Archive of Our Own ^beta

Wei Ying is on Day One of her grand plan to rehabilitate her image when she first overhears it:

"Have you heard the news? Wei Wuxian is –"

"Dead?"

Oh, wow. Rude.

"– what? Wait, let me check Weibo. Did she die? Oh, okay, no. You scared me!"

"Sorry," says the person who suggested that she might be dead. "I thought everyone knew about the death rumours."

"Uhhh, that was ages ago. Anyway. What I was trying to say is that if you join the Yiling Wei sect and pass through the disciple trials, Wei Wuxian will personally teach you demonic cultivation."

Wait, what?

Wei Ying stares at the book she's pretending to read. She's pretty damn sure she'd know if she had offered any such thing. What even is the Yiling Wei Sect?

There's a round of gasps from the little table that six people are squashed around, and then one of them speaks up. "Okay, but come on, we're way too old to become cultivators now. Those old families train their children from birth for their golden cores and shit."

Another person pipes up. "Yeah, I have a family friend who sent their kid to the Lans to train as a kid, and there were like, thousands of rules. He had to turn vegetarian and wake up at dawn and everything. He dropped it after a couple of years and picked up badminton instead."

Everyone shudders, including Wei Ying.

"Nah, that's the beauty of demonic cultivation, see?" says the apparent know-it-all of the group. "You don't need a golden core to do demonic cultivation, so anyone can become a demonic cultivator at any age. It's so much more accessible for normal people like us."

Wei Ying waits, trying to see if anyone's going to drop any more info about this thing where she's apparently going to teach everyone demonic cultivation, but after a few more interested murmurs, the conversation moves on to other things. She pulls out her phone – a shitty thing that has barely heard of 3G, let alone 4G or 5G – and waits the five minutes it takes to connect to the coffeeshop wifi and searches herself. She mostly tries to avoid doing this, because usually all she gets are articles talking about how really fucking evil she is.

Ah, yes, that apparently hasn't changed. Still cancelled. She clicks out and sighs. Even if she wants to find out more, she doesn't feel like wading through all the miserable stuff to get to it.

She finishes her coffee and her book, and heads back to her apartment. Well, technically, it's Mo Xuanyu's apartment, but she's subletting it for now; and very technically, it's a studio and not even a whole apartment, but still. It has a double bed and it's better than the storage attic on top of a funeral home, which was the last place she rented.

She's aware that her standards may be a teensy bit low.

Wei Ying kicks her shoes off at the door and flops onto the beanbag that passes for a sofa in here. She's only going to be here for another few weeks anyway, she just needed somewhere to stay while she got herself sorted out and made an action plan.

Originally, this had involved lying low, getting a job driving didi or working in a convenience store or something, and building up enough savings to renew her Cultivator License so she can pick up proper contracts and get back into the nighthunting game. She could stay away from the big Sects with their fancy estates and even fancier problems, and just pick up those postings for local relatives or whatever and it would still be enough to make a decent living with how scarce the cultivator skillset is becoming these days.

She hadn't been fussed about how long it might take, as long as she still had enough money to cover rent and expenses, but now she's going to have to accelerate her timeline. Not for the first time, she wishes she could still fly on Suibian. The flight to Yiling might be long and tiring but train tickets alone are ¥500, which is her entire monthly food budget.

She flicks through Weibo, looking for cultivator postings that don't look too complicated. The simpler jobs won't pay as much, but there's less chance of her expired licence being discovered and the risk of injury is probably going to be lower too. It's not exactly illegal to practise cultivation without a license on the mainland but there are a lot of benefits to being licensed, and insurance is one of them.

There's one for a haunting and it's even local enough that she gets there by nightfall after a lengthy walk. It's after she vanquishes the ghost (which was more of a gentle herding into the afterlife, really) that she hears the second reference to this Yiling Wei thing.

"Are you also a fan of Wei Wuxian?" asks the girl who put up the posting when Wei Ying goes to collect payment. In cash, fucking hell. No wonder she didn't need a license.

"Uh, what makes you say that?" 

"You've got the whole black robes, demonic cultivation, flute thing going on."

Wei Ying flinches slightly, as she does every time anyone openly mentions the demonic cultivation when she isn't expecting it. How do even non-cultivators know what demonic cultivation looks like these days?

"Aren't you supposed to have bangs though? I thought Wei Wuxian had bangs."

"Oh, really? I'll have to look into that," says Wei Ying. She did used to have bangs, but they became too annoying to maintain once she was cutting her hair herself. She's glad that most pictures of her on the internet are mostly grainy and bad quality, the demonic cultivation fucking with the camera technology, otherwise this girl would have recognised her for sure. "You said also – you're a fan too?"

"Sure, who isn't? Girl power, and all that." (Hilarious, because Wei Ying can think of several thousand people who are definitely not fans of her, and that's just off the top of her head.) "Plus, she founded the Yiling Wei sect and is revolutionising cultivation for the people. That's pretty cool."

"Yeah, totally," says Wei Ying, and stuffs the cash (cash!) into her inside pocket and waves the girl goodnight.

It's almost dawn by the time she gets home, so she manages to type in 'Yiling Wei sect' into the browser before collapsing into bed.

She reads through the results in the morning. Unlike the search for her name, these are actually useful. The Yiling Wei sect was (apparently) founded by Wei Wuxian in the year she went missing, and is based in Yiling (obviously). As the principle sect of demonic cultivation, it has grown vastly in popularity in the last three years and its entry requirements are much more flexible than traditional cultivation sects.

She tries to see who else is involved in this supposed sect of hers, but she can only see that the first disciple position has been open, ever since (former) first disciple Xue Chengmei vacated the position. She has no idea who Xue Chengmei is. The name vaguely sounds familiar, but she's pretty certain she's never met them.

It comes to her half an hour later when she's on the way to her next job. She stops literally with her hand on the door handle and says aloud, "Shit, isn't that the serial killer?"

One of the neighbours walking past shoots her a slightly bewildered look.

"Sorry!" she calls after him, and whips out her phone. She's right. Xue Yang, courtesy name Chengmei, convicted of murder. So the thing is, the last three or so months before she officially went missing are mostly a demonic cultivation induced haze of hallucinations and self-loathing, so it is altogether feasible that she founded a sect by accident, but she's sure that she would remember taking on a serial killer as her first disciple.

Fuck, she really needs to get to Yiling.

The third time someone mentions the Yiling Wei sect to her unprompted is just plain out on the street.

"Have you heard of Wei Wuxian?" someone bellows and Wei Ying almost skitters back around the corner she just came from, before she realises that it's not aimed at her. It's a teenager with a head mic, the speakers loud and obnoxious above his head. "Come join the Yiling Wei sect and earn the opportunity for her to teach you personally!"

He has a stall and everything. There's another teenage boy with him, handing out leaflets. Wei Ying fingercombs her hair – the bits that are too long to be bangs anymore – down to cover the sides of her face, just in case, and walks up. She'd got rid of the black robes after the close call with the girl yesterday; she can do demonic cultivation just fine in mom jeans and a white t-shirt and hopefully that will lower the chance of recognition too.

"Hey! Are you interested in demonic cultivation?" asks the kid brightly, the mic squeaking a long moment of static before he realises he doesn't need it to speak to someone right in front of him. He grabs a leaflet off the stall and thrusts it at her.

"Uh, I don't really know a lot about it," she says, "but you said Wei Wuxian could personally teach me?"

"Yeah, totally. Here, the details are inside." The kid opens up the leaflet, which is glossy and red and black. It looks pretty neat actually, like something that Wei Ying would approve of if she ever founded a sect. There's a table, with different levels explained. There's an apprentice, outer disciple, inner disciple, and first disciple positions detailed, with a little primer about each one.

"Now, it looks complicated, but it's really simple. The benefits of each tier are explained here, and it's super fair and clear about how you advance to the next tier. It's not like the other cultivation sects where all the ranks are just based on how old or how senior you are – your skills and abilities and effort are all taken into account."

So far, Wei Ying approves of her apparent sect. It does sound way better than some of the traditional cultivation sects she grew up knowing.

The teenager continues: "You start off as an apprentice, just to get a taster of it, see if it's right for you. Most people do it part-time around their studies or work or whatever; it's very low commitment, classes are twice a week but repeat all the time in case you miss one, and loads of social events so you can get to know other budding cultivators. And you'll get to go on cases with a sponsored outer disciple to teach you the rope. Once you want to become an outer disciple, that's when it becomes a full-time thing, you start going on night-hunts and get paid a stipend against your completed cases if you want to live in the dorms, that sort of thing.

"I only joined the Yiling Wei sect like maybe nine months ago, and I'm almost ready to advance to inner disciple and that's where Wei Wuxian starts teaching you personally. And I guess I had a bit of a head start, because I grew up in a traditional cultivation school so like, a bunch of the learnings were pretty familiar to me, but still. Super equitable."

Wei Ying raises her eyebrows. "So Wei Wuxian doesn't start teaching you personally straight away?"

The kid scoffs. "Come on, a-yi. She's the head of the Yiling Wei sect, she can't oversee all the classes. She has inner disciples who teach the basics and then she teaches you the really gnarly stuff."

"Gnarly stuff," she says sceptically.

"Yeah, like creating your own demonic cultivation techniques, designing new arrays, stuff like that."

Wei Ying can't decide if she's more offended by the idea that she would teach anyone how to come up with demonic cultivation techniques, because that shit is dangerous and she doesn't even trust herself to do it safely, or by the fact that she's apparently old enough for teenagers to address by auntie instead of older sister.

Also, now that she's taking a closer look at the leaflet, teeny little red flags are starting to pop up. "And it says that part of your responsibilities include... outreach activities?"

"Yep, sure do. We have a pretty active recruitment drive. It helps you in your disciple standings if you refer someone in, but also it's for the benefit of the sect. Pretty much everyone's heard of Wei Wuxian, but most people have this terrible impression of her. So it's like a PR thing, make sure that people know that we're still a respectable sect and we take on legitimate jobs, clear her name, that sort of thing so that more people want to join." He waves his hand at the stall, as if to indicate ta-da!

"Yeah, I heard she was evil," says Wei Ying faintly. She resists the urge to shake the teenager and demand to know whether the sect that she allegedly founded is actually a multi-level marketing scheme in disguise.

"No way!" the teenager insists. "She just went against the traditional ways of cultivation, so all the old school cultivation schools got mad and denounced her because they're desperate to try and stay relevant and keep their funding and hoard their power."

"Lan Jingyi," a smooth, low voice sounds from somewhere behind Wei Ying. It sounds... really familiar. "You may have left the Lan sect, but you are still part of the family. You should watch how you talk about your elders."

Jingyi glances over at the speaker, and grimaces. "Sorry, Hanguang-jun." He turns, and whispers, very quickly and sotto voce at Wei Ying, "But really, Wei Wuxian made loads of advances in the field of cultivation and should be recognised as a genius. If you want to sign, there's a petition to get her into the Cultivation Hall of Fame."

He presses a clipboard into her hands. Wei Ying's eyes flick down. It is indeed a petition to 'clear Wei Wuxian's name of any and all wrongdoings, to confirm her eligibility for the Cultivation Hall of Fame'. There's a gratifying number of signatures on it, given that Wei Ying is still persona no grata in the mainstream cultivation world, but Wei Ying can't even savour the sensation, because she has been distracted since the moment Jingyi said 'Hanguang-jun'.

The woman in question floats into view. She's wearing traditional cultivation robes in pale blue and white, posture perfect with her sword held behind her. She glances over at the stall and its promotional materials and frowns, ever so slightly.

Wei Ying freezes, like maybe if she pretends to just be a random passer-by, then Lan Zhan will accordingly randomly pass her by. It doesn't work, of course. Lan Zhan glances over her, cool and disinterested, and then does a double take. It's after she locks eyes with Wei Ying with wide, shocked eyes, that Wei Ying smiles sheepishly at her.

"Hey Lan Zhan."

(Out of the corner of her eyes, she sees Jingyi mouth 'Lan Zhan' in wonder. Oh, that's right. Maybe she ought to have used 'Lan Wangji' instead.)

Lan Zhan stares at her, and then flicks her eyes to the stall, to the posters with the grainy pictures of her on and then to the real deal herself, from her plain white tee down to her combat boots. Wei Ying shakes her head almost imperceptibly, and Lan Zhan steps in close out of hearing range of the two Yiling Wei kids before she murmurs, "Wei Ying."

-

They end up at a McDonalds, mostly because no one has ever wanted to linger inside a McDonalds and that is very much the vibe of this encounter.

"You're – here," says Lan Zhan as Wei Ying finishes putting in her order for the fishburger and looks up to see Lan Zhan looking at her way too intently.

"Um. Yeah. Well, not here here. Hong Kong, mostly. Sort of. Yes please." That last bit is towards the cashier asking her if she wants to upgrade to the large fries. Lan Zhan looks like that wasn't quite what she meant, but waits until they get their food and move off.

They find a relatively quiet area where Wei Ying slides her tray onto the table, and it strikes her out of the blue just how elegant Lan Zhan is. In her cultivator robes, she should feel completely out of place and out of touch here, perched on the little plastic stool surrounded by mums with small children and rowdy teenagers.

She looks different now. There's still the same Lan robes and the headband, but the sides of her hair are shaved short, leaving the top long enough to still fall down her back in a thick braid. She takes up more space than she did before, something in the breadth of her shoulders and the deliberateness of her step. In the same three years, Wei Ying has shrunk down on herself (partly thanks to a sustained period of not being able to remember whether she had eaten) and become more adept at sliding into the shadows. There was a point where she resembled more of a wraith, but that was almost a year ago. Now she wears it like a bird, light and flitting.

"Here." She pushes the cardboard box of fries across the tray towards Lan Zhan. She's pretty sure they're vegetarian.

Lan Zhan spears one with a plastic fork. Wei Ying didn't even know McDonalds had forks, or where Lan Zhan got hers from, which seems entirely on brand for this chance encounter.

Lan Zhan eats the one single fry and then puts the fork down, folds her hands into her lap, and looks expectantly at Wei Ying. "Wei Ying," she repeats. She hasn't said much of anything else so far – it was Wei Ying who cut in before the evangelising kids could realise who she really was, asking if Lan Zhan wanted to join her as she grabbed lunch.

Wei Ying is awkwardly halfway through a bite of the unnaturally square fish, and munches awkwardly for several seconds before mumbling, "Yeah?"

"It really is you," says Lan Zhan quietly, and fuck, that just makes her feel bad.

Wei Ying puts her burger down and wipes her mouth and her fingers, and sighs. "Yeah. I wasn't expecting to see you so far from Gusu. It's... nice. To see you."

There's a long moment of silence.

