AU where the MDZS characters are cultivators in the modern world. Except the novel exists in-universe and becomes massively popular. Everyone’s read it.
Except for Jiang Cheng.
It’s literally impossible for him to go a full week without overhearing people talking about this damn book, since it feels like everyone around him has read it (especially his brother and their friend, Nie Huisang). So inevitably, Jiang Cheng knows basically everything about this tragic period drama.
Tragedy strikes the Jiang family. Not sure how. Maybe they’re attacked just like in canon. Maybe it’s something out of the blue like a car crash. But the grief almost destroys Wei Wuxian, so he starts dabbling in demonic cultivation, just like the protagonist of his favourite book.
Everything goes wrong. Jiang Cheng finds him mid-ritual, and he knows he’s not going to survive it, but he has no idea how to stop it. He fumbles for a way to save Wei Wuxian and finds his journal, where he has been creating news talisman.
He finds a way to “start over”, a ritual Wei Wuxian was probably considering using before changing his mind, and jumps to activate it. At the last second, he realises the talisman is incomplete: it needs to be channelled through something. It can break the world down, but it needs a roadmap to build it back up again.
Jiang Cheng doesn’t have time to write out the finer details of their world. His brother is dying. So he grabs the closest thing he can find - Wei Wuxian’s favourite book, Untamed - and plunges it into the talisman.
And that’s how modern cultivator!Jiang Cheng ends up reincarnated into canon with the approximate knowledge of what’s going to happen.
He’s horrified to see everyone cast in different roles, especially his brother as the protagonist and Lan Wangji as the love interest. But he also knows how much death and loss is in the original book.
So Jiang Cheng sets out make everything right and save as many people as he can.
