” Wen Ruohan asked.

Lao Nie shrugged. “No need.”

“No need?” Wen Ruohan scowled at him, annoyed all over again. “Lao Nie, did you not hear me earlier? I wanted you to watch him, because I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t find a way out if the only ones guarding him were my disciples. Or yours, for that matter! He’s tricky and resourceful, even if he’s been disarmed. Who knows what trouble he’s gotten into already – ”

“He won’t be getting into any trouble,” Lao Nie said. “He’s dead.”

Wen Ruohan was about to retort with something devastatingly clever and cutting, likely about the importance of living up to responsibilities and one’s given word, but then whatever he had been about to say entirely dropped out of his mind as Lao Nie’s words entered it.

“I’m sorry,” he said blankly. “He’s what?!”

“Lao Nie, did you just say that he was dead?” Lan Qiren asked, frowning. “My brother? Dead?”

“My condolences, Qiren,” Lao Nie said, sounding completely genuine and sincere and also immensely missing the point. “Really. I know you two weren’t close, and that by the end you probably pretty much hated each other, but he was still your brother. You have my sympathies for the loss of what you could have had, if not for what you did.”

“Thank you,” Lan Qiren said. He sounded extremely polite, and extremely confused, the latter being a feeling which Wen Ruohan shared in its entirety. “I appreciate your consideration. Putting that aside, could you perhaps explain what happened, exactly? My brother is dead? How did he suddenly die?”

Wen Ruohan rather wanted to know that himself, especially since Qingheng-jun had been in perfectly reasonable condition when he’d delivered him into Lao Nie’s custody.

But then, how…?

“He killed himself,” Lao Nie said. His face was as casual and composed as if he were relaying the weather, rather than telling a bald-faced lie.

It was absolutely impossible that Qingheng-jun had decided to commit suicide.

As far as Wen Ruohan knew, the man had refused that particular route twice already, first in refusing to actively kill himself in the immediate aftermath of realizing he had murdered his wife, and second in refusing to passively permit Wen Ruohan to kill him. Even his last-moment surrender had been a deliberate ploy designed to extend his life, giving up even his dignity to do so. His dignity, his revenge, his pride…no, Qingheng-jun had been defiant and bitter to the last, blaming others and Lan Qiren in particular for all of his misfortunes.

For him to suddenly turn around and die by his own hand now, after everything – no, it was impossible. Absolutely impossible!

“Oh, suicide, really,” Wen Ruohan said, snide and incredulous. “Really, you don’t say. Tell me, if he killed himself, how exactly did he manage it? I disarmed him myself, so I know for a fact that he didn’t have access to his sword…”

“He used my saber,” Lao Nie said.

Wen Ruohan stared at him.

Lan Qiren stared at him.

Lao Nie…

Lao Nie’s lips twitched.

“Your saber,” Lan Qiren said slowly. “Your saber. Your spiritual weapon, which you entrust to no one, and which obeys only you. The saber that can, if it wishes, quite literally bite its wielder if it dislikes who is holding it. We are speaking of – that saber?”

Wen Ruohan hadn’t known about the biting thing. Was that really a thing? That seemed quite useful… Wait. When exactly did Lan Qiren have the chance to hold Lao Nie’s saber long enough to find that out?! Lao Nie hadn’t even given it to Wen Ruohan to hold!

Well, that was probably good thinking on his part. But that wasn’t the point.

“That’s the one,” Lao Nie said, sounding almost cheerful, or at least as though he were having a fair amount of fun watching their expressions, which he almost certainly was. “Good old Jiwei.”

Wen Ruohan thought, not for the first time, of how good it would feel to punch Lao Nie in the face. Just once. Once, but very hard.

Based on Lan Qiren’s expression at the moment, he might be amenable.

“Let me make sure I understand what you are saying,” Lan Qiren said, looking as though he were summoning all of his many years of emotional regulation to try to keep himself calm. “You are saying that my brother somehow managed to get hold of your saber and used it to end his own life. Is that what you are saying?”

“Not quite,” Lao Nie said, holding up his hands. “I’m saying that he killed himself, and also that if you have a doctor examine his body, you’ll find that the cause of his death was my saber.”