"Yeah, that's fair," says Wei Ying. Lan Zhan has always had that effect on her, where she knows what she wants to say just from the press of her lips or the furrow of her brow. "I'll start at the beginning. Uhhh so let me preface that with that I don't really remember all of it. It's sort of gleaned from medical records and other people telling me how things went down. But around three years ago? I had something similar to a qi deviation. It wasn't actually a qi deviation, but there were a bunch of, you know, the usual rage fits, hallucinations, delusions, that sort of thing. I think you might have, um. Seen a bit of that?

"But I ended up running away and eventually got put in the hospital. And then I ended up in a coma, and then I had some other health things so then it was an induced coma and when I woke up I had the worst of the memory loss, like I couldn't remember who I was or anything that had just happened to me. And every time they woke me up I kept forgetting bits from the last time I woke up, but I do remember being real angry about it and I, hm, maybe broke out of the hospital in one of my amnesiac fits and somehow ended up down south with no money, no ID and no idea who I was. But! I did remember how to do demonic cultivation and I figured out that I'm apparently really good at pickpocketing? Did you know that? I sure didn't.

"And yeah, somehow I ended up in Hong Kong and working and trying to figure out the qi... deviation, fluctuation thing, did so much acupuncture like you would not believe. Picked up a couple of interesting cultivation techniques they have down there. And worked on regaining my memories, and then I got them back – well, some of them? I don't know what I don't know, of course – and decided to head on back up. I just got in a couple of weeks ago." She makes a little flourish, as if to indicate The End!

Lan Zhan's face, which Wei Ying had always thought as a solid poker face, has become increasingly more distraught. She's not sure how she can tell, but it's something in the way her jaw is clenched.

"But I'm fine now," Wei Ying adds.

She pushes the tray of fries towards Lan Zhan encouragingly. Lan Zhan stabs another fry, and chews for way too long.

"You didn't – get in touch," says Lan Zhan eventually. "If you needed help, you could have –"

Wei Ying waves her off. "Oh, give me credit. I did try. But I don't know what happened to my phone during that qi fluctuation period and I didn't know anyone's numbers by heart. Or if I did, I'd forgotten them. And I don't remember any of my passwords, I always used the randomised ones and got my laptop to save them? So I couldn't get onto any of my social media accounts, and I didn't have ID to reset it, yadda yadda. I tried to leave a message with Lotus Pier reception, but they blocked me. Apparently they get loads of prank calls from people pretending to be Wei Wuxian, which is, uh, so fucked?"

"Very," agrees Lan Zhan. "But now, I could –"

Wei Ying winces.

"No?"

"Nah. It's fine. Now I've had the time to think about it, I don't think that would be fair on them. I caused a huge amount of trouble to the cultivation world, fucked up everything and everyone, made everyone think I was dead, and now I turn up and want to slide back into their lives? I looked myself up, once I remembered who I was, and that didn't exactly go too well." Wei Ying sighs, and uses a stray piece of lettuce to scoop a fallen dollop of mayo into her mouth. "I was just going to be an independent cultivator and stay out of the cultivation world and lie low. Didn't expect to see you on day one of that plan, obviously."

Lan Zhan frowns. She's eaten seven fries now, the speed increasing with each blasé detail that Wei Ying throws at her. "What about the Yiling Wei sect?"

"Ah," says Wei Ying. "You have me there. So it seems that in my time away, I apparently founded a sect? I don't actually remember this. But there's some rumour going around that if people join, I will personally train them in demonic cultivation. Which means that either someone is lying to people in my name, or someone is pretending to be me. Or it's something I said three years ago and people are holding me to that, but I feel like that seems less plausible. I just discovered it was a thing that existed yesterday, so I don't really know how I'm going to deal with that yet. It's kind of a lot."

"The Yiling Wei sect has been operating for over two years now," says Lan Zhan. "I tried to visit when I first heard of it and was turned away. I just assumed you didn't want to see me, but it must have been someone else if you were never there at all."

She looks – kind of relieved? In all fairness, they didn't part on good terms, but that's not down to Lan Zhan. Wei Ying doesn't think she left anyone on good terms. She still feels bad though.

"No, not me," confirms Wei Ying. "Sorry, I just need to clarify: I've been operating a legitimate – or semi-legitimate – sect for two years but no one's ever seen me?"

"There are wards around the base of the Burial Mounds. Only those permitted to enter manage to find the sect. There have been plenty who protested a demonic cultivation sect, but they found themselves turned about at the bottom of the mountain. Eventually it was thought that if you were leaving everyone alone as long as they left you alone, that status quo could be maintained."

This is so much more complicated than Wei Ying thought it was going to be. Jiang Cheng must be furious. The bewilderment must show on her face, because Lan Zhan nudges the tray of fries back to her. "I will accompany you to Yiling to investigate if you would like."

"Oh! You don't have to, I wasn't planning on going yet – I wanted to do some more research –" Wei Ying snaps her mouth shut, and then tilts her head as she surveys Lan Zhan. She doesn't look like she's just offering out of politeness. And she did try and find Wei Ying at the sect two years ago, allegedly. Having an officially licensed cultivator around will be useful too, if she encounters anything particularly unusual, and Lan Zhan has always been invested in doing the right thing. Maybe she just wants to see who's impersonating Wei Ying as well. "You know what, that would be great. Thanks."

She shovels a handful of fries into her mouth.

-

She brings Lan Zhan back to her subletted apartment. She doesn't even bother with the 'it's not much' spiel. Lan Zhan's original plan had been to ask for accommodation at the local temple, which is (supposedly) standard for cultivators. The Lans are probably the only ones who stick to that old tradition, which means that Lan Zhan would be spending the night on a shitty bedroll in a tiny room anyway and the only difference is where that room is. The Jiangs always just sprung for a decent hotel room.

She doesn't think Lan Zhan has any delusions about Wei Ying's current living situation. Wei Ying has been on the mainland for a grand total of three weeks and she doesn't have any ID, it's not like she can get anything better even if she could afford it.

At least she has green tea. Mo Xuanyu has a whole box of the stuff.

"You can have the right side of the bed, or the beanbag," says Wei Ying magnanimously.

"Acceptable," says Lan Zhan, somehow even more magnanimously.

"Would you mind if I was a bad hostess?" asks Wei Ying. Lan Zhan tilts her head to the side questioningly. "It's just – there was a lot today. I'm dying to figure out what the fuck is going on."

"Please, go ahead. You'll remember I don't require conversation." Lan Zhan's lips twitch. An in-joke! Hot damn! Wei Ying grins back. She likes whatever pizzazz the last three years have given Lan Zhan; it's like she did a Pokémon evolution or something.

Wei Ying sets the kettle on for that tea – because manners dictate she do something as a host at least – and then changes into indoor clothes and wriggles into bed with her laptop. She has to get her thoughts down in a semblance of order before they all run away from her.

The issue:

An imposter is posing as Wei Wuxian (me) and running the Yiling Wei sect

They are promising to teach demonic cultivation as a lure to recruit new members

The implications:

Someone is hiding behind Wei Wuxian (me!) to disguise who they are

Someone is using demonic cultivation for their own purposes

Someone is recruiting other people (cultivations & non) to join the sect for ??? reasons

Maybe: need manpower for something?

Leads:

Lan Jingyi – member of the Yiling Wei sect and [...] to Lan Zhan

"Cousin," says Lan Zhan, and Wei Ying jumps with a squeak. She'd left Lan Zhan somewhere at the foot of her bed and immediately become immersed in the details. She hadn't expected that Lan Zhan would also change into indoor clothes – a cropped hoodie and matching high waisted grey tracksuit that looks very comfy – and climb into the bed with her.

In hindsight, she doesn't know what she expected, given the only other seating area is the sad beanbag.

"Cousin," repeats Wei Ying, amending the document. "You don't have to get involved, by the way. It's already plenty that you'd go with me to Yiling."

Leads:

Lan Jingyi – member of the Yiling Wei sect and cousin to Lan Zhan

Xue Chengmei – former first disciple. Also, mass murderer???

Burial Mounds

"I would like to know who is behind this as well. Xue Chengmei is unlikely to be helpful," says Lan Zhan, still reading over her shoulder. She's close enough that Wei Ying can feel the warmth of her breath on her bare shoulder. "By the time she was apprehended, she had ripped out her own tongue so that she would never be in danger of spilling any secrets."

Wei Ying recoils. "What the fuck. That's horrific. Fuck. Yeah okay, let's definitely go talk to your nice cousin first."

"Third, twice removed," says Lan Zhan absently, still looking at the screen.

"Thanks. Can you see?" Wei Ying tries to tilts the screen so that Lan Zhan can read it more easily, except then the angle gets hard to type on as she starts adding the things she'd found out about the sect, along with question marks next to things she doesn't yet know, so she shifts on the bed to try and make it visible for the both of them, and –

"Here." Lan Zhan raises her arm and tucks it behind Wei Ying's back, tugging her in so that she's flush against Lan Zhan's side.

"Really?" asks Wei Ying, blinking up at her and her flawless skin. "I know I don't remember much about three years ago, but–"

"Really," confirms Lan Zhan, and does not comment on the rest.

"Huh. Okay." No point thinking about it too hard. Wei Ying shuffles up next Lan Zhan, and balances the laptop across both their thighs as she carries on typing.  

It's not until the muscles in her waist start aching that Wei Ying realises that she's been holding herself stiff. She's next to Lan Zhan, yes, but still holding herself upright. They've got most of the details down in a document by now. She exhales, and releases the tension in her muscles, her body folding automatically to lean against the line of Lan Zhan's body.

In response, Lan Zhan squeezes her arm around Wei Ying tight. "I'm glad I was here," she says quietly, and Wei Ying knows what she means – the fortuitous timing that led her to be here at the same time that Wei Ying was here.

"I'm glad I was here too."

There's a warm glow in the sort of area where her golden core used to be. She'd missed this. She hadn't known to miss it, but sitting next to Lan Zhan with her quietly pointing out details to add to the case file floods her with a nostalgia for something she can't quite remember. It's so frustrating. She closes her eyes for a moment, and leans her head against Lan Zhan's shoulder.

She wakes up in the dark, slid down with the covers tucked up to her nose. There's a wash of confusion, and at least that is a familiar feeling. She doesn't move for a moment, trying to see what she remembers and doesn't remember. She remembers typing with Lan Zhan and building out an action plan for the next day. She remembers telling Lan Zhan that it's not going to be a fast investigation since she needs a couple of weeks to afford the ticket to Yiling, and Lan Zhan telling her that that's not a deterrent. She doesn't remember shutting the laptop, or changing clothes, or falling asleep. She doesn't remember turning the light off or showing Lan Zhan where the bathroom is or closing the curtains. Actually, that must have been Lan Zhan; Wei Ying never remembers to close the curtains.

She can see the edge of her laptop on her bedside table, the small slight indicating that it's asleep and not shut down. There's a warmth at her back that is (hopefully) Lan Zhan, and a sliver between the curtains that lets in enough light from the streetlight outside for her to see the dim outlines of things in the apartment.

She still gets these, sometimes – little spots here and there where her memory just sort of disappears for a bit. Most of the time, it's related to using demonic cultivation too much again. She thought she'd been safe so far, only doing piddly jobs recently, like that one shooing grandma on to the afterlife, but it seems that they've built up enough for the resentment to linger.

She slides out under the covers, careful not to disturb Lan Zhan. Her bare feet squidge into the rug. Huh, she's not wearing socks anymore. That's an odd detail to not remember. Also, she's wearing a thin strappy top and tiny pair of shorts that flashes half her ass. She lets herself get distracted from the encroaching resentful energy for a moment to stare down at herself in astonishment. She never wears these to bed. In fact, it's way too cold to wear these at all at the moment. She looks at the drawers, and sees where she pawed through all of her clothes to find these, usually tucked away in the very back. She has no idea what came over her.

She rubs her hands over her arms in the cool air, and quickly crosses to the beanbag. Even though she doesn't have a golden core anymore, meditation still helps. Wei Ying visualises in her head, little gold coloured streams of light that flow through her meridians that she has to wrangle into all flowing in the right direction and at the right speed, picking up all the wispy traces of demonic cultivation and flushing them out. She likes to gather them at her fingertips and then flick them off, or exhale them out through her mouth like she's a dragon.

It doesn't always help bring the missing pieces of her memory back, but it helps stave off further episodes. She usually meditates in the afternoon, that moment between daily errands and that evening's job, but seeing Lan Zhan must have knocked out her scheduling.

There's rustling behind her, and then a pause that hangs in the air. Wei Ying straightens her posture in silent agreement, and then she feels two warm palms land behind her shoulder blades, and the torrent of qi flood her from Lan Zhan. She channels it into her existing streams, and flushes out the rest of that resentful energy. Fuck, it's so much quicker with a strong cultivator.

She exhales and it dissipates into the air, and she opens her eyes.

Lan Zhan's hands drop from her back, and Wei Ying turns around to see big amber eyes reflecting at her in the moonlight.

"Thanks."

"No problem," says Lan Zhan, and holds out a hand to help her up. If she wants to ask why Wei Ying had to get out of bed in the middle of the night to have an impromptu meditation session, she doesn't show it.

Wei Ying takes her hand and unfolds herself, rubbing down the cool skin of her thighs and pulling down the hem of the shorts where they threaten to ride up into a wedgie. It's way too chilly in here to be wearing this get-up, she can't wait to get back under the covers. When she straightens up, it's to see Lan Zhan's eyes gleaming in the dark; she takes half a step back under the intensity of it – and then Lan Zhan turns and goes back to bed.

Wei Ying looks down at herself. Ah. She's directly facing the window with the tiny amount of light streaming in, which is just enough light to see that her nipples are hard. Like, prominently showing through the thin strappy top because of how cold it is. There's a lot of boob going on, actually. She realises why past-Wei Ying picked this outfit now.

She resists the urge to cross her arms over it as she walks back to bed. Lan Zhan doesn't say anything, just holds back the covers for Wei Ying to slide in as well.

When Wei Ying awakes the second time – and at least this time she remembers getting back into bed – she's rolled into the middle of the bed under the covers, curled up on one side and pressed into Lan Zhan's side with one leg thrown over Lan Zhan's leg and leeching off her warmth.

Wei Ying gets cold easily these days; Lan Zhan, in contrast, is like a furnace. She lies there, sleepy and letting her brain come back online slowly, until it becomes really obvious that Lan Zhan is also awake.

"Morning," says Wei Ying to somewhere vaguely above her head. "Also, sorry, not sorry for stealing all your body warmth."

"Good morning," says Lan Zhan from somewhere above her head, voice muffled by the layers of duvet over Wei Ying's head. "Are you feeling better?"

What? Oh – the meditation. "Yep, just had a little blackout moment," says Wei Ying, and then groans as Lan Zhan lifts the covers so that she can peer down disapprovingly at her. "It's fine, don't worry. Happens every so often now and I just have to keep up with the meditation."

