I may or may not put up a profile pic later. Or never.

In the fourth chapter, when Madam Mo was telling off the Lan juniors for not doing enough to save her son, Wei Wuxian tells her off in turn for being unfairly disrespectful to them, one of his points being that the juniors were doing that night hunt for free. And again in the Lotus Pod extra, It was mentioned that Yunmeng Jiang exorcises the households of the area of their water ghouls free of compensation.

Which raises the question… How in Laozi’s eight trigram crucible are these clans making their income???

I get the sense that Yu Ziyuan’s beef with the infidelity rumors is that she can’t stand the thought that she was seen as second pickings. That the only reason Jiang Fengmian married her at all was because his first choice was no longer an option when she married someone else, so he just settled. And that the rumors exist at all means that everyone else believes she was only ever a second option, if even that. Yu Ziyuan ire with Jiang Fengmian isn’t that she thinks he’s disloyal, but that she believes that he thinks she wasn’t worth considering as a first option (or more likely, that he didn’t consider her a option at all, given that he was opposed to the marriage with her from the get-go, but was pressured into it by both the Yu Clan and the previous Jiang head). So I don’t think Yu Ziyuan believes that Wei Wuxian is Jiang Fengmian’s bastard son

Lives rent-free in my head and pops up in my mind every couple months, it really got me thinking how Jin Ling is the ideal heir Jin Guangyao could have, given his whole circumstances.

So Jin Guangyao needs an heir, because we know there are other clan members who would love to seize the position of clan head. We know this because the epilogues outright said that Jiang Cheng had to barge into the Jinlingtai, whip crackling, to solidify Jin Ling’s position and protect him from those clan members. Without the legitimately-blooded Jin Ling, born to the equally legitimate Jin Zixuan, another clan member could waltz up going, ”I can be clan leader. Look at me! I’m hale, hearty, and have legitimate heirs of my own. And unlike that other guy, I’m not a bastard born to a prostitute.”

Obviously Jin Guangyao can’t be having heirs of his own, because of… All That. Taking a concubine would be tricky, because whatever excuse he gave to Qin Su for Never Laying With Her Again, At All, Ever, would no doubt be hard to explain away. Why is he okay with sleeping with his concubine, but never his legal wife? Besides, unlike his father, it’s safe to say that Jin Guangyao doesn’t want to cause Qin Su unnecessary pain (or at least, what he views to be unnecessary pain). Having Jin Ling as his heir sidesteps that issue and more.

He could’ve given Qin Su the excuse of something along the lines of how he doesn’t want to jeopardize Jin Ling’s legitimacy with a son of his own. Not only does Jin Ling’s direct lineage bypass the issue of Jin Guangyao’s own socially shaky bloodline, it also has the bonus of good PR, making him look more noble than he really is, because “Look at how unselfish he is! He’s only looking out for the rightful heir and will pass the mantle back to the main family line when the time comes.”

And best of all, Jin Ling’s parents are dead. If Jin Guangyao tried to adopt from a branch family, he’d no doubt have to contend with the parents that child was born to trying to exert their own pressure and influences. However, once Madam Jin was dead, Jin Ling no longer had any other authority figures Jin Guangyao would have to compete with for influence. (No, Jiang Cheng doesn’t count, because before Jin Ling became Clan Leader, he had minimal, if not zero, say on how the Jin Clan was run.)

Lan Xichen tried to mediate between Jin Guangyao and Nie Mingjue, despite the fact that their core values are diametrically opposed, and thus, irreconcilable, and they both would’ve been better off going their separate ways. Instead, murder happens.

Qingheng-jun should have taken revenge on his teacher’s behalf and killed the Not-Yet-Madam Lan (or at bare minimum, stood aside to let others take revenge), but he couldn’t bring himself to see the woman he fell in love with dead, but to let her literally get away with murder would be betraying his clan and his deceased teacher. So he ends up taking this halfway measure, where he partially punishes her for murder by locking her up, but still allowing her to live, and then punishing himself for not following through on enacting vengeance and preventing anyone else from doing so either (as well as the general scandal of wedding his teacher’s killer).

Not because it gave a bit more details on the relationship between Madam Lan and Qingheng-jun, though it is a neat detail, but it gave some rather crucial context on how the fuck the Lan brothers got conceived at all, because that was a bit of a question mark in the original text.

