One of my favourite Untamed moments of NHS so far is the soft smile of "ah, home sweet home" while everybody else are clearly "is the Unclean Realm a supervillain lair?" So, a prompt: 5 times the Nie sect's perfectly ordinary sect things got everybody else freaked out, much to NHS' puzzlement.
Even Nie Huaisang would agree with the general consensus that he’s a useless good-for-nothing, which is why he doesn’t understand everyone’s expressions when he helped out in making dinner when they’re all night-hunting. Scorn he’d be used to, but everyone is just goggling as if he’d suddenly summoned lightning.
“Were you not planning on eating the boar or something?” he asked, looking around in confusion.
“You broke down the entire carcass into edible pieces in less than an incense stick’s worth of time,” Jiang Cheng said, voice a bit strangled. “Not just the meat pieces, but the offal, too.”
Nie Huaisang shrugged. “My clan were originally butchers. It’d be weirder if I didn’t know how to do that.”
“Could you do it to a person?” Wei Wuxian asked, eyes alight with mischief.
During the preparations for the Phoenix Mountain hunt, Wei Wuxian gets a brilliant idea and starts writing furiously on pieces of paper in one of the Jin sect’s sitting room.
“Can someone get me some blood? Human, ideally, but pig will do,” he asked at one point, having already scabbed up all his fingers in making draft talismans, and when a bowl was put next to him, he doesn’t think too much about it, only happy that it didn’t seem to ever empty.
After a while, he looked up and noticed that Baxia was propped up on the table next to him, dripping blood into his bowl. Definitely human, too. There was no apparent source for it.
He stared for a while, then went to find Nie Mingjue.
“Did you just stab someone?” he demanded, and Nie Mingjue shook his head. “Then does your sword just regularly drip blood?”
Nie Mingjue shrugged. “I’ve stabbed a lot of people. Why wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know what the problem is,” Nie Huaisang protested. “You wanted me to watch him, he was tired, he asked for a bedtime story!”
“You told him the story about people getting made into meat pies!” Jiang Cheng hollered, holding a wailing Jin Ling in his arms. “Right after he’d had meat pies at dinner!”
“It’s tradition to tell that story over meat pies. Don’t you remember the first time I told you that story? You and Wei Wuxian both turned green.”
Jiang Cheng glared at him and comforted Jin Ling to no avail.
Nie Huaisang tapped the child’s shoulder with his fan. “Stop crying. You know what happens to little boys that lose their temper.”
Jin Ling stopped crying at once, his face pale.
Jiang Cheng looked at him, then back at a smiling Nie Huaisang, then back again. “What did you tell him now?!”
“Today’s not a good day for a visit,” Nie Huaisang said apologetically. “We get ghosts today.”
“You’re a cultivation clan and you allow ghosts?” Jiang Cheng scoffed.
“They come here to be purified. Anyway, they’re really cute ghosts.”
“Mostly animals,” Nie Huaisang said. “Side effect of cultivation by butchering – at first it was mostly livestock, but after a while we started getting all sorts. Drowned kittens, run over puppies, that sort of thing.”
“…there are puppies?” Jiang Cheng said blankly. “Ghost puppies?”
“Mm, yes. Do you want to pet some of them before they go? They’re usually not powerful enough to take more than a very small amount of yang energy, and petting them makes the purification process easier.”
“Right. Show me the way.”
Nie Mingjue was unconscious, having put himself between his sworn brothers and their enemies as they tried desperately to escape the trap they’d been lured into; he’d been stabbed, cut or whipped a number of times before they finally managed to break their way into the cave and escape. Lan Xichen had put him on his back, while Jin Guangyao carried Baxia, his fingers dipping down to caress the blade every few minutes.
“As much as I appreciate dage’s sacrifice, he’s probably the only one who knows his way around this maze,” Jin Guangyao said after they’d been wandering for nearly a shichen without finding anything but more cave, but he settles down a bit after Lan Xichen gives him a look. “I didn’t mean anything by it, erge, you know that. I just meant that it would be nice if we had a guide – ah!”
“Dage’s saber – it bit me!”
Lan Xichen blinked. “…I’m sorry?”
“The beast head on the hilt! It bit me!” Jin Guangyao took another step, yelped again, and retreated.
Lan Xichen frowned thoughtfully and looked ahead, then turned to go down another fork. “Anything now?”
“No, it’s quiet. Why do you – no. Erge. We’re not following the directions given by a saber! Who would do that?”
“It’s not a saber, it’s Baxia,” Lan Xichen said calmly. “It’s fine. Nie Mingjue always did say Baxia had a better sense of direction than he did.”
“I thought he just meant that he didn’t have any,” Jin Guangyao said. “I didn’t think he meant…”
He trailed off, a strange look coming into his eyes.
“Do you think Baxia took it personally, back in the Sun Scorching Palace, when I said – ow!”
“Maybe you should consider apologizing,” Lan Xichen suggested, doing his best to hide a smile.
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