Lan Zhan sighs, and lowers the duvet on top of Wei Ying's head again. Wei Ying soaks in the glorious warmth, and tries very hard not to rub up against Lan Zhan's hip. It's just that it's been so long. Since she had the opportunity to, but also since her body felt any sort of these needs. It's not exactly like she's been in the mood. It's novel enough that she wants to wriggle out of her shorts and take advantage of it while she feels any sort of arousal at all, which would be completely inappropriate to do while Lan Zhan is here.

Wei Ying sighs, and instead burrows her way upwards until her head pops out next to Lan Zhan's. "Sorry if I disturbed you in the night. I forgot to warn you that I move around a lot."

"No problem," says Lan Zhan, putting down her phone. Oh. So she's been awake for a while, waiting for Wei Ying. That's vaguely guilt-inducing, but not more than the warm fuzzies it gives her. It's been a while since someone indulged her for no reason. She squeezes Lan Zhan around the waist as a thank you hug, and Lan Zhan ruffles her hair. That's new. Also nice, but definitely new.

If she closed her eyes, she could fool herself into pretending that this was something else.

Lan Zhan's voice speaks up from next to her temple. "Did you want to talk to Jingyi today? He's manning the stall again today."

"Oh, yeah!" Wei Ying perks up.

-

"Oh wow, thanks Hanguang-jun!" Jingyi looks slightly overwhelmed as they rock up with Starbucks for him and his friend. Wei Ying's idea, although Lan Zhan paid for them. "And also your lady friend, thanks a-yi!"

On the one hand – thank fuck for honorifics which mean that Wei Ying does not have to introduce herself and Jingyi wouldn't even think once, let alone twice, about not knowing her name but on the other hand, still way too soon to be called a-yi.

"Morning, little Lan. Our conversation got interrupted yesterday – it was so rude of me to leave you hanging, sorry – but I think Lan Zhan mentioned that I had some other questions about the Yiling Wei sect?"

"Yeah, Hanguang-jun texted me," says Jingyi, and sort of looks astounded that Lan Zhan would even have his number.

Wei Ying nods. She'd seen the conversation, Lan Zhan showing her each of the messages before she pressed send. "I looked up some more details about the sect last night, and there's a lot of stuff on the internet that looks really sketchy? Like, almost cult-like? But then I remembered that you said that there was a lot of bad press around it so I wanted to get what it's like from someone who's a disciple."

"Cool, yeah! Hang on, let me grab some seats and we'll be happy to answer any questions. Ouyang Zizhen and I both come from cultivation families, so we can compare to traditional cultivation as well."

"Ouyang?" That sounds familiar. "As in Baling Ouyang?"

Jingyi's friend finishes setting out some foldable stools around their stall, and ushers them around into the canvas covered bit out of the wind. "Yep. I used to be the sect heir, but my dad and I didn't see eye to eye on stuff and I have five older sisters so it solved everything when I left and one of them could inherit the sect. Plus, demonic cultivation is so cool."

Jingyi and Zizhen are both candid as Wei Ying picks through her questions, carefully moving from one to another in natural conversation so as to not sound like an interrogation. There are a couple of places where they have to stop and think, but Wei Ying never gets the impression that they're lying and both of them seem pretty happy with their career choices. Whatever is happening with this fake Yiling Wei sect, it's not treating them badly, at least.

"I hope you choose the Wei sect over the Lan sect," says Jingyi at the end.

"I – what?" asks Wei Ying.

"That's what you're considering, right? The traditional cultivation path or the demonic cultivation path? Obviously there's no right answer and it depends on what's right for each individual, but if you were considering the Lan sect because of – personal connections –" his voice stutters, but he moves past it, "then I hope this conversation has shown you the merits of demonic cultivation."

He sounds painfully sincere. Wei Ying catches him flicking a sideways look at Lan Zhan, and follows it to see Lan Zhan looking determinedly into the middle distance. She remembers him watching as she'd called Lan Zhan 'Lan Zhan' out loud yesterday, the awe on his face for her daring to use her given name. Ah. She can see the misunderstanding.

She rocks back slightly in her stool, which is not difficult because one of its legs is slightly uneven, and lets herself have an epiphany. The shaved hair should have tipped her off, really. "Lan Zhan, are you –" she falters, suddenly aware that this is a really inappropriate question to have in front of strangers, family, both, either.

Lan Zhan's gaze slides down to her, turning from cool to warm like someone dialled the thermostat up right in front of her. "Out to my family," she confirms.

"Ahh…ahahehehee," says Wei Ying in the most bizarrely high-pitched voice she's ever heard from herself, which is not what she meant to say at all. That's not what she had meant to ask either. "Sorry. I really missed a lot when I was away," she adds weakly.

"It's fine," says Lan Zhan. Is she laughing internally at Wei Ying? It sure looks like it. "You may, of course, choose whichever sect suits you best."

Now she's just trolling. That's amazing, Wei Ying didn't even know she was capable of that kind of humour. She thanks Jingyi and Zizhen for their time, and they head off back to Mo Xuanyu's place with more to think about.

"Sorry for bringing that up in front of the boys by the way," says Wei Ying. "It just – caught me off guard."

"That I like women? Or that my family is aware?"

There's a thrill that goes through Wei Ying to hear Lan Zhan say it so boldly out loud in public. She never has. "Both?" she asks, uncertainly. More accurately, she's uncertain as to whether she was uncertain.

"I thought the hair would give it away," says Lan Zhan. And well, when she puts it that way. Cultivators are very picky about hairstyles in general. There's no way that she did this without significant commentary from the Lans, one of the most traditional sects of them all.

"I didn't want to presume," she protests.

"I will consider what I can do to appear more gay," says Lan Zhan solemnly, and Wei Ying giggles. Giggling is not a thing she even knew was in her repertoire. Not like this, anyway. Not when she's not trying to deliberately appear more girly and flirty.

...

Oh.

"Fuck," she says faintly. Two epiphanies within five minutes is a lot, even for Wei Ying. Lan Zhan is looking at her equally curiously.

"Nothing," croaks out Wei Ying. Why is there no Chinese remedy advice for how to stop blushing? She's pretty sure she has red spreading down the back of her neck like a cracked egg dripping. "You're just. So funny."

Without a word, Lan Zhan holds out her arm, and Wei Ying staggers into it gratefully, wrapping both her arms around Lan Zhan's and pressing her warm cheek against Lan Zhan's bicep.

They walk like that for a moment, Wei Ying trying to cope with the fact that her entire capacity for romantic and sexual desire that's been compartmented away for the last three years is now fast leaking out of her seams and she isn't quite sure how to stop it.

Or, perhaps, from Lan Zhan's point of view – they walk down the street, comfortably linking arms. Wei Ying isn't sure how much of her horny desperation is actually noticeable; maybe it's just all in her head.

It's not until they're almost back at the apartment that Wei Ying's voice is back to normal enough that she asks: "Are you sure Xue Chengmei isn't worth a prison visit?"

Lan Zhan shakes her head. "She's kept in a traditional cultivation prison. There were countless measures taken to ensure that she had no access to corpses, blood, or sounds."

No access to sounds. That's extreme. It's true that Wei Ying can do demonic cultivation with nothing other than a pucker of her lips in a whistle, but still. She doesn't even want to ask where she is – it probably means she's wrapped immobile in chains in a box with filtered air surrounded by a vacuum in an underground cavern somewhere.

"Alright. Yiling it is then. Let me pack up some stuff and look up train times."

"We agreed to fly," says Lan Zhan carefully, and Wei Ying looks at her. So, she's pretty sure she remembers this conversation.

"Noooo, we did not. I told you that I needed to wait to go because I couldn't afford the train ticket and you told me not to worry about it."

"Because I can fly us."

"Because ¥500 is not a lot of money for the Lan." Wei Ying narrows her eyes at Lan Zhan. Ah. Maybe she should have clarified exactly what that meant before assuming.

"It isn't," says Lan Zhan, "but also, I can fly us."

So, it turns out that Wei Ying can't say no to Lan Zhan anymore. She never used to have a problem with this.

-

So, it also turns out that Wei Ying has a fear of flying now.

They discover this about 50 metres above ground, Lan Zhan securely holding Wei Ying around the waist, when Wei Ying turns to look around and all of a sudden the ground seems way too far away and the edges of her vision go blurry and she jerks suddenly in Lan Zhan's arms which pushes her off balance and one of her feet slide off the edge of Bichen and the edge of the sword slices through her jeans, and then –

Well, and then Lan Zhan catches her and they swerve down to the ground as Lan Zhan calls her name, but Wei Ying observes all of this with a sort of dispassionate disconnection from outside of her own mind because every time she tries to slide back into her skin, that wobbly feeling around the edges of her vision comes back.

She wraps her arms around herself and tucks her hands under her boobs and hunches down into a squat. It makes her feel more like one whole person in a human skin again. She's familiar with this, at least – it feels the same as when the demonic cultivation makes her start feeling like she's made of wisps of qi and smoke, floating away on the air unless she makes an effort to gather it all and solidify herself.

"Sorry," says Wei Ying. Her voice is the studied sort of casual. She tries to explain it away without having to explain everything. She peels one of her hands out and picks at the edge of the jeans where Bichen had sliced through. They're ripped jeans anyway, no one will notice. Her palm is sweaty. "It's just been a hot second since I've flown."

Lan Zhan pulls a water bottle from her qiankun pocket and offers it. "No apologies needed."

She sips carefully past the tightness in her throat. When she offers the empty bottle back, Lan Zhan tilts her phone screen towards Wei Ying, showing the purchase of two train tickets. "Oh, you didn't need to," says Wei Ying weakly, even though the idea of getting back on a sword makes her feel queasy right now.

"Wei Ying," says Lan Zhan, in a tone of voice that Wei Ying hasn't heard before. She's used to Lan Zhan saying Wei Ying in a more annoyed tone of voice. Usually accompanied by other imperatives, like 'Wei Ying, stop' or 'Wei Ying, enough'. Now though, it's gentle.

For some reason, that makes her tear up. It's a full 180° from completely dry tear ducts to full on tears clouding her vision and threatening to wobble over the rim of her eyelids in about two seconds flat. She snort-gasps hysterically at her own bizarre behaviour, and that's enough movement to send the first of the fat tears dribbling down the side of her nose, and then she blinks and now they're all clumped in her eyelashes, and fucking hell.

"You can't be so nice to me," says Wei Ying with a gurgled laugh as she swipes them away with the side of her hands. "I'm not used to it, I'll react all weird."

It's not really Lan Zhan being nice to her that set her off, she knows this. It's more the instant understanding that she can't fly anymore, not just because she doesn't have a golden core but because not having a golden core makes her fundamentally scared of falling, in a way she never had to worry about when she had a golden core. Maybe compounded with the sudden recollection that the last time someone carried her on a sword, it was one of Wen Chao's bodyguards who dangled her over thin air by her arms and near wrenched them out of her shoulder sockets and then dropped her 30 metres through the air and shattered both her legs.

She loved flying, before all this.

So yeah, it's not really about Lan Zhan being nice, but that's just like the last, tiny droplet of water that makes the whole cup spill over.

Lan Zhan stares at her in astonishment. It's like she doesn't know what to do – which is all right, because Wei Ying doesn't know what to do either, except keep sitting on the side of the road and wiping away her tears even though her hands are all damp now and realistically all she's doing is just smearing them all over her face.

Suddenly, there's a weight across her shoulders, and it's Lan Zhan's robe jacket, still warm from Lan Zhan's body warmth; Lan Zhan tugs it properly over her shoulders, and then digs out a packet of tissues where she even opens the little sticky flap for Wei Ying, and then she hesitantly puts her arm around Wei Ying as well. Wei Ying leans into her immediately, dropping her head onto Lan Zhan's shoulder, and lets Lan Zhan awkwardly rub her arm.

"I'm all right," she says eventually. She's pretty sure she cried out the whole amount of water Lan Zhan had given her five minutes ago. "Wow, that was so embarrassing. I've been holding it together so well up till now. Mostly. You know what I mean. I'd sorted myself out so I didn't have to keep seeing healers every other day, and fully resigned myself to just starting a new life and I was all resolved, you know? And then I find out all this weird stuff that's happened because of me that I didn't even know about and then of all people I bump into you. It's just been a real weird 48 hours."

She closes her eyes and inhales after her word vomit. "Not bad," she clarifies, more quietly. "Really good, actually. Just weird."

"I also was not expecting to see you again. So yes, weird." Lan Zhan is silent for another moment, and then adds, "Our train leaves in twenty minutes."

Wei Ying ends up laughing. If Lan Zhan had tried to be nice to her again, that might have set the tears off again. But this – an acknowledgement and an understanding – was all she needed. They set off for the station.

They end up with seats around a little table. It's nice, Wei Ying has never been on a long train ride before. They start out facing each other, legs crisscrossing as the countryside zooms past them with a low rumble. She wants to fall back on easy topics of conversation – asking about Lan Zhan's last three years, how her sister is, how her uncle is – but that's a slippery slope and Wei Ying isn't ready to veer off into how Jiang Cheng or Jiang Yanli have been.

So instead they sit in silence, Wei Ying with her laptop out, trying to see what other information she can find on the Yiling Wei sect, and Lan Zhan with a book. Whoever's running the sect is doing a good job of it. There's a website that looks like it was made in the 21^st century, with a price list and booking form with timeslots that takes e-payment for cultivation jobs and everything. She just wants to know why they've stolen her name to do it.

She hits a dead end at some point – there are more websites she can peruse but all the information is starting to repeat itself, and there are no clues on the Yiling Wei sect itself that hints at any of the leadership. She switches to looking Lan Zhan up on the internet instead. She's made a very good name for herself in the last three years, it seems. Any licensed cultivator has a case file available on public record and Lan Zhan's is packed with all sorts of things all over the country, and she's always placed in the top three at the four major competitive nighthunts.

She stretches back, thinking appreciatively about how cool that is and inadvertently makes eye contact with Lan Zhan – because Lan Zhan is watching her. A faint blush comes over Lan Zhan's cheeks as she's caught and she flicks her gaze back down to her book.

"Like what you see?" asks Wei Ying, which is a terrible and boring and cliché thing to say. The sort of thing she'd say all the time when she was younger.

Lan Zhan seems to take it seriously. "Some of it. You look – well. Given the circumstances."

Wei Ying raises her eyebrows. "Do I? You must have low standards, Lan Zhan. You've seen me disassociate, freak out and cry on you, and that's all within the last hour."

Lan Zhan closes her book, her mouth in a tight frown. It's cute. It reminds Wei Ying of how she used to rile Lan Zhan up all the time, and her lips would always press together in this exact little moue. "Do I look like I have low standards?"

A laugh bursts out of Wei Ying, loud enough that a couple of other people look over before she reins herself in. "Your comebacks have got better."