“Lao Nie,” Wen Ruohan hissed, finding himself appalled despite everything, up to and including his own deep and sincere desire to see Qingheng-jun dead. “What is wrong with you? Are you suggesting that he killed himself by walking into your saber?!”

Lao Nie snickered.

He actually snickered.

“Lao Nie!” Wen Ruohan shouted. “You said you were going to help!”

Lao Nie’s smile abruptly faded away. “I did help.”

“Lao Nie – ”

“Hanhan, you sometimes forget this – in fact, you often forget this – but I am not actually one of your subordinates,” Lao Nie interrupted, his expression unusually solemn. “I don’t follow your orders, and I apply my own principles to the situations I find myself in, not yours. I appreciate that you and Lan Qiren have decided that you don’t want to kill unarmed prisoners that have surrendered, particularly not without a trial, which is quite correct of you. I understand your reasoning in applying that principle even to Qingheng-jun, even when his sole reason to stay alive is to cause further harm, and if it were under any other circumstances, I’d respect it.”

Wen Ruohan was left speechless.

Lan Qiren merely pressed his lips together. “What circumstances do you mean?”

“Only this,” Lao Nie said. “That there is no greater good than showing kindness to a madman, once he has passed the point of no return.”

Ah.

That was –

That made more sense.

Given the Nie sect’s history – their traditions, their qi deviations, their ancestral madness – given what Lao Nie himself had so recently discovered about himself, about his own fate, his own imminent fate –

For a sudden moment, Wen Ruohan found himself unable to breathe.

“Oh,” Lao Nie said, watching whatever was happening on his face. “You know. I see. How?”

“Your son told us,” Lan Qiren said. “Nie Mingjue. He’s a good boy.”

Lao Nie laughed and shook his head. “Yes, he is,” he said fondly. “A very good boy – though where he got those ridiculous morals, I don’t know. He’s as inflexible as you, Qiren, in his own way. Anyway, you both don’t need to look so upset. It’s fine.”

“It is most certainly not fine,” Wen Ruohan said at once.

“Well, no, it’s not,” Lao Nie conceded. “But there’s nothing to be done about it. It’s as inevitable, as sure as the dawn.”

Wen Ruohan had heard that before, though under circumstances that had meant much less to him personally. Cangse Sanren had said something similar, equally resigned, talking about that big scary beast that was coming to tear her limb from limb, and she’d been just as certain of her immovable fate as Lao Nie was about his.

“It’s inevitable, so there’s no point in worrying about it now, is that it?” he asked with a sneer. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I didn’t say that,” Lao Nie protested.

“You meant it,” Lan Qiren pointed out, and Lao Nie, caught out, smiled ruefully. “Lao Nie, we are only saying that we wish to help – ”

“And I’m saying that it’s pointless. Don’t you think we’ve tried? My family, going back generations, we’ve all tried our best to stop it. We can’t. Once it starts, there’s nothing you can do about it – ”

If there was one thing Wen Ruohan hated in this life, perhaps even above betrayal, it was being told that there was something he couldn’t do.

He was Wen Ruohan. He had spent his whole life laughing in the face of those that underestimated him, those that challenged or disdained him, and now all those people were long dead and forgotten. These days, there was no one alive who underestimated him, no one who thought that they could tell him what he couldn’t do. He had defied even the heavens themselves, perfecting his cultivation and breaking the limits of the human lifespan, living beyond the usual expectations even for a cultivator, and he was still as hale as he had ever been. Soon enough, with Lan Qiren’s help, he would undoubtedly even break through the barrier that separated god from man, and become divine.

And Lao Nie had the gall to say that there was nothing he could do about it?

Wen Ruohan was not going to take that lying down. It was the most disrespectful thing he had had someone say to him in – well, admittedly, since Cangse Sanren, which wasn’t that long ago, and Lan Qiren wasn’t exactly all that respectful either, though in a way Wen Ruohan enjoyed rather a great deal.

No: ancestral Nie sect mystery or not, he was going to find a way to fix it. At a minimum, he was going to find a way to buy some time, to prevent any further decline and forestall death, and he wasn’t going to let anyone, not even Lao Nie, get in his way.