How did they come together to make, not one, but two kids when they were both locked away in separate houses? Presumably Qingheng-jun would’ve had to visit her, but while we don’t have a lot on the guy’s character, it did seem a little weird that he would’ve done so when he kept himself locked up, whether out of guilt or penance, even years after the woman had died. Did the family have to convince him to visit so they could make an heir to the family line? Did they snag some kids from a branch family to pass off as children of the main family line? Did Qingheng-jun visit her in a dream and impregnate her there? Did they fucking grow the twin jades in a radish patch???

"I imagine when Wen Ning finally settles and is ready to move on, the same thing [that happened to the Wen Remnants' bloody corpses] will happen to him, and he'll go to wherever spirits go to after liberation."

so, where do (resentful) spirits go after liberation? is their afterlife different from that of a living person who died normally?

i'm asking because "Wei Wuxian's cultivation method breaks the cycle of reincarnation (either for every soul he summons or just Wen Ning)" is often brought up in fandom discussions; but, to me, neither the narrative nor any of the characters in-universe treat it as an appropriately big of a deal. i'd be grateful if you could share your thoughts on that!

Ok, important to note here, I’ve only ever read the novel. So I can’t speak for any headcanons or metas spawned from The Untamed or donghua, but well, the reason I said “to wherever spirits go to after liberation," is because, within the MDZS canon, we don’t actually know where souls go after passing on/being liberated; we only see the result of spirits lingering in the mortal realm. The one person who could potentially give a firsthand account of what the afterlife is like has never once mentioned where the hell he was during his 13 year stint as a ghost; we don’t have any kind of confirmation (and tbh, WWX might not have even made it to the afterlife and was lingering somewhere on Earth. We the audience haven’t the faintest clue where he went after he died.). Presumably, the dead go through the Chinese afterlife in this setting, but many cultures rarely agree on what happens to a person after they die, and China is hardly different in that respect.

In the belief of reincarnation, it’s thought that the soul goes through Diyu, an afterlife where souls would work off the bad karma they accumulated through life through trial and punishment until they can knock back a bit of Meng Po’s five-flavored soup and be reincarnated. It’s an afterlife that was inspired by Naraka from Buddhism when the religion came to the country via the Silk Road, but as that statement implies, there were other beliefs of what happens to the soul after death before Buddhism became mainstream. That is where ancestral veneration and soul dualism comes into play, which itself is complicated and messy.

There are a few different models of what the multiple souls look like and what they’re called, and of how many parts of the soul there are, whether there’s 2, maybe 3, possibly 10. For the sake of not making this post even longer than it will be, I’m mostly gonna focus on the terms of hún (魂) and pò (魄) as they’re probably more relevant to discussing the novel. The hún as a component of the soul is something like the psyche, or ego, the identity of the person. This is the part of the soul that’s associated with yáng (陽) and with shén (神). The pò is the yīn (陰) of the soul and is something like the soul of the body. It’s associated with the grave and with guǐ (鬼).

Supposedly, the hún and pò separate upon death, and the hún either ascends to the heavens or resides in the ancestral tablet (which it is depends on the belief) to be worshipped as a shén, a divine being or a god. Meanwhile, the pò resides with the body to eventually return to the earth (whatever that means for it), but if there are lingering regrets, it becomes a guǐ. Though, there are some studies that this was more of a scholastic theory than actual religious belief, as there are steles that mark the resting place of the húnpò (魂魄) as one soul with no distinction between hún and pò, while the shén resides in the family shrine. In this case, the names of the two soul parts are húnpò and shén, but the principle is largely the same, just with different terminology. One part of the soul remains with the body, while the other part becomes a spirit to be venerated.

As you can imagine, there was a bit of contention between ancestral worship and reincarnation, because if the spirit of your ancestors have reincarnated, how can they sticking around in the ancestral shrine to be worshipped? Well, the answer to that is that Buddhism did what religion and culture does best, and that is subsume other religions and cultures and mutate into fifty hundred different branches of practice.

So in some beliefs of Buddhism, the ancestors are still venerated as they go through the process of preparing to be reborn, and there are other beliefs that take advantage of the dual soul theory and only a part of the soul gets reborn. I think one of the many examples is where the pò remains with the body, the hún would get reincarnated, and the shén is its own thing that becomes the deified spirit to be honored.