"Thank you," she says dryly.

Wei Ying hums, and props her face up on one hand. "You look like the last three years have been good to you. I'm glad. I know everyone always said it, but I always knew you were going to do well for yourself."

Lan Zhan looks like she doesn't know what to do with that kind of sincerity, even though it's just true. Everyone has been saying since they were actual teenagers that Lan Zhan would be the best of their generation. Maybe she's one of those people for whom pressure produces diamonds.

"Anyway... thanks."

Lan Zhan frowns. "What for?"

"Everything. Coming with me. Setting up that conversation with your cousin. Offering to fly, and being nice when I couldn't, and then paying for my train ticket. Lots of things. And, you know." Wei Ying inhales a deep breath, and exhales with her words. "You looked happy to see me. I wasn't – I wasn't sure that – I hadn't seen anyone I knew and then it was you, and –" All of a sudden, she's run out of breath.

"I was happy. Am." Lan Zhan presses her hand over the top of Wei Ying's on the little plastic table, and squeezes.

Wei Ying smiles weakly. "I know. I noticed. And I know you don't like this sort of conversation, so I wanted to say it now while we're stuck on a moving vehicle together. So, thanks."

She turns her hand palm up and squeezes back and leaves their hands like that for the rest of the journey.

-

Yiling looks nothing like Wei Ying remembers. The train station opens out just a little walk away from the town centre, and where Wei Ying had been expecting a small, sleepy town with little clusters of food and fruit stalls and independent shops clustering together to form a loose market, the pavements are packed with people.

There are coaches drawing up and parking outside of the station and letting off whole busloads of people ready to wander around. It reminds her of a tourist attraction. There are multiple stalls selling merch of her, drawn in a cute manhua style. From where she's standing, she can see a life size cardboard cut-out for sale where she's doing a magical girls transformation pose, robes pulled tight over an amount of cleavage she does not possess in real life.

The shops have all changed from three years ago, each of them now swathed in various shades and styles of red and black and occasionally purple. In front of each shop stands someone – more often than not also in black and red robes – doing some sort of promotion, from handing out leaflets to product demonstrations to shouting through a mic.

"Demonic cultivation gear! Fresh out of Wei Wuxian's head and off the factory floor!"

"Mao nets! All kinds of mao nets, 50% off only today! We got electric, binding, and straight up cultivation rope mao nets!"

"Demonic cultivation? Interested in demonic cultivation? Join our six-week bootcamp and find your new vocation!"

"Vintage Yiling Wei robe sets! 100% authentic, comes with the Yiling Wei seal!"

"Hey, Lan Zhan," says Wei Ying weakly. "What the fuck?"

Lan Zhan takes one look at her, and sweeps her off the main road and around the corner. "My oversight," she says quietly. "It has been like this for a couple of years now. I have... got used to it."

"Did I miss the memo? Is demonic cultivation popular now? Is it even legal? I just–" Wei Ying peers back around the corner with wide eyes. She hadn't understood what it meant to be an established sect, perhaps. There were other sects, like Baling, the one the Ouyang boy was from, which were official but small and didn't make much of a splash. This is on a whole other level.

"I just remember when I was literally hiding out from people I knew wanting to kill me for practising it," she finishes in a small, bewildered tone. Three years couldn't have made that much of a difference, could it?

"It is... not illegal," says Lan Zhan. "Not legalised and regulated in the same way as regular cultivation, but not like before. And it is popular with a certain audience. I believe it would be more accurate to say that it is infamous rather than famous. People who have been disillusioned by the traditional cultivation ways have been hearted by its existence, and are very passionate about championing its cause."

"So I founded a revolution. Or possibly a cult."

Lan Zhan considers it for a moment. "Possibly."

The idea of it is making Wei Ying's head hurt. How has this gone on for so long? Is this what people, even the ones who truly knew her, think she would do? And – perhaps she would. She recognises the truth for herself in what Lan Zhan said. She had been disillusioned by the strict rules of the cultivation world by the end, their inability to take context and circumstances into account. Perhaps this is her legacy.

"I considered joining, at one time," Lan Zhan says, like a casual throwaway comment and not a statement that throws Wei Ying out of her reverie, making her squawk and stagger sideways.

"What."

The tips of Lan Zhan's ears go ever so slightly pink, unhidden by hair. "I questioned the teachings of Gusu Lan for a time, and there are indeed few alternatives for someone who wants to practise cultivation in a method not previously approved of."

"You questioned the Gusu Lan teachings?" Wei Ying clutches at her chest. She is aware that she's just repeating Lan Zhan, but even she can't deal with this many surprises in one day. Lan Zhan was like the pillar epitome of Gusu Lan teachings.

"Frequently. There are many ideas that I think were rooted in the context of their time, and had not been refreshed in accordance to our changing world. And I considered that a sect founded and run by Wei Ying could not be lacking in new ideas."

Wow. "And? What happened? You obviously didn't end up joining."

"I petitioned Yiling Wei, but received no reply. I assumed that was answer enough. If Wei Ying wanted me to join, then I would have."

Wei Ying slides a little down the wall as she realises that Lan Zhan thought – has been thinking, for years – that Wei Ying just rudely rejected her by ignoring her. "Oh my God! I mean, it wasn't me. Isn't me. But if you ever wanted to join my non-existent, definitely-not-fraudulent sect, I would love to have you, of course. You know that, right? I mean, who wouldn't?"

Lan Zhan smiles at her with amusement. "It's all right. As you said, we didn't part on good terms. I understood. Or thought I did, when I thought it was you."

That's – so flattering. Wei Ying feels flattered for her fake self. She's simultaneously proud of Lan Zhan, and also slightly horrified that she, even in her absence, nearly convinced Lan Zhan to join a cult.

"So the stalls outside are –"

"Unsanctioned," Lan Zhan shrugs. "Every so often someone from the Board of Cultivation comes to try and intimidate them into leaving, they pack up for a bit, and then come back. It has generated a huge amount of tourism and trade growth for the area though, so no one tries too hard."

"Have you ever taken a look around?"

"Only in passing on my way to the Burial Mounds. It seemed... inappropriate, given I knew you."

Wei Ying nods. "Yeah, it's kind of strange. But do you mind if we take a look around? I'm curious, at least. I told you I tried to look myself up, once I'd regained my memory a bit, but all the results were so overwhelmingly awful so now I don't do it anymore. It'd... it'd be nice to walk around somewhere where people don't think I'm evil."

"You have to search the –" Lan Zhan stops, as Wei Ying pulls her hair down straight and loosens it out of her ponytail. That, coupled with her non-cultivator clothing, should make her just look like a normal young woman walking through instead of any resemblance to Wei Wuxian.

"You have to search the what?" she asks distractedly.

Lan Zhan doesn't answer for a moment, and when Wei Ying looks up again, her ears are even more pink than before. "Lan Zhan?"

"You have to search the codewords," says Lan Zhan eventually. "Netizens who want to talk openly of you and demonic cultivation use coded hashtags to avoid being found by the major sects still cracking down on people."

Wei Ying stares at her. There's so much to unpack – Lan Zhan immersing herself in netizen culture, in knowing about secret codes, in knowing what Wei Ying's secret hashtags are. They don't have time to deal with all of that here, in the middle of the street, so she's going to have to get to it later. Instead: "What are my secret hashtags?"

Lan Zhan gets her phone out and opens an incognito tab, reading as she types. "HHSN. It stands for... Hong Hei Shao Nü.^[1]" She looks pained at having to say it aloud.

"That's adorable." Wei Ying scrolls briefly through the results. While they're much more complimentary about her, Wei Ying wonders if they have got the complete other end of the stick to the ones who think she was evil incarnate. She wasn't exactly a cutesy magic girl either. "Explains the manhua-style drawings, at least."

Lan Zhan closes her eyes briefly.

"No," says Wei Ying.

"It's a webcomic," says Lan Zhan. "Of the fictional exploits of Hong Hui Xiao Nui."

"There's a webcomic, that's amazing. You have got to show me later. Man, I really wish I didn't have to confront my identity-thieving doppelganger right now." She fiddles, trying to see how she feels about walking out there. She might not be instantly recognisable, but as much as she blew it off just now, this amount of attention on her is... stressful.

"I want to walk through but be all incognito. Just blend in with the crowd and have none of them know it's me," she murmurs, and faintly hears a rustle behind her.

She looks around to see Lan Zhan shrugging out of her robe jacket - the one she'd leant to Wei Ying earlier.

"What are you doing?"

"Becoming incognito. We wouldn't be recognised as even cultivators if not for the robe," she says, and carries on.

Wei Ying turns her back when she catches a glimpse of shoulder to give her some privacy. She'd seen Lan Zhan in casual clothing yesterday, but there's something about the act of getting changed that makes Wei Ying blush. She waits until Lan Zhan is done rustling, and turns back around to see Lan Zhan folding the last of her robes into her qiankun satchel, left in a cropped tank top, loose cultivator trousers that could pass as sweatpants, and white tabi-toed boots. It's sort of infuriating that Lan Zhan makes it look like Fashion™.

"Nice," is all she says instead.

And it is. Nice, that is. Lan Zhan has a lean stomach and muscled arms that indicate that she's not slacking on her exercises even after gaining her cultivator license, like so many cultivators do.

"Shall we?" asks Lan Zhan, clasping her satchel shut.

They fall in step together, Wei Ying finding herself swaying towards Lan Zhan to hide in her shadow every time someone shouts a little too loudly about Wei Wuxian. No one here thinks it's her, but she's got to get better about flinching away from it. The main street up to the burial mounds is pedestrianised, lined solid with shops and shoppers, and they make their way up, caught in the ebb of the crowd.

"Demonic cultivation flavoured candies! Taste the resentment!" shouts someone handing out free samples. Wei Ying loves a free sample. She nabs a toothpick for each of them. They taste mostly like slightly smoky sugar.

"Not that resentful," she reports to Lan Zhan, who looks increasingly amused at her.

There's another stall selling robes, which are more like lightweight, glossy cosplay robes rather than the heavy cultivation robes lined with talismans sewn in. The proprietor catches her rubbing the material with her eyebrows raised, and sidles up to her. "I've got real silk and real cultivator robes, young miss."

"I've seen real cultivation robes," says Wei Ying. "They're pretty heavy. They have to be, so they don't flap up all the time when they fly."

"Oh I see. A connoisseur, then? Come and see what you think of these." The older woman beckons her in.

The shop is narrow, with wares lining both sides of the walls and then stacked up on the tables. The display model robes increase in quality as they get further towards the back – odd, Wei Ying thinks, as surely some of the good stuff should be on display. There aren't any customers who come this far back. Except then the auntie explains it.

"I've got stuff for the tourists up front. A bit flashier and shinier. No one wants to actually wear cultivation robes if they don't have to," she says as she fishes out a long pole with a hook on the end, and starts pulling down some of the pieces from higher up.

Well, she's right about that. Even once she'd lost her golden core and the according strength it allowed, Wei Ying noticed just how heavy cultivation robes were. These look like the real deal. Heavy, stiff fabrics, layered one over the other. She flips it open, and there are talismans stitched into the backside too. They're not the standard ones - usually for warmth, durability, resentful energy dampening, that sort of thing - which means that they're someone's personal creations. She half-recognises some of them, and she can mostly figure out from the arrangement and the tiny script in stitching what they're for, and curiosity lances through her when she realises that they might be based off her own created talismans. She shows them to Lan Zhan.

"And you said that these are official cultivation robes?" Lan Zhan enquires.

The woman nods, watching them closely now that they look like they know their stuff. "The clientele is small, since most clans make their own robes personally but some independent cultivators want the extra fancy stuff without having to do it all themselves. I thought that's what you two were."

Wei Ying nods quickly. "We are. I just didn't realise that I could get robes without doing all the talismans myself. Are they custom ordered, or...?"

"Yiling Wei affiliated, of course. We buy local." The woman pulls up the label under the collar to show the little black mountain symbol that Wei Ying has come to associate with her sect. Interesting. It implies some sort of relationship with the sect, a business deal. It's all very commercial.

"Of course. Good to support the local economy. Do they only come in the Yiling Wei colours, or...?" Wei Ying has discovered that a great way to let people give her the info she wants is by leading them into finishing her sentences.

"We have a range. Take a look yourself." The woman points at the right pile and, well, Wei Ying hadn't exactly intended on getting robes today but it feels a bit awkward to not now. She rifles through the colours – there are some truly garish pinks and purples and oranges in the mix – before seeing a set in pale blues and creams.

She pulls it out immediately.

Lan Zhan's face is. Well, it's certainly an expression of some sort. Wei Ying laughs. "Come on, I think they'd suit me. I looked okay in these colours during that summer, didn't I?"

The shopkeeper spies her opportunity for a sale, and steps in between them. "Why don't you try them on? There's a mirror in the back."

The back is a storage cupboard rather than a fitting room, precarious towers of clothing muffling the sound of the woman talking to Lan Zhan outside as Wei Ying closes the door behind her. She pulls the robes free from the crinkly plastic and shrugs into them with years of practise, getting the seam to lie right here, and the waist to line up there, the pinch down on her stomach to get the belt tied at the right height. She doesn't bother with the trousers, leaving them over her jeans. It gives it a modern flare, she thinks.

When she looks at herself in the mirror by the dim light of the bare bulb (swinging slightly from where she accidently touched it as she put her arm up), she looks – nice. As in, like a nice young woman who almost definitely hasn't completely lost control of herself, her cultivation, or her demonic cultivation and nearly crippled the cultivation world with a backlash of resentful energy. She straightens the collars so that they overlap neatly, and pulls at her hair until it's in a high, bobbing ponytail. She looks almost unrecognisable, it's hilarious. She's got to show Lan Zhan.

She steps out of the storage cupboard just as Lan Zhan is paying. Lan Zhan freezes like she's been caught in the act, which, she fucking has. The machine beeps as the app payment goes through.

"What if I didn't even like it, Lan Zhan?" asks Wei Ying, but she's smiling.

Lan Zhan sheepishly pockets her phone. "Then we could have used it to examine the talismans regardless."

Wei Ying spreads her arms and twirls around.

"You look good."

"Thank you." She smooths her hands down the robes. They're both not mentioning the fact that they look like Gusu Lan robes, but that's all right.

She ends up taking them off again before leaving the shop so that they don't look completely out of place, but Lan Zhan carefully puts them into her qiankun satchel along with the rest of their luggage.

The rest of the street is an equally unusual experience, and Wei Ying flits from stall to stall with a sort of fascinated masochism. It becomes evident quickly that there are two categories of shops. The first are those that are here just to make money, selling kitschy merchandise that piggybacks off her notoriety. They're mostly harmless, although Wei Ying does have to ask if Lan Zhan has a budget after she ends up buying a Wei Wuxian themed phonecase, card wallet, 'talisman paper' notebooks, and a whole ass body pillow after watching Wei Ying glance at them with any kind of interest.