Lao Nie was just going to have to live with that.

Admittedly, at this precise moment, he looked particularly unwilling to accept that conclusion, that stubborn mule-headed Qinghe Nie look fixed firmly on his face even as he argued, rather unwisely, with Lan Qiren. As if Lan Qiren, just fresh off winning a battle of words with his entire sect, was going to let him win this one, particularly when Lao Nie’s arguments seemed to mostly revolve around the same basic point.

“It’s inevitable,” he said, dragging out the sound. “In-ev-it-a-ble. Why are you and Hanhan having such trouble with that concept? There are things in this life that we can change, Qiren, and there are things we can’t, and this is one of the latter. It’s as inevitable as the dawn, as sure as sunrise – ”

There was that phrase again, the one Cangse Sanren had used to describe her own doom. It was irritating to be surrounded by stubborn people convinced they were about to die, Lao Nie to rage and a qi deviation, Cangse Sanren to that future beast. A pity it wasn’t the other way around! There was no one better for defeating a beast than one of Qinghe Nie, descendants of butchers that they were, and Cangse Sanren seemed almost immune to the ravages of rage, forgetting each moment what happened in the previous one. Possibly that was even literal for her, given her idiosyncratic understanding of time, a remnant perhaps of living on a celestial mountain with an immortal…

Hm.

Now that was an idea.

“I am not giving up,” Lao Nie said impatiently, while Lan Qiren frowned and shook his head at him. “Don’t put it that way, it sounds bad. It’s not the same thing at all! I am just trying to be realistic. It would foolish to ignore facts and fail to adequately prepare myself, my sons, and my sect for what is going to happen – ”

“As foolish as refusing to accept help in the event that the preparations you make need not apply?”

“Damnit, Qiren, stop talking circles around me.”

“Stop being wrong first.”

Lao Nie gaped at him, then cackled. “I like this version of you,” he said. “Hanhan’s a surprisingly good influence on you, which I admit I wouldn’t have predicted.”

“We are Dao companions,” Lan Qiren said impatiently. “Naturally we mutually improve each other. Do not change the subject.”

“Qiren…”

“Lao Nie, there are things that a man may choose to face on his own. I have never denied that. If you truly deny us, we will desist – ”

Maybe Lan Qiren would.

“– but just as you are our friend, we are your friends, and we wish to help you. Would you deny us that chance?”

Oh, that was a good argument, particularly for someone like Lao Nie, and Wen Ruohan could see the exact moment Lao Nie’s resistance cracked under the weight of Lan Qiren’s earnest sincerity.

“Oh, all right,” Lao Nie grumbled, scrubbing his face and letting out a lengthy sigh. “I suppose I wouldn’t. Fine. Whatever. You can go ahead and bash your brains against the problem for a bit, if that’s what you really want…but Qiren, please understand and prepare yourself, this is something my sect has been trying to solve for a very long time. It is entirely possible, even likely, that in the end, the only help you will be able to give me is the sort of help I provided your brother.”

Lan Qiren’s stern expression softened. “I understand. But thank you for letting us try.”

“In fact, I’ve got an idea,” Wen Ruohan announced, and grinned when they both looked at him. “Well, the beginning of one, anyway. Qiren’s right, there are many benefits to taking a problem and making it someone else’s.”

“I don’t know if I like the sound of that,” Lao Nie remarked, his eyes narrowing a little in suspicion. “Hanhan…”

“You need not be concerned,” Lan Qiren told him firmly. “Any idea he has, I will first approve. Or are you saying you do not trust in my good faith?”

“…fair point. All right, I retract my doubts.”

Wen Ruohan scowled. “Lao Nie – ”

Lao Nie pointed at him. “You have a torture palace.”

“What does that have to do with anything?!”

Now they were both looking at him with indulgent expressions that suggested he already knew the answer to that.

Possibly he did.

“I’ve already planned to repurpose the majority of it,” Wen Ruohan said defensively. “I do not require it as much, any longer.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Hanhan,” Lao Nie said warmly, and in the face of his own straightforward sincerity Wen Ruohan found that he had trouble maintaining his anger. “Really, you have no idea how happy it makes me that you’ve finally found your way out…but also, I’ll believe it when I see it.”

