kokomelon

“Then I’ll go to the Lan sect,” he said, and pretended not see the way his mother relaxed a little, relieved that he wasn’t asking too many questions. “I’ve heard they are gentlemen there, righteous but gentle; it will be the best match for my personality, I’m sure.”

A lie, of course. ‘Gentlemen’ were just as likely to come to the brothel as brutes, and they were all the same once they had a cup of wine and a beauty in their arms – Meng Yao tried not to have any illusions.

“Can we afford it?” he asked instead, since that was something he was sure his mother would have thought of, would have expected him to ask. “Gusu is so far away…”

“I have obtained a letter from the local sect recommending you to their sect leader, Lan Qiren,” she said. “He’s the one that teaches the classes – the one that sent out the summons asking the subsidiary sects to look for individuals with raw talent to join his classes and offering them an extra seat for their sects for each nameless orphan they find that lives up to Lan sect standards. Only the Heavens know why he’s doing something like that…I assume they’re trying to expand.”

That seemed like the most reasonable explanation. Meng Yao nodded. “So I’ll be traveling with the local sect?”

“That’s right,” his mother said, and raised her chin a little. “At least this much, your mother was able to do for you.”

She’d begged and bargained and traded favors for it, then, Meng Yao thought, and yet taking him along was to their own benefit: if they were looking for inherited cultivation talent sufficient for the Lan sect, then the bastard son of another Great Sect leader would be a better bet than some random nobody. She’d probably humiliated herself for nothing.

“Will you come with me?” he asked, more concerned with that – it was too easy for women of ill repute to disappear into the depths of the city if they didn’t have someone to watch out for them.

Even someone as young as he was. He wished he was older.

“You can come back to visit me during the Spring Festival,” she said, which meant no. “I’ll be all right, A-Yao.”

Meng Yao wasn’t so sure.

Still, not having him around would at least remove a visible reminder of his mother’s age – she’d been kicked out of the better brothels because of him, because no one wanted a woman who was a mother. Leaving would at least do that for her.

“I’ll write,” he finally said. “I’ll write as often as they let me.”

“And I’ll write back,” she promised him, kissing his cheek. “I promise.”

With that, Meng Yao supposed he had to be satisfied.

-

The Lan sect was both exactly like what Meng Yao expected and absolutely nothing at all like anything he could have dreamt.

For the first, his cynicism was almost immediately confirmed: the boys raised there were snobby as anything, looking down at the rest of them as little better than barbarians, and many of the adults were the same way. It was clear that this whole business of recruiting talented nobodies was a project of the sect leader’s – the interim sect leader, no less, not even the real thing – and nobody else’s; they were only just barely going along with it. Adding to that the fact that there were dozens if not hundreds of rules, and Meng Yao could glumly foresee a future of having his lack of knowledge held over his head as a fault, even with his marvelous memory to act as his backing.

For the second…

Well, there was Lan Xichen, who was – as unbelievable as it seemed – to actually embody all those things that people said about gentlemen, all kindness and gentleness and fierce upright pride, except only for real. There was Lan Wangji, who was basically perfect in every way and kinder than he gave the impression he was, willing to help tutor anyone who asked if only they dared disturb his solitude long enough to do so. There was the boy Meng Yao shared a room with, Su She, who’d punched the boy from the Yunping cultivator clan in the mouth for calling Meng Yao a son of a whore and pretended it was because they weren’t allowed to talk about that sort of thing, when actually it’d been because he hadn’t wanted rumors to get around that might make Meng Yao’s life harder in the future.

There was Lan Qiren, who was strict and a little boring but fair, painfully fair, handing out punishments with an equitable hand no matter that it meant that he was punishing the locals as often if not more often. It’d been his idea to bring people like Meng Yao into the Lan sect, and defending the idea was the only time he truly seemed moved to passion. Now that they’d passed the initial examination and been judged to match Lan sect standards, Lan Qiren announced, as far as he was concerned, they were Lan sect just as if they were born there, as if they’d been children of his own.

And he even seemed to really believe it, too.

Today, Meng Yao’s head was still warm from when the stern Teacher Lan had put his hand there, gentle and approving, and his ears still burning from the murmured “Well done, Meng Yao, as expected.”

“I think I would kill someone for him,” Meng Yao said dreamily to Su She, who snorted.

“You’ve got such father issues,” he said disdainfully, as if he didn’t have entire family issues. That was just Su She’s way, though – he bitched and moaned and complained without end, and he’d probably kill someone for Meng Yao if Meng Yao so much as hinted it was something he’d want. They’d made friends for a reason. “You know the bit about the poor kids being his own children is a lie, right?”

“I know which sect’s leader is my father, thanks,” Meng Yao said, rolling his eyes. “I’m well aware it’s not Teacher Lan. Like he’d ever have kids of his own, anyway.”

“That’d require noticing when someone’s flirting with him,” Su She agreed, all solemn for just a moment, and then he dissolved into sniggering giggles. Meng Yao couldn’t blame him: it was, in fact, extremely funny when women (and sometimes men) tried to flirt with Teacher Lan, mostly because of the way that he very genuinely and completely missed that that was what was happening each and every time.

“Laugh all you like,” Meng Yao said peaceably. “You’d kill for him, too.”

“Probably,” Su She agreed. “But only because of you.”

That was fair enough. After getting the lay of the land, Meng Yao had arranged for them to ‘accidentally’ be overheard by Teacher Lan while talking about the misconduct of one of the teachers who was the most biased against guest disciples, one of the ones that had been harassing Su She in particular for over a year before Meng Yao had arrived, and despite Su She’s initial nervousness about the plan, it had all gone splendidly. Sure, they’d been punished to do five copies of a treatise on upright conduct because they’d breached Talking behind the backs of others is prohibited, but the teacher in question had been sentenced to two hundred strikes with the discipline rod for abusing his position and three months of enforced seclusion to contemplate his misbehavior, and then, Teacher Lan had said, his expression dark and threatening, they could discuss what role would be the best fit in the future.

The other teachers had taken notice and shaped up very quickly, after that.

Comparatively, those five copies made in the nice cool Library Pavilion instead of having to do chores on the hottest days of summer? Practically a pat on the back for bringing it to his attention.

Su She would never have dared to raise anything if it was just him, Meng Yao thought; he had a strange fear of authority figures that combined envy and misery in an explosive combination – he would have just suffered and suffered and suffered until he’d been pushed too far and then it would have all burst out at once. He wasn’t like Meng Yao, who was unwilling to keep to his “proper” place and was more than willing to use his greater-than-average share of brains to get what he wanted, no matter what rules he broke in the process. He was the sort of person who was willing to do whatever it took to obtain his desires – no matter what it took.

Well, maybe not no matter what. He wouldn’t want to disappoint Lan Qiren too much.

(Okay, so maybe Su She was right and he had some unresolved father issues. So what if he did? Whose business was it but his?)

-

It’d taken Meng Yao a while to fully adjust to the Cloud Recesses.

Some parts he’d figured out right away – the way they all flattered themselves as gentlemen even if they were actually little more than hypocrites (Teacher Lan and his personally taught nephews exempted, of course), which of course meant that Meng Yao’s ability to act pitiful at the drop of a hat and cleverly turn black into white made him a teacher’s pet at once. The vegetarian meals were easy enough to adapt to, given that his mother hadn’t had the money for meat all that often, and the training and cultivation and all that wasn’t any challenge for his excellent powers of retention – he had ambitions of becoming one of Teacher Lan’