The body pillow is a whole trip, because it's not until after she picks it up that she realises that the Wei Wuxian drawing on one side is clothed and the other side is in lingerie, but she just watches as Lan Zhan pays for it and then stuffs it serenely into the qiankun satchel.

"Did you always have this sense of humour, or is that new?" asks Wei Ying, sort of tickled at how ridiculous Lan Zhan is being.

"I grew it myself," says Lan Zhan to Wei Ying's great delight.

The second kind of stall, and the ones that Wei Ying pays closer attention to, are the ones that seem to have some sort of actual connection to the Yiling Wei sect. These tend to be the ones with cultivation gear that's endorsed by the sect or some sort of affiliate, partnership, supplier, et cetera. There's nothing wrong per say about the stack of talismans that Wei Ying rifles through, or the explanation of the paid-for Compass app, or the cultivation sheet music, but all of them seem to have some sort of vestige of Wei Wuxian's demonic cultivation – as rudimentary as her original research and creations had been – and then some sort of alteration or addition on top.

By the time they make their way through the tourist high street, even Wei Ying's energy is starting to dip. "I need a break and we literally haven't even started on the actual case yet."

"We can stop for tea," says Lan Zhan. She steers them through the worst of the traffic into a restaurant that's still serving the tail end of dim sum, and slides the little piece of paper with ticky boxes to Wei Ying.

"And to think I only offered you McDonalds fries," says Wei Ying, and promptly ticks six of her favourite things before adding in an equal number of fish and veggie options for Lan Zhan and slides it to the edge of the table for someone to pick up.

The place seems familiar but not at the same time. She thinks back. There hadn't exactly been much opportunity for eating out when she'd been in Yiling last and in fact, the only time she can think of is when Lan Zhan came to visit.

"Is this the same teahouse we came to last time?" she asks.

Lan Zhan nods. "I've been here a few times since. They renovated about a year ago."

Wei Ying tries to see past the furnishings and match the shape, the shell of the restaurant to her memory. That's right - the lobby has been opened up to incorporate more seating, the fish tanks have moved to the other side of the room, there's a fresh coat of pain and new decorations. "Nostalgia's such a funny thing. I thought I'd feel something specific when I came back to Yiling, so much happened to me here. But it's completely different now, it might as well be a new place."

Perhaps her nostalgia is for a time rather than a place, a moment suspended in her memory that won't change no matter how much time passes.

She feels a lot better after food, tea, even a dessert. Lan Zhan slides her card onto the bill when it arrives and Wei Ying doesn't even bother to fight her on it. She can't afford it, and they both know it. She ought to feel bad abusing Lan Zhan's generosity, but she can't bring herself to feel anything but grateful. She just pokes Lan Zhan's arm with one finger instead as she pays; Heavens knows what the wait staff think of her. Lan Zhan finishes up the transaction and catches her finger between hers.

"You're so good to me," she says.

"Everyone should be good to you," says Lan Zhan, quietly fierce. Wei Ying rocks back into her chair, startled. It seems like there's more coming, but Lan Zhan merely shakes her head. Wei Ying doesn't push. It seems like the sort of thing that could break a seal. Instead, she slides her arms through Lan Zhan's and links them up as they bustle out and head towards the 'Yiling Wei sect' signs. Lan Zhan pats her softly on the hand and she squeezes Lan Zhan's arm.

She knows. Lan Zhan doesn't have to say it. Wei Ying can read it in all her little actions.

-

The Burial Mounds start a little way out from the town. Probably because for all the money the shops are making off of it, the trickles of resentment she can feel the closer she gets are enough to make anyone uneasy. Wei Ying looks around. "Where's the gate?"

"The gate?"

"There used to be a gate here. Not a physical one, but the boundary of a seal. I thought the Five – well, Four Sects – had all pledged to renew the seal every so often to keep the resentful energy in. They had these little stone lions to show where the border was."

Lan Zhan tests the edge of the seal with her foot. "It's still here, but weak. I assume the sects have left it to the Yiling Wei sect to maintain now as part of their territory."

Wei Ying frowns, and pokes around in the sparse grass. She can't see any indents in the dirt where she remembers the lion markers being, which means that they haven't been here for a while now. She looks up and meets Lan Zhan's eyes; they both know it, but she says it aloud anyway: "They can't be maintained by demonic cultivation, that's not how it works."

If, and that's a big if, Wei Ying had decided to found a sect on a volatile piece of land knowing that she'd need help to stop it from eventually decaying and causing qi deviations, insanity and death to a whole town and maybe even further, she would have asked for that damn help. This isn't just negligence, it's got to be deliberate.

They step foot into the Yiling Wei territory. It seems normal enough at first, though Wei Ying remembers what Lan Zhan said about wards being around the area. Nothing as of yet.

There's a small building along the path, which definitely hasn't always been there. The windows are open, and there's a young man sat watching something on a tablet. "Good afternoon, welcome to the Yiling Wei sect! How may I help you?" he says as he fumbles with the pause button.

"Hi. Um. We were hoping to speak with, uh, Wei Wuxian." Oh, that sounds so odd coming out of her voice.

The young man peers at her. Wei Ying doesn't recognise him, but she can't tell if that's good or bad. "Do you have an appointment?"

"No, er –" She looks back at Lan Zhan for help.

Lan Zhan steps forward with no hesitation. "It's official sect business. Lan Wangji, Gusu Lan."

The guy looks them both up and down. Lan Zhan still has the headband, sure, but she's in a tank top and loose bottoms and Wei Ying is just in a t-shirt and jeans. "Uhhhh, I'll call ahead. Walk on up and if she wants to see you, she'll see you. If she doesn't, you'll be redirected to the exit on the other side of the mountain."

Wei Ying nods. "Sure. Thanks. Hey, can I ask a couple of questions? I've never been here before."

"Yeah, 'course." The guy looks like he's on much steadier ground now. Perhaps the part about being a tourist attraction hadn't been wrong.

"So the sect is inaccessible without permission?"

"Aren't all sects?" Well, he's got her there.

"Right, right. But like, no one's allowed up? Because I mean, it's like a mountain right? And it must be so inconvenient if you can't get like, food and supplies and stuff up, imagine having to carry things up all the way yourself."

"Oh. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, it's pretty inconvenient, but most people only live in the outer level so it's not that far up and we've got carts, it's not like we don't have technology. We're a 21st century sect, a-yi. I'm told you can't drive up to Cloud Recesses though still." Good dig.

"It's a four hour walk," Wei Ying confirms, dramatically rolling her eyes. The guy shudders along with her. Okay, this is good. She's winning him over, she thinks.

"What do you mean by the outer ring?"

"Oh, the mountain is split into sections. The very top is for Wei Wuxian and her closest disciples, and then the other half of is for the outer disciples and apprentices. So yeah, uh I guess if you're going up to see her and she lets you in, you should keep going until you reach the top.

"Also, um – no, sorry, never mind."

"Hm? What is it?" Wei Ying blinks, and the guy looks from her to Lan Zhan, slightly twitchy.

"Sorry if I'm overstepping, but if you wanted to change into cultivator robes? I, uhm. I heard she prefers it when people turn up in the formal garb. If you, if you have them with you, you can get changed in the staffroom."

It's an interesting tidbit, but Wei Ying knows better than to press this guy for details. For all intents and purposes, he's the receptionist.

"Ohhhh. Yeah, that would be great actually. Thanks for the heads up. That makes sense, we'll be respectful on an official visit and everything." Wei Ying smiles at him, and he exhales, relieved, showing them in and pointing out the door around the corner at the back of the building.

"You spoke differently," says Lan Zhan, once they're out of earshot.

"Hm?"

"When you were talking to that man. You spoke differently." Lan Zhan shifts as Wei Ying turns to look at her in confusion. And perhaps Wei Ying hadn't realised how much of Lan Zhan's demeanour is deliberate until she turns it off, but Lan Zhan shifts her weight onto one leg, letting one hip jut out, her upper body swaying in as she tilts her head and bats her eyes a couple of times in imitation of Wei Ying. It's cute and flirty and altogether disconcerting as fuck coming from Lan Zhan.

She goes back to her normal self, upright and perfect posture as Wei Ying shudders. "Oh please don't do that again."

"You do it," Lan Zhan points out.

"I don't really notice it. I just do it when I want people to do stuff for me."

"You used to do it to me all the time."

Wei Ying pauses, feet clattering to a stop. Is this like... jealousy? Or – what? "Yeah, because I was young and stupid and I wanted you to get me out of time outs. And because it annoyed you when I did the dumb airhead thing."

"Because you weren't a dumb airhead."

"Yeah, but it's a useful persona. Like for when you're going up to meet the person who's been using your identity for two years, maybe it'll help if they underestimate you."

Lan Zhan is quiet for a moment, and Wei Ying has to pause when she opens the door to see if Lan Zhan is still following her. "I did underestimate you," she says quietly. Oh no, is she sad?

Wei Ying takes her by the wrist and tugs her forward. "But you don't anymore, right? You figured out that actually I'm cool and super smart and awesome. Right?"

"Mn."

"Then that's okay. Oh, and cute, right?"

That makes Lan Zhan crack a smile. Well, more accurately, she exhales with a note of amusement, which is basically the same thing. "Yes, and cute."

Wei Ying opens the door. It's barely more than a cupboard, big enough for exactly one person to sit and eat their lunch and stretch their legs out whilst surrounded by boxes of pamphlets - tourist info on the Yiling Wei sect and more recruitment materials, it looks like.

"Cosy." Wei Ying rotates around on the spot. She folds the chair up so that there's room to actually close the door behind Lan Zhan leaving the two of them standing close by.

"We can take turns," says Lan Zhan, even though it sounds from her tone that she isn't interested in taking turns.

Wei Ying licks her lips. "I'm sure it'll be fine. We're both. Sensible adults."

It is, in fact, not fine.

See, the room is big enough for one person to sit, and it's also fine for two people to stand, but it is definitely not big enough for two people to stand and try and put robes on. Wei Ying has to time it so that she stretches out an arm just after Lan Zhan does, so that hers can stick out under Lan Zhan's, and then Lan Zhan has to keep her arm out until Wei Ying has pulled her sleeve on so that dropping her arm doesn't hit Wei Ying, and - anyway, the result is that neither of them quite have the room to manoeuvre for the kind of complexity that formal robes require.

Eventually, they just help each other. Wei Ying pulls the fabric over where it catches on stacked boxed behind Lan Zhan, and picks at the folds until they settle down by the seams, and presses her hand against Lan Zhan's back so that she can get her belt straight.

"Thank you," says Lan Zhan, touching her lightly on the hand when she's done, and Wei Ying jumps a little. She hadn't expected that contact, for some reason.

"No, thank you," says Wei Ying, shaking out the robes she (Lan Zhan) had just bought. She'd normally never wear new clothes without washing them first, but they're similar enough that she'd pass as Gusu Lan, rather than putting her own robes on. (It strikes her, all of a sudden, that her own actual robes would be considered non-genuine, not having the seal of Yiling Wei sewn into it. How hilarious.)

It's Lan Zhan's turn to help her out now, and for all that Wei Ying was trying really hard to be completely normal and professional about it when she was helping Lan Zhan, it suddenly feels so awkward when she holds her arm out and Lan Zhan helps her tug the sleeve down to the right length, or when Lan Zhan holds the ends of the robe together as she tries to find the right length of belt. It's not like she's naked underneath, she's wearing a whole ass oufit, but with Lan Zhan standing in front and just gently looming over her with her hands against Wei Ying's stomach, everything in here seems too hot all of a sudden.

Their hands brush as Wei Ying folds the belt over her front, and Lan Zhan's hands are soft and temperate. Not too hot and not too cold. Just perfect. Perfect temperature. Wei Ying, on the other hand, is pretty sure that she's radiating heat off every inch of skin right now.

"Okay," she mumbles. "All done."

Lan Zhan's hands linger on her waist, and then carefully tug at the belt until it smooths out a little. "There."

Wei Ying realises that she's looking down, just staring at their hands, which aren't even touching. She dares to look up at Lan Zhan, and Lan Zhan is right there, closer than she thought she'd be, also looking at Wei Ying. She licks her lips. "I didn't want to presume," she says, as if this is a well-trodden conversation instead of the very first time they've breached it; the very first time she's even thought of it at all.

But then, she and Lan Zhan are like that. Taking up conversations without starting them properly.

She clears her throat. Even if she can't start her thoughts properly, she should at least finish them. "That just because you liked women. You." She can't. The words are stuck in her mouth.

Lan Zhan's hands spread around her waist, and Wei Ying sways forward. Lan Zhan steps up and meets her in the middle until Wei Ying is caught in the circle of her arms.

"Ah, Lan Zhan. You're too good to me," she says dreamily. "I hope this isn't another hallucination."

"Another?"

"Yeah, I had quite a few back when I was doing the… qi deviation thing. But I've got it under control now and this would be a pretty terrible time to find out I haven't actually."

Lan Zhan squeezes her around the waist. None of the hallucinations ever did that. She clings back, and lets Lan Zhan finally close the gap between them. She sighs into the kiss, the press of Lan Zhan's mouth against her own, the warmth of her body pressed up against Lan Zhan's, the way Lan Zhan takes her weight and pulls at Wei Ying like she would have Wei Ying closer to her if it was at all possible.

It's over way too soon.

"The receptionist," Lan Zhan reminds her, regretfully. She brushes her thumb over Wei Ying's lower lip, and then trails her fingers across her cheek as she tucks a stray strand of hair over her ear.

Wei Ying sighs. Pillowing her cheek on Lan Zhan's boob is very comfortable actually. She allows herself one more second, and then tilts back onto her heels. Lan Zhan is still looking down at her, face slightly squishy and soft, and Wei Ying can tell because she reaches up and presses the tip of one finger into her cheek, and she smiles. Wei Ying smiles too.

She fishes out her flute – not Chenqing but just something she picked up in Hong Kong – and slides it into her belt before they step out. She waves goodbye to the young man as they leave, promising to mention how helpful he was if they manage to meet Wei Wuxian, and then jogs to catch up to Lan Zhan, already up the path, and catches her by the elbow.

Lan Zhan lifts her arm and she slots hers in, linking them up with an ease like this is something they do all the time. Maybe it could be. Wei Ying is slightly giddy at the thought.

"Let's go sort out this stupid impersonator quickly," she says. "And then we can go somewhere and talk."

"And talk?"

"And maybe hold hands," says Wei Ying, deadpan.

"That sounds agreeable."