That was fair.

“You know, we never did get the chance to talk at the Lotus Pier discussion conference that wasn’t,” Lao Nie mused. “I wanted to hear all about how the two of you managed to fall in love – and I still do, for that matter.”

“We got married,” Lan Qiren said, as if that answered the question.

“…I’m going to redirect the question to Hanhan,” Lao Nie said dryly, clearly agreeing with Wen Ruohan on the blatant insufficiency of Lan Qiren’s answer. “Actually, while we’re at it, how did you end up proposing marriage to Qiren anyway? I didn’t even think you liked him.”

“Mm, I didn’t. It takes a truly great man to see what he has overlooked and correct his own errors, but luckily – ”

“He wanted to use me to take over the cultivation world,” Lan Qiren said with a sigh, pointedly ignoring Wen Ruohan’s bragging. “Through my students, of all things. I still think the whole notion is utterly ridiculous.”

Lao Nie’s expression went abruptly thoughtful in a way that suggested that he certainly didn’t think the idea was all that ridiculous. A moment later he grinned.

“Well, Qiren, you have to admit that putting aside the students, it didn’t work out that badly for him.”

“He has not taken over the cultivation world.”

“If you pay a little attention, actually, you’ll find that I have,” Wen Ruohan said smugly. “Or at least considerable portions of it.”

“Don’t look so pleased with yourself, Hanhan,” Lao Nie said, even as Lan Qiren looked as if he were hunting for some way to refute the irrefutable. “Don’t forget: whether you rule the world or not, you still have to clear everything you do with Qiren first!”

“That is not the situation,” Lan Qiren insisted. “He has not taken over the world – Lao Nie – stop smirking at me, you intolerable annoyance – ”

Wen Ruohan tuned them both out as he considered what Lao Nie had said. Whatever Lan Qiren’s denials, it had to be admitted that Wen Ruohan’s influence now extended well into the other Great Sects, which had previously been inviolable, with a few omissions, but equally it had to be admitted that this wasn’t exactly the tyrannical dictatorship he’d always envisioned for himself when thinking about the day that his Wen sect eventually took over.

He hadn’t counted on Lan Qiren being there, for one. And even if he had, he would never have assumed that he would voluntarily bind himself to following Lan Qiren’s ridiculously strict morality, even when the man himself was not present to object – except he had, hadn’t he? The way he had dealt with Qingheng-jun…that wasn’t a mere aberration, an outlier, a favor he’d been doing for Lan Qiren. He’d done the right thing because he knew Lan Qiren would want him to.

If he wanted to keep Lan Qiren, Wen Ruohan was going to have to do that about everything.

It was going to be a gigantic pain.

But on the other hand, he did rule the world now.

Ah, whatever. If that’s the trade – I’ll take it!

Wen Ruohan reached out and, ignoring Lao Nie’s presence, pulled Lan Qiren into a kiss.

Lan Qiren –

Well, Lan Qiren kicked him.

“Inappropriate!” he spluttered. “We’re in front of company! Keep your hands to yourself!”

“Don’t hold back on my account,” Lao Nie murmured appreciatively. “On the contrary…”

“Absolutely not,” Lan Qiren said. Firmly.

“But –”

“No.”

“Hanhan –”

“Also no,” Wen Ruohan said, and watched with interest as Lao Nie blinked, absorbing that, and then, after a moment, shrugged it off, just as he did anything else. It probably ought to have hurt to see him simply shrug off a relationship that had lasted over a decade just like that, but…well, that was Lao Nie, heartless and careless. That was the real Lao Nie, the way he ought to be.

And Wen Ruohan…well, Wen Ruohan had Lan Qiren, and he was far better off for it.

“Fine, then,” Lao Nie said. “That means I can go back and find that dragon –”

“Lao Nie!” Lan Qiren howled. “You are not, and I mean absolutely not, going to go find and – ”

Wen Ruohan started laughing.

This was going to be good.

----

A/N: and that's it! next chapter is the epilogue :) thanks to everyone for reading!

#mdzs #lan qiren #wen ruohan #sect leader nie #my fic #my fics #Megafic

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