As for what belief system is in the novel, the existence of a Guanyin temple means that Buddhism has already been firmly established in this setting, and with it, the belief in reincarnation. Though, and if a native speaker wants to weigh in, please do, but from what I understand, in the single-soul model, the word “soul” that’s typically used is 靈魂 (línghún). However, the Chinese text of the novel uses 魂魄 (húnpò) as the word for soul. (Though, the word líng hún can also be used in the dual-soul model as línghún and shén, but if I’m not mistaken, the term húnpó seems pretty exclusively for the dual soul theory). Between the terminology used and the scene of Wei Wuxian asking Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan for approval and help locking Lan Wangji down in ancestral hall, and how he moments later had a bit of a freakout over fighting Jiang Cheng in front of his parents shows that they believe the spirits of the ancestors dwell in the tablets of the ancestral hall.

(Interestingly, the Soul-Soothing Ceremony in Chinese is 安魂禮 ān hún lǐ. Read into that what you will.)

If MDZS works under multiple soul rules, it means that reincarnation was never in the cards for the Wen Ning we know in the present, guidao or no, because that Wen Ning is the part of the soul that stays with the body to eventually return to the earth (and theoretically there’s some other Wen Ning spirit doing ancestral spirit-y things).

Oh yeah, by the way, all of my previous rambling is entirely moot. Unless I’m gravely misremembering something, the first time I ever heard anything about Wei Wuxian’s cultivation “breaking the cycle of reincarnation,” is in fandom spaces. I don’t remember anything like that being stated in the book.

(Which is why I have to stress that I only know novel canon. For all I know, in The Untamed or the donghua, they might explicitly state “Yes, Wei Wuxian’s cultivation cuts off the cycle of reincarnation.” This is why metas in this fandom are complicated. Adaptation or no, The Untamed is functionally an entirely separate story from the novel, so a meta for one just isn’t applicable to the other. Anyways…)

If it is a theory that developed from the novel, my best guess is that it spawned from this passage:

Everyone in the room was stunned. Lan QiRen sprang to his feet, “The essence of exorcising demons and annihilating ghosts is to liberate! You do not study the methods of liberation, and even think about increasing their energy of resentment! You reverse the natural order, and ignore ethics and morality!” (Exiled Rebels scans, Ch. 14)

Specifically this part, “You reverse the natural order,” is what I suspect spawned the headcanon.

“Breaking the cycle of reincarnation” could be considered as “reversing the natural order,” but just stirring up resentful energy instead of pacifying it would also be “reversing the natural order.” (Depending on who you ask, pineapple on pizza is reversing the order of things. “Reversing the natural order” is not exactly specific in its wording to illustrate what that might entail.)

Also, that isn’t even word for word what Lan Qiren says. Rather than, “You reverse the natural order, and ignore ethics and morality!” What he actually says is this: “本末倒置，罔顧人倫!”

“罔顧人倫” just means “disregard ethics,” so nothing to dig into there, but “本末倒置” is a chengyu that more literally translates to “invert root and branch.” It’s typically compared with the saying “putting the cart before the horse,” as the closest English equivalent. It’s a saying to mean that the wrong thing is being prioritized, or to prioritize the consequential or superficial over the fundamentals. In line with the “cart before the horse” comparison, an example of inverting root and branch would be something like renting out a wedding venue before you even propose. However, another potential example that doesn’t quite line up with the aforementioned English idiom is basically what happened with Mother’s day (really most Western holidays) where it was a day meant to show appreciation to your mother, but it’s been commercialized to hell and back with cards and carnations and whatever marketable gifts you should totally buy to show that you truly appreciate your mother. That’s also inverting root and branch, where you lost sight of the original purpose.

When people hear “reverse the natural order,” it isn’t unthinkable that they thought he was talking in the sense of “crimes against nature” and warping the way of how the world works, but what Lan Qiren is actually saying is, “Get your priorities straight.”

In other words, the notion that guidao closes off the cycle of reincarnation to ghosts raised by it is a headcanon, not an actual fact of the novel. So maybe it breaks the cycle of reincarnation, or maybe it doesn’t interfere with the reincarnation process at all, or maybe reincarnation was never on the table to begin with. If it’s either of the latter two, it would explain why Wei Wuxian’s cultivation wasn’t treated as that big of a deal in that regard.