It's like, a joke and a euphemism, sure, but Wei Ying finds herself genuinely excited at the prospect of getting to sit down and talk and hold hands with Lan Zhan. She presses herself in close against Lan Zhan's arm, which is strong and muscled and steady, and feels Lan Zhan just minutely adjust her centre of gravity so that she can take Wei Ying's weight as they carry on walking up the mountain.

Really, she wants to talk about it now. She wants to drag Lan Zhan to a hotel and get them alone and ask her if she really likes her and maybe kiss about it. But there's already a threatening fog that's descending around them and there's no way to know if anyone's eavesdropping on them and she needs to make sure that she's ready with the demonic cultivation; she somehow doesn't think that someone would go to the trouble of pretending to be her and setting up a sect and giving it up without a fight.

"Should we?" asks Wei Ying, rotating her finger a circle, indicating the fog.

"Let's see if we are allowed to pass first," says Lan Zhan. Both of them have automatically lowered the voices, murmuring just loud enough for the sounds to pass between the two of them.

Wei Ying nods. That's wise – if they're allowed to pass through with no issue, that would be indicative of something. Of what, she doesn't know, but it would mean something when most unwanted visitors are redirected straight out.

They walk for twenty minutes, thirty minutes. Forty.

"It's not that big of a mound, if the paths haven't changed in the last three years, we should have either hit a plateau or be on a downwards incline by now," says Wei Ying in a quiet voice. She has her flute in her hand now.

Lan Zhan nods, and the fog is thick enough that half her face is obscured. "We are not wanted for an audience, nor are we unwanted."

"Interesting." She remembers vaguely someone saying that some people got lost on the way up instead of being spit out, and she realises belatedly that she should have paid more attention to this detail. What is the point of keeping someone lost? Something must have happened to thosepeople.

Now that she's actively trying, Wei Ying can feel the low thrum of qi used to power this cultivation array. "This isn't resentful energy," she murmurs. She can feel the fog pressing in on them, heavy and cold and wet and dampening all sounds until she can't hear any signs of wildlife anymore. This has the hallmarks of traditional cultivation, a maze array of some sort most likely. It's set into the ground and regulated in a way that resentful energy could never be bound.

Lan Zhan's arm moves next to her, and she presses a thin dagger into Wei Ying's hand. "Just in case." Which means that she's noticed that the fog is muffling sound as well.

"Do we follow where they want us to go? Or fight our way through the maze?" There are benefits to both. Being able to find out what the Wei Wuxian wants from them for the first; an element of surprise for the second.

"Can you take us through?"

"Yes." Wei Ying knows the Burial Mounds. It might have been three years and the town of Yiling has changed but in her experience, mountains don't change too easily for the ways of people.

"Then we aim for the top."

That makes sense. The outer ring seem full of people who have equally been fooled by false pretences. It'd be troublesome to come out of the maze to have to deal with them too. Wei Ying pauses for a moment to orient herself. Even with the fog obscuring her vision, there are ways to tell where she is. The slant of the ground, yes, but also how thin the air is to tell her how high up; the colour of the trees and grass and dirt to its approximation to the epicentre of the mass graves themselves. And technology too - her original Compass app, which doesn't exist in any app store but does tell her not only the direction towards resentful energy and the concentration of it, but also plain old cardinal directions. Most cultivators, she reckons, have never had to actually sleep a night in the wild.

They're on the side of the mountain, wending slowly around to the back. It they are where she thinks they are, there should be a path soon, that criss-crosses in the opposite direction that takes them further up.

"Straight up and north-west," she murmurs, kicking her foot around in the fog every few steps to see if they've reached the path yet. They could miss it and she'd never know. Her knees are starting to ache, as they always do now when she has to walk for too long, a grating that ends in a click when she finishes off a step. There's the start of a shin split too, where her leg fractured. The robes are heavy and frankly, this is miserable. It hadn't been a fun walk before, even without the fog and the misdirection and the power of the array trying to pull her in a certain direction.

She glances at Lan Zhan; they've unlinked arms now so that Wei Ying can look at her phone and poke at the path, but Lan Zhan is still close, the edge of her robes always brushing the heel of Wei Ying's shoes. She looks pristine, of course. Not just in the prime of physicality but the power of the golden core healing her body so quickly she probably doesn't even notice the strain of walking for an hour yet.

It's not fucking fair.

The power, the strength, the vehemence of that thought that crosses Wei Ying's mind is so strong that it makes her vision tremble. Her hands are suddenly clenches, one a fist with sharp nails digging into the meat of her palm and the other clutching her phone so tightly her fingertips are white. She sways as she lets go of the rage. No, the resentment.

"Wei Ying?"

Of course, Lan Zhan notices. It would be remiss of her not to.

"The resentful energy," says Wei Ying shortly, not sure how to explain it.

Lan Zhan holds out her hand and Wei Ying stares, unsure what to do with it for a moment. Fuck, her mind is getting muddy. She smacks her palm into Lan Zhan's, and the course of qi flows through her, burning out the creeping flickers of resentful energy.

"Thank you," she says hoarsely as the world clarifies around her.

"It's affecting you," says Lan Zhan, and what she means is that it's affecting her disproportionately to how it's affecting Lan Zhan.

"Yeah. The resentful energy. It's mine," says Wei Ying simply. She squeezes Lan Zhan's hand.

They stay connected after that, Lan Zhan's hand a loose circle around Wei Ying's wrist like an Energizer battery.

Another half hour of walking feels like half a day to Wei Ying, but she keeps pointing them into the directions the fog seems the thickest until it's a solid mass of white ahead of her, the dampness sticking to her skin as she tightens her hold on Lan Zhan. The compulsion to turn aside gets stronger and stronger, there's no way to tell even from putting one foot in front of the other if she's going in the right direction. She stumbles several times as rocks or tree branches or unexpected foliage springs up too late for her to avoid it.

And then all at once, she breaks free of the fog and emerges out the other side. She looks back as Lan Zhan steps through as well – it almost looks like there's a sheet of glass, holding the wall of white back.

"This is it. The path to the cave at the top." She's sweating, heavily. Lan Zhan – still pristine. If she's breathing more heavily, it's probably because the air up here is thinner.

It's not fair, whispers that intrusive thought again, as it has done periodically since it arrived in her head that first time.

Yeah, she thinks back at it. Yeah, it's not fair but it's better than being here alone and not having Lan Zhan with you so stop being a little bitch.

She looks up; the path ahead is clear and it's strange to see. The day is still cold and crisp and clear, the sky a vivid blue. She lets the sun bathe on her for a moment, soaking it up. She looks down the mountain, and it looks like the maze covers a solid two thirds of it; people could be lost in it for days at a time. The remaining third is further down the path, with roofs of what look like long huts just within view when she peers down. She doesn't see anyone walking around at the moment, and pulls back before anyone spots her.

She lowers herself to perch on the edge of a rock. "Just give me a sec. I need to do like the recharge before we head in to the boss battle."

It would be so funny (not) if the Wei Wuxian wasn't even here. Had gone out shopping or something.

She feels another course of qi flow through her and looks up to see Lan Zhan frowning. She pre-empts it: "It's not the resentful energy. Just plain old tiredness, Lan Zhan."

Lan Zhan has figured it out by now. Surely. Presumably. With the amount of qi she's pumped into Wei Ying's sluggish meridians. But she hasn't mentioned it and Wei Ying hasn't mentioned it, so that's something to deal with at another time.

Lan Zhan fishes a few things out of her satchel and holds them out. Wei Ying laughs with what little breath she can catch, and takes the banana and packet of mixed nuts and the bottle of water. It's such a little thing, but she does feel better afterwards.

Their plan is simple by necessity. Neither of them have enough information have the upper hand here, and the cave only has one entrance. So they're going to go in, swords drawn, and hope that they have the element of surprise on their side. Lan Zhan even draws her sword and slashes at the door to the cave with spiritual energy, blasting it open and descending upon the cave sword first as it caves in. Wei Ying follows behind more carefully, stepping over the splintered remnants of the door frame.

There's a young woman, sitting with both legs tucked up on a chair. She jerks as they barge in, the chair clattering over as she springs up onto her feet. "What's this?" she barks. "What are you doing in here?"

Wei Ying notices absently that the place has been done up a bit since she was here. There's a fancy desk and bookcase and little partitioned wall into another room out of sight and everything. Like, there's no paint on the walls which are still bare rock, but there certainly is a chandelier.

Lan Zhan comes to a stop. "Xue Yang," she says, voice laced with astonishment.

The woman narrows her eyes. "You're mistaken. I am Wei Wuxian. This is my sect and my private quarters. And you are trespassing."

"Hi hi!" chirps Wei Ying, peeking around the imposing form of Lan Zhan on the warpath. "Sorry to disturb! This is an official visit. We announced ourselves at the reception, I think your man said he'd call up? Whew, has anyone told you it's a long walk up?"

The sheer incongruity of Wei Ying makes the woman – Xue Yang, presumably, although the question of how she is here when she's supposed to be in a top-secret prison dungeon is another question – reel back a little, and look the both of them up and down slowly. "Gusu Lan. Lan Xichen? Lan Wangji? Oh, there we are? Hanguang-jun. What a pleasure. And you –"

"Oh," smiles Wei Ying with all of her teeth bared. "I'm Wei Wuxian."

Xue Yang moves first. Her hand moves but not to the flute in her belt; instead, it flies to her sleeve and she pulls out a sword instead and the other hand grabs at a misshapen lump of rock on her desk.

Clang! The sound of swords clash as Lan Zhan meets her first. She's strong; not as strong as Lan Zhan because she disengages and leaps back, which is what happens when someone crosses swords with Lan Zhan and isn't strong enough to overpower her, but strong enough that Wei Ying is pretty sure she's a cultivator-cultivator with a golden core and everything.

Wei Ying is glad she and Lan Zhan are tag teaming it. Lan Zhan takes care of the sword and Wei Ying instead focuses on the resentful energy she can feel – piles and piles of it, roiling towards them in thick waves. And it's not just energy. She can hear the thudding of footsteps, heavy and dragging.

She knows what it is. Mass murder. There's so many of them.

She puts her back to Lan Zhan, trusting that Lan Zhan won't let Xue Yang past her, and pulls the broken slabs of wood into the doorway as a makeshift barricade as the first of the fierce corpses amble into view down the hill.

Fierce corpses. They're not common anymore – everyone knows the rites for a proper burial and how to keep the ground cleansed. Even non-cultivators can prevent fierce corpses from rising. That means that Xue Yang most likely raised them. Wei Ying bites her lip. It could be graverobbing, she thinks, but it could also be – Xue Chengmei, convicted of murder, her mind helpfully supplies.

Her lip trembles. This is her. Xue Yang is pretending to be her. This is what the Yiling Wei sect is really doing.

She wets her lips and raises her flute. She plays.

Nothing.

What the fuck. She tries again. Normally, resentful energy is drawn to her like it is eager and starving and been left out in the cold and her body is home. She can feel it, thrashing like a caught fish. There's something keeping it trapped within the bodies, unable to disperse, only able to accumulate.

She darts back inside. She needs time to think.

If her original cave hasn't been tampered with too much, then that means her original protections will be here somewhere. Wei Ying slices through her thumb with the dagger that Lan Zhan gave her, and smears it across the ground. She doesn't need a golden core to activate an array that she spent days painstakingly carving into the stone ground.

That's the fierce corpses held at bay for now – they bottleneck up in the entrance to the cave.

Lan Zhan is still exchanging blows with Xue Yang.

"Lan Zhan! She's controlling the fierce corpses with something!" calls Wei Ying.

"I see it," says Lan Zhan, and springs back to fall in line with Wei Ying, swapping her sword for her guqin. She draws her hands over it, chords of sound whipping out towards Xue Yang, harder to block than the visible blade strikes. Wei Ying can only see where they land as she sees little slashes, rips appear in Xue Yang's clothing – on her shoulder, on her hip, across the shin. A spray of blood flecks across the wall, but Xue Yang doesn't even waver.

She's good, Wei Ying will give her that. She can block almost half of Lan Zhan's music cultivation, which is beyond most cultivators, and dodge the other half, which is even more impressive. It's probably why she doesn't see it coming when Lan Zhan thrums both hands through Wangji in a stunning move, catching her like a fly upon a wall – she's thrown bodily back until she hits the stone wall of the cave, dropping her sword but not the lump of whatever it is controlling the fierce corpses.

Wei Ying was prepared for this moment though; she darts in through, just behind Lan Zhan's blast, and scoops the sword up as it clangs to the ground.

She doesn't need a golden core or any fancy moves for this – she brings it down as hard as she can on Xue Yang's arm in a slicing motion, somewhere between her hand and her elbow.

Xue Yang screams and slams the open palm of her sword arm into Wei Ying's shoulder – but not before she grabs at the thing in her hand, now wet and slippery from the gushing blood. She feels the spiritual force from Xue Yang's hand hit her like a thousand fucking bricks and Wei Ying flies across the room and she braces, fully expecting to hit the wall and crack like three ribs, except it's Lan Zhan's chest that she hits, and Lan Zhan's back that cracks into the wall instead.

Even with the cushioning, the wind is punched out of her lungs. Inhaling is like trying to drag air in through a vacuum. She drops the thing she'd grabbed from Xue Yang's hand.

"Wei Ying!"

How Lan Zhan has breath after that is a miracle. How?!

She raises her head in time to see Xue Yang stagger to her feet. Somewhere through the haze of pain, Wei Ying is impressed at her tenacity. If there was ever a time to just curl up and cry, this would be it, surely. Sometimes she can't even deal with her period and here Xue Yang is, standing up after getting her damn hand sliced off.

(The disembodied hand soars through the air, does a couple of somersaults and flops somewhere into the dirt in between them.)

She's emitting high pitched noises with every exhale, eerie and creepy and painfilled like a dying wounded animal. She kicks around on the ground, and Wei Ying can't figure out what she's trying to do until she kicks up a corner of the rug and drops the blood from her own dripping arm across it and Wei Ying feels the power of the array disintegrate.

The wheezy exhales turn into wheezy laughter, which is. Hm. Terrifying, if Wei Ying does say so herself. And then she notices that there's a pattern to the high pitched noises and she can feel the resentful energy moving.

"M'okay," Wei Ying gasps at Lan Zhan. "Get the fi'corsss."

Somehow, Lan Zhan understands what she says; she hauls Wei Ying upright, and streams sword first towards the fierce corpses. Thank fuck for that bottleneck at the cave entrance.

Wei Ying leans pathetically against the rough stone wall, catching her breath. She really misses that golden core.

She clenches her hand, now sticky and smeared with Xue Yang's blood. Even though she's not holding it anymore, she can feel the residual resentful energy emanating off that thing she'd been holding, like the concentration of it had been so intense she couldn't even register what it was until she could catch just the aftertaste of it.

She feels – sick. Nauseous. This, again, is at least familiar.

She licks her lips again, and whistles. It comes out shrill and reedy, and she can feel the resentful energy swirling in the air respond to her. This, too, is familiar.

She looks over at the woman who impersonated her for two years. Who went to the extent of pretending her own true identity has been locked up forever. She doesn't know why, but at the same time, she does.

"You think you could pretend to be me? I created demonic cultivation," says Wei Ying. She kicks the lump into a corner behind her. "Let's see how you do without your little tricks."

Xue Yang's eyes – already blown wide, probably with pain – swivel and stare at her with something close to delight. "I've always wondered how good you were. But however good you were, I'm better now. I learned everything you wrote down years ago, and then some."

Wei Ying whistles, and she feels the confusion from the raised dead as she and Xue Yang jostle for control.

But Wei Ying can do more than that. She can wrestle for control of the fierce corpses and also draw the resentful energy in the air, from the mounds, seeped into the ground, to her like thick ropes of energy.

Xue Yang does the same.

Wei Ying gathers the energy to her in such a rush that the edges of her vision go blurry and she can feel her eyes go bloodshot. It fills her like she's a bottomless well that she's been draining dry for the last twenty months and now she's finally filling up again.

She takes the resentful energy that Xue Yang is trying to draw in, peeling it away from her in gobs like the peel of an overripe mandarin stuck to the flesh.

Xue Yang screams, and lashes out with her resentful energy, a sudden torrent of ghosts bursting through the stone to hurl themselves screaming at Wei Ying.

Wei Ying staggers to dodge their outstretched claws, slicing through them with the sharpened edges of resentful energy. Eliminate.

She collapses to one knee, gasping. That's not the way it's supposed to be. Resentful energy doesn't do this to her. She wears it like a second skin, but it's trying to wear her. There's something wrong – and from the looks of it, Xue Yang knows what it is.

Clarity. She needs clarity. She pulls out a talisman just in time as Xue Yang descends upon her, sending her back before she can let loose a handful of powder into Wei Ying's eyes. She covers her face with the sleeve of her robe to avoid breathing any of it in, and it's warm against Wei Ying's cheek.

Warm. Why's it warm?

Wei Ying curses as she realises her own mistake. She'd known that there was some connection between the goods being sold on behalf of Yiling Wei sect in the town, and she'd suspected that there was something sinister behind it. She just hadn't put the two together. She fights her way out of the robes and the moment they drop to the ground in a heavy heap, it's like she breaks through the water to breathe the air on the surface.

There are little glowing imprints of seals – seals she hadn't had the time to explore properly – on her bare skin, where the lining of the robes touched her. She growls, more at herself than anything else, and kicks the cursed robes away from her.

Xue Yang is good. Almost as good as Wei Ying. She cradles her arm with the bleeding stump to her chest as her eyes turn pink, also bloodshot over, but Wei Ying still can feel her the other side of the room like a vortex. And Lan Zhan is still fighting the fierce corpses. Wei Ying stopped whistling when she scrabbled to get the robes off of her, which means that Xue Yang is still exerting some level of control over them.

Enough.

Wei Ying flings open her bare arms, and feels all the tiny hairs on her skin rise like chicken skin as she claws at the resentful energy and wraps it around herself like a heavy fur coat until it sinks into her skin. She feels warm; she feels full; she feels alive.

She can feel it pulling at her from within. She siphons resentful energy from the fierce corpses, so many of them that it's like an unlimited battery supply. She screams – it's not a tune, but resentful energy doesn't need a melody to be carried through musical cultivation. It's the intent that matters.

She remembers this now. She remembers doing this before, taking in so much resentful energy that her husk of a human shell was barely relevant – she was Wei Wuxian, she was the founder of demonic cultivation, and she was resentful energy itself.

And Xue Yang tries to copy her, to regain the resentful energy that Wei Ying snatches from her, but as fucking unhinged as she is, she's human. She hasn't done this before. Wei Ying can see when the nausea hits her, the double vision, the stars and blindness, the nosebleeds, the bleeding out of the ears, the moment when resentful energy calls to her more than she calls to it. Wei Ying remembers all of this.

She scoops up the thing, the lump of stone, whatever the fuck it is, with the edge of her Yiling Wei robe, and throws it at Xue Yang. Suppress.

Even in her descent, Xue Yang catches it. Wei Ying can feel her hand spasming, twitching from the aftershock of just touching it even through the fabric of the robe.

Xue Yang is exposed to the fullness of it; it tips her over the edge, the inherent resentful energy concentrated in it overwhelming her when she's already at a critical point. Where Wei Ying pulled it into herself, her skin stretching at the seams like an overstuffed bag, Xue Yang starts to unravel. She screams – and there is no demonic cultivation. It's just a scream. She clutches at her head.

Back then, this was the point where vicious ghosts had appeared to Wei Ying, calling for vengeance from her and rending at her clothes and flesh with their hands. She notes with some dispassion that there are no real ghosts around Xue Yang. It must have been a hallucination.

Wei Ying limps forward slowly. She'd had such naïve hopes at the beginning of this. That she'd talk to whoever was impersonating her, that it was a gimmick, or a mistake, or like. Fraud. Something mundane. She could sob with how wrong she was. She has the dagger that Lan Zhan gave her, still.

Xue Yang stares in front of her as she screams, but she's not seeing things in the real world anymore. Her eyes don't track Wei Ying as she limps all the way around her.

Wei Ying slits her throat.

The weight of Xue Yang's body as it falls makes Wei Ying stagger – she catches it and then lets it slip straight out of her arms and crumple into a heap on the floor, her skull cracking sharply against the stone floor. The stone thing rolls to the ground with a dull thud.

It's over. Wei Ying closes her eyes, and exhales. No, it's not over. She looks at the cave entrance, where she can barely see Lan Zhan anymore. There are piles of hacked off limbs, disembodied heads, torsos with the ribs cracked apart. So many corpses Wei Ying can't even count them all.

She wipes her hand of blood on Xue Yang's robes, and then concentrates. She lifts the resentful energy from the corpses, absorbing it into herself as each of them drop to the ground like puppets with their strings cut, which gives Lan Zhan enough time to step back and play Rest. Oh, yeah. That's... that's a much better method. Liberate.

Well, demonic cultivation was always about doing things the unorthodox way around.

Wei Ying sways. In the space between one blink and the next – or perhaps it was longer – Lan Zhan has caught her. She looks up into Lan Zhan's face. She's beautiful, especially when there are two of them. Oh, three.

She laughs, suddenly harsh. She knows what comes next. "It's too late, Lan Zhan. I went too far."

The laugh morphs into a cough as she discovers her throat is irritated, probably from all that screaming earlier. She leans over to one side, and spits up blood. Yeah, that's probably not a good sign. "I don't think meditation is gonna save this one."

Lan Zhan's three blurry faces solidify into one, and for a moment, Wei Ying can see the naked fear and worry on her face. That's – that nice. And then her vision fades, and Wei Ying's consciousness takes a dip for a moment as well, and then the next time she opens her eyes, she's – sitting? Maybe.

Lan Zhan's hands are hot on her back, propping her up but also channeling qi into her, burning the resentful energy away. Wei Ying said it earlier already – it's too late. It's like lighting a match and taking it underwater.

"Lan Zhan, don't – don't waste your energy. I don't." Every part of her body hurts, but somehow that fades in comparison to the pain in her heart as she tells Lan Zhan: "I don't have a golden core."

"I know," says Lan Zhan quietly, fiercely. "You told me."

She did?

"The first night. You'll remember it. At some point."

Wei Ying coughs again, and this time it's a mask for crying. "You're so stubborn."

"So are you. Must you be so adamant to die?"

"Are you angry at me," snuffles Wei Ying, and oh this is the worst. She's about to descend into madness hallucinations at any time and lose all her memories and/or die, and Lan Zhan is trying to save her and all Wei Ying can do is cry.

"No."

It sounds angry.

"I need you to concentrate on not dying," continues Lan Zhan.

Oh. Oh, yeah. Wei Ying has kind of given up. It seems unfair that Lan Zhan is the only one trying to save her. She can feel the resentful energy tickling at the edges of her mind, and she falls into the familiar rhythm of breathing. She raises her hands, extends, presses them down. Expels resentful energy out of her palms. She can do it.

She can't do it.

It's like using a thimble to empty a sinking ship. She took on the resentful energy of hundreds of corpses in a matter of minutes. "Fas'er," she slurs as her muscles stop working the way she wants them to. Think. Think.

"More... meridians. Stronger." Treacherous incoherence starts to seep through her, not just her words but her mind. The meridians in the hands are one of the easiest to transfer spiritual energy – resentful or not – through, but that doesn't mean they're the only ones. There's more, she knows there's more, but she can't fight through the resentful energy to think of it.

She droops – Lan Zhan has let go of her, but it's only so that she can pick Wei Ying up and throw her onto the bed. The bed? Fuck, Wei Ying doesn't even remember moving to the other room. Lan Zhan climbs on on top of her and her eyes are determined, so determined. Wei Ying feels bad for giving up on herself when Lan Zhan looks like this.

And then Lan Zhan crushes her mouth to Wei Ying's. Wei Ying gasps into the kiss, hot and fierce, and she feels the qi channelling from Lan Zhan through her mouth and her hands, flat on the side of Wei Ying's ribs; she can feel Lan Zhan taking the resentful energy out of her and into herself. She moans, as Lan Zhan's slides her tongue against Wei Ying's lower lip, biting it hard enough that it feels like a lance of lightning through her body.

She can barely breathe: the resentful energy is threatening to crush her, or maybe it's Lan Zhan's weight solidly against her chest.

When Lan Zhan pulls up for air, it's for one frantic breath before dipping back down again. It's better, faster than before, but it's not enough. Lan Zhan kisses her until Wei Ying's lips are raw and her jaw is aching. Until Lan Zhan looks at her with hooded eyes, and Wei Ying realises with a sudden clarity that even the distinguished and accomplished Lan Wangji is not immune to the effects of resentful energy. She can burn it off with her golden core at a speed that Wei Ying cannot, but there is something a little sharper around the edges of Lan Zhan at the moment.

Tendrils of resentful energy cling to Lan Zhan's body and her body jerks as it fills her. She exhales, a long hiss.

"More," Wei Ying whispers. There's got to be a way to do it even quicker.

Lan Zhan's hand suddenly presses down on Wei Ying's stomach. No, not her stomach. Her – liver. Oh, yes! The liver is where anger – resentfulness – is stored. The meridian that connects it to the rest of the body runs narrowly up the middle of her body. It's the strongest, most direct connection to resentful energy.

"Do you trust me?" she asks with a voice like shards of glass, and Wei Ying shivers.

"Yes."

She kneels up and curls her fingers into the waistband of Wei Ying's trousers and pauses for just a heartbeat before yanking them off, trousers and underwear. Wei Ying feels a jerk of heat low in her stomach that accompanies the physical jerk of her hips.

She swallows. She knows what Lan Zhan is going to do.

The liver meridian starts at the forehead, going down the neck into the torso, through the gallbladder and liver, and then down – between the hips. 

Lan Zhan grabs her by the hips and drags her down, folding her up off the bed until Wei Ying's legs drape over her shoulders, and lowers her mouth to Wei Ying's clit. Wei Ying's eyes flutter closed as she feels Lan Zhan suck her clit into her mouth and run her tongue over it.

The tight ball of something in her stomach unfurls into heat. The resentful energy tickles her as it tries to pull her into a cycle of anger and she hears the rhythmic, wet sound of Lan Zhan lapping it up out of her. Lan Zhan breaks for air and then curls her tongue from the bottom of Wei Ying's pussy all the way up to latch back onto her clit again, hands on the back of Wei Ying's thighs pressing her legs apart wide enough that she can feel the burn in her thigh muscles. Lan Zhan drags her teeth every so slightly over Wei Ying's clit and Wei Ying screams, hips bucking as Lan Zhan leans her weight forward and keeps her pinned to the bed.

It's like a dam inside of her breaks, one that Wei Ying didn't even know was there. There's resentful energy swirling in the air, tickling the edge of her skin until it almost feels like a caress on the sensitive part of her thighs.

The edge of a hallucination appears as the resentful energy doesn't want to relinquish its grip on her and then Lan Zhan slips the tip of her finger into Wei Ying and it's so unexpected that the hallucination disappears. She moans as Lan Zhan teases her with just the first knuckle of her finger, in and out, the qi on her fingertips a heat that almost burns inside Wei Ying. She smears Wei Ying's own wetness across the hardened nub of Wei Ying's clit and gets her mouth on it again.

Wei Ying encourages her down, sinking her hands into the heavy base of Lan Zhan's braid and pushing her face into Wei Ying's cunt. Lan Zhan retaliates by sinking two fingers into Wei Ying and twisting, angling her fingers up in time to her mouth. Wei Ying wails.

She's tight but wet, and the orgasm catches her like a swimmer in a wave, her entire body tensing in a single moment. She can feel the resentful energy crackling off the surface off her skin, Lan Zhan's qi burning it up as Lan Zhan fucks her through it.

"Enough, Lan Zhan, enough!" She squirms enough that Lan Zhan has to pull up, pressing her legs closed desperately. Lan Zhan hooks her arm around her knees to lock them together and throws her over so that her ass faces up, her other arm pressing into the arch of Wei Ying's back as she gets her mouth on Wei Ying's pussy and eats her out, tongue stroking against the swollen lips of her labia before dipping into her. She says something, but it's muffled against Wei Ying's skin and the vibrations of the sound against her sensitive skin making her clench her hands into the sheets.

Afforded the clarity of mind, somehow this is even more embarrassing than Lan Zhan having to suck her clit to burn out resentful energy. She wriggles her upper body, the half of her that Lan Zhan hasn't pinned down, and rolls her head so that she can see the side of Lan Zhan's face before it dips down below her ass.

She can feel how wet she is, dripping down to smear into the crease of her thighs. She can feel how tight she is, her pussy clenching against Lan Zhan every time she presses her tongue in. She came, but she's still wound up; she's sensitive, and this is simultaneously too much and not enough.

"Lan Zhan," she whispers helplessly.

Lan Zhan pulls up to look at her, the lower half of her face shiny and wet. She wipes it perfunctorily with the back of her hand, and it's so fucking hot that Wei Ying has to press her burning red cheek into the mattress.

With a sudden movement, Lan Zhan brings her palm down, open and hard on Wei Ying's ass cheek. She cries out, entire body jerking in surprise, a bolt of arousal squeezing her stomach – she feels her pussy clench and a bead of wetness slips from her and splatters halfway down her thigh.

"So wet," murmurs Lan Zhan, plunging two fingers into her hole with no notice. "So tight."

Wei Ying yanks the fitted sheet free with a high pitched cry as Lan Zhan's fingers stretch her out. She does get tight after she comes, she knows, but she's never kept going after it. Lan Zhan uses her thumb to rub against Wei Ying's clit, and it feels like electricity, just on that edge of too much pain. She bucks and tries to crawl away, but her legs aren't listening to her.

Lan Zhan grabs her, flips her over with a hand cradled under her shoulder. "Wei Ying. Not yet. Not yet. There's still too much resentful energy. For your own good."

She reaches up behind her head, and undoes her headband. Wei Ying stares up at her, too sex stupid to understand what she's doing until she winds it around Wei Ying's wrists and pulls them up above her head to tie to the bed. Wei Ying tugs when she realises she's bound, but the knots are true and the wrapping neatly done.

Lan Zhan kisses her, hard enough to bruise, and Wei Ying moans as ropes of resentful energy stream out of her lungs and up her throat, so thick and painful that it feels like something physical is being dragged up from inside her. Lan Zhan eats it out of her and burns it away, leaving Wei Ying gasping.

She settles Wei Ying's hips square so she can press her legs apart again, fingertips so tight against Wei Ying's thigh that she can feel the tips leave bruises against her skin, and gets her mouth over Wei Ying's clit again.

Her pussy feels empty without Lan Zhan's fingers.

"You said enough," says Lan Zhan when Wei Ying begs her to put them back in, and Wei Ying tries to kick futilely, mad and too horny to function. She can feel her pussy clenching and unclenching and dripping wetness down her ass crack, desperate for something inside her as Lan Zhan focusses on her clit.

The second orgasm comes quicker, her clit still too sensitive as Lan Zhan drags her teeth over it, scraping her to the edge of that pain like little flashes of lightning that build up. There's a noise next to her head, and she realises belatedly that it's her, making aborted little screams in time to her breathing.

The third orgasm catches her by surprise, fast on the heels of the second as Wei Ying tries give her abused clit some relief as she thrashes on the bed and Lan Zhan bites down on her, hard, and rubs over it with the qi-infused pad of her thumb.

Wei Ying blacks out.

When she comes back to herself, all of her limbs feel heavy with sleep. Her hips ache, in the way they do after a good amount of exercise, and she's tucked up on her side. When she tries to stretch out, she realises that Lan Zhan's fingers are inside her, keeping her full, a gentle buzz of qi thrumming through her like a low grade vibrator. She moans luxuriously, rubbing her legs together, and feels Lan Zhan press a kiss to the back of her shoulder.

"This was incredible. I should almost get ripped apart by demonic cultivation more often," she says muzzily. The kissing turns into a warning bite. "Too soon?"

"Too soon."

Wei Ying sighs. She's not sure how long she passed out for, but she feels more well rested than she has in months and the resentful energy inside her is down to a few wispy flickers. She leans back, so she can look at Lan Zhan, who helpfully rests her chin on the side of Wei Ying's boob so that she can do exactly that.

"I wanna like, reciprocate. But I feel like a cloud right now."

"No need," says Lan Zhan, and when Wei Ying frowns questioningly, she tips her head to the bottom of the bed, where her pair of grey sweats are neatly folded, and Wei Ying can see the side of a large wet patch.

"Huh. Wow. Next time?" she asks hopefully.

"Yes," says Lan Zhan amenably, and that's that.

They sort of stare at each other dopily for a while. Wei Ying can't think of the words to express what she wants to say, between the thanks and the swell of affection and the, well, horniness, then realises that she doesn't have to try. She can just stare at Lan Zhan and smile, and Lan Zhan will look back at her and also smile, and it's the most wonderful feeling in the world.

They have to get cleaned up at some point. There's a compact en-suite in the back of the cave, which Wei Ying raises an eyebrow at when they open the door to it. "Xue Yang bothered to redo my whole bathroom so that there's indoor plumbing and wiring inside a cave, but she couldn't be bothered to paint the walls?"

"Modern comforts first," says Lan Zhan, as she helps steer Wei Ying into the shower. Wei Ying's legs still aren't working completely.

They end up kissing in the shower, Wei Ying eager for her first opportunity to touch Lan Zhan. Her belly is smooth with dips that hint of a four pack. Her shoulders are broad and muscled, and her thighs are the size of both Wei Ying's. She lets Lan Zhan crowd her against a wall as she slides her hands up and down her skin, feeling the bunch of muscles in her back as Lan Zhan looms over her. She loves it, she realises, the feeling of being small and protected by Lan Zhan. She likes it when Lan Zhan cups her face, angling her so that Lan Zhan can kiss her as she likes. She likes the solidity of Lan Zhan's arm around her waist, pulling her towards Lan Zhan. She parts her legs and slides one of Lan Zhan's legs between hers, rocking against it lightly.

"You're like a puppy marking its territory," remarks Lan Zhan with amusement, and Wei Ying huffs.

"You're the one doing the marking," she says, and tilts her hips so that Lan Zhan can see the still red handprint glowing against her ass.

Lan Zhan hums, and in a moment smacks her free hand across Wei Ying's ass to give her a matching print on the other cheek.

Wei Ying squawks, and lets Lan Zhan bully her.

"Did you like that?"

"No," says Wei Ying mulishly, lowering her face and batting her wet eyelashes at Lan Zhan. She's doing that thing, she realises with a thrill. That thing that Lan Zhan had noticed earlier, where she'd flirted coquettishly to get her way.

"I think you're a liar," says Lan Zhan, and bites her on the lower lip, hard enough that it's going to swell, and slides her hand down until she can slide one finger inside Wei Ying. It slides in easy, no friction at all. "See? You're so wet. Your body can't lie to me."

Wei Ying pouts, and rubs her tits against Lan Zhan's chest. Lan Zhan looks back at her, unimpressed. (But horny. Wei Ying is quickly learning what that looks like.) She slides her one finger in and out of Wei Ying and damn it, she's right. Wei Ying is wet and open enough that it barely feels like anything, just the barest of pressure.

She squirms. "More, Lan Zhan."

Lan Zhan ignores her as Wei Ying beats her tiny fists against Lan Zhan's shoulders ineffectually. (Another unimpressed look which, okay, this one is justified because Wei Ying is not even trying.) She just keeps working her one finger in and out.

"C'mon, Lan Zhan." Wei Ying gets more vocal. "I need more. Fuck me. Lan Zhan, please, please."

The water is hot against her side, and she can just tell her face is getting red and splotchy and the way that Lan Zhan is just observing her with hooded eyes is driving her wild, and the wetter she is, the more that one finger gently stroking in and out is even less enough.

"Lan Zhan. Please, please, I need more. I could – I could take –" She stutters, and chokes it out: "–your whole fist."

Lan Zhan stills. Wei Ying looks at her with wide eyes. She swallows.

Lan Zhan leans forward, and very carefully brushes a kiss across her cheekbone. "Not today," she breathes, and Wei Ying hears herself make the most pathetic little gurgle. But Lan Zhan is gonna remember that, she knows, and spring it on her when she's least expecting it. The anticipation is killing her already.

Instead, Lan Zhan pulls out and quickly squeezes her clit between thumb and forefinger, hard. Wei Ying yowls. Lan Zhan does it again, and bites her on the earlobe to boot. Wei Ying clings to Lan Zhan's shoulders as Lan Zhan tortures her with hard kisses across her neck and lips and pinches across her clit and the already swollen folds around her pussy, forcing her orgasm out of her until Wei Ying's hips stutter so much that Lan Zhan can't get at her. It's only Lan Zhan's arm around her waist that is keeping her upright.

"Nrrrgh," says Wei Ying eloquently, slumping over onto Lan Zhan's chest and rubbing her cheek against the best of both worlds bit of her chest where Lan Zhan's boob meets pec. Lan Zhan peels wet hair off her face and pats her gently, like she's not the one responsible for Wei Ying's general state of uselessness. She's pretty sure she's clawed up Lan Zhan's shoulders and biceps up pretty badly, which serves her right for being so mind-blowingly good at sex.

They stay there until the water runs cold – Wei Ying because world hard and cold, Hanguang-jun tiddy soft and warm; Lan Zhan because she seems content to hold Wei Ying for as long as she can – and they steal Xue Yang's horrendously fluffy towels and scrub themselves down. She sure did value her material comforts.

They sit on the edge of the very much ruined bed, which has giant wet patches down the middle but also the occasional smear of blood, and Wei Ying sighs. "I wanted to talk to her," she admits. Lan Zhan bullies her – an ongoing theme here, Wei Ying can see – into putting on some of Lan Zhan's spare clothes. She huddles up in the soft hoodie and sweatshirt combo.

"Of course you did," says Lan Zhan. "She impersonated you for two years."

"I mean. Yeah. But also, she did so much with demonic cultivation. She took all of the stuff I'd figured out, and then she built on it. She must have been so smart, you know? And she figured out how to harness resentful energy from other people, and yeah she was using it to kill people and build a fierce corpse army which, hmm, is pretty bad and sucks to be me to have to deal with now, but. I don't know."

"You felt a kinship with her."

"Yeah. And it was kind of nice that people were talking about me and demonic cultivation like it wasn't the worst thing in the world. And now, after all this... they probably will again. And I can't blame them." Even starting to think about is going to give her a headache; she's carefully skirting around it all in her head at the moment, but it's inevitable. There's the corpse clean-up, and burial rites, and figuring out who they are and returning them to their families, and dealing with the outer disciples who live further down the mountain, and all the trade deals with people peddling her goods, and then explaining all of this to the various cultivation sects who probably won't even believe her... The list only goes on.

Lan Zhan hums. Her hand on Wei Ying's arm, stroking up and down, is very soothing actually. "We don't have to do it all at once. People outside of this room don't even know that anything is wrong."

Wei Ying turns to stare up at her perfect side profile. Wait, she's getting distracted. "Are you saying we... don't let people know?"

"Yet."

"So what, I just slide into the empty position and start running a cult?"

Lan Zhan inclines her head. "Most of the people we met... seemed like good people. Good disciples, trying hard."

They did. Lan Jingyi and Ouyang Zizhen were just enthusiastic teenagers.

"And that gives us time to find some answers ourselves first," says Lan Zhan. And then, after a moment's consideration: "I would consider putting a pause on the recruitment drive though."

Wei Ying nods back. "Yeah, the last thing we need right now is more new members before we figure this out." She's already talking like she's gonna stay and take it on. And she is, she guesses. She could run a sect, legitimately, right? They can take off the weird MLM aspects and the maze that shoots people out the back end of the mountain like poop. She's got a reception and everything. She's warming up to it the more she thinks about it.

She adds, "There's got to be more to Xue Yang's plans. Where did she get all the money to fund all of this? How did she create business deals if she's never been seen in public? Who's in that cultivation prison if it's not her? And what was she even planning to do with an army of fierce corpses? There're so many questions. Reason #2 I wanted to talk to her, I guess."

"We could ask her, if you would like."

Wei Ying stares some more, as Lan Zhan finds her satchel – flung unceremoniously at the bottom of the bed somewhere between Wei Ying's body trying to rend itself apart and her third orgasm presumably – and pulls out her guqin. "Oh shit."

That's right. Xue Yang was murdered. Most murdered people hang around for at least a little while, with the potential to turn into a vengeful ghost, and her body is still lying on the ground outside without no burial rites yet.

"Do you think she watched us fuck?" asks Wei Ying, which is a terrible attempt at a joke.

"I can ask," says Lan Zhan, which is an infinitely better one. Damn, Wei Ying is really dating up here.

Lan Zhan settles on the floor, Wei Ying curled up against her back. She lucked out, she knows. Lan Zhan one of a few cultivators skilled enough to be able to not only command truthful answers from a spirit, but also command it to answer at all. With almost anyone else, the spirit could choose to just not answer.

Lan Zhan sets her phone on the side to record, picks her way through staccato questions and listens carefully to the answers, pausing to interpret qin language for Wei Ying. They've picked the questions they think are the most important, and the easiest to answer with the limited empathy-based vocabulary of the qin language.

"She has answered. She says that she impersonated you because it was fun. And people hated you already." That's a strong start. Lan Zhan looks angry on Wei Ying's behalf.

"The corpses are all random people who came up the mountain. No sect cultivators, she didn't want the attention a missing sect member would bring. The person in her place in the prison is – Song Lan." Lan Zhan falters for a moment here; the qin language from the spirit is sharp and discordant on the guqin. Wei Ying will have to ask her later who Song Lan is. Lan Zhan clears her throat. "And she has been working with Jin Guangyao."

Wow. There's a lot here. They're definitely going to need some time to unpick all of this.

One of the strings on the guqin snaps, as if a certain someone tried to twang it like a rubber band, and Wei Ying immediately raises her flute to her lips, commanding Xue Yang away permanently just as ghostly hands start to manifest and reach towards them. Wei Ying plays until she is swept away by an invisible wind. Xue Yang might have been her match when alive, but now she is just one among the many dead that Wei Ying can control.

"And I thought I was done with the cultivation world," sighs Wei Ying, staring at the patch of wall Xue Yang's ghost disappears through. "I don't even know where to start. I'm gonna need 3-5 business days to even process everything."

Lan Zhan double-checks her phone recording and nods to herself, satisfied. She's so smart. Having the evidence, the post-death confession from Xue Yang, will go a long way towards explaining things. "Then take 3-5 days to process everything."

Wei Ying blinks at her. Lan Zhan blinks back, as if it's the most obvious answer in the world. And maybe it is. She puts up a cursory protest: "But the corpses–"

"Are already dead. We can take pictures of them as we cleanse them and decide what to do afterwards."

Wei Ying nods, slowly. It's hard getting her head around this. She's so used to everything needing to be completed yesterday that it's sort of blowing her mind a bit, but Lan Zhan is right. "Yeah. Okay. Are you – gonna–"

She doesn't know how to ask if Lan Zhan is going to stick around. She's talking like she is going to be here, but Wei Ying doesn't want to assume. This is a lot of mess for Lan Zhan to be involved in.

"If you would have me. The meditation helps with the demonic cultivation, but the dual cultivation is safer and faster. And–" This time it's Lan Zhan's turn to pause. Wei Ying feels the same. Feelings so immense she doesn't even know how to put it into words.

"You promised me hand-holding," she says hoarsely.

"I heard there's a vacancy for first disciple of the Yiling Wei sect," says Lan Zhan. She hasn't retied her Gusu Lan headband after their shower. "The last one being a mass murderer."

Wei Ying's mouth works open and closed. "Really?" she says eventually, her voice betraying herself with how small it is.

Lan Zhan holds her hands out. Wei Ying takes them. Even swings them a bit. She's smiling a lot, and also possibly crying. She's not really sure when the crying bit started. Her emotions are like a rollercoaster at the moment.

"They told me Wei Wuxian, the founder of demonic cultivation herself, would teach me cultivation if I become an inner disciple," says Lan Zhan, and that completely does her in.

She throws herself at Lan Zhan, still sobbing, both arms around her neck and Lan Zhan catches her, as she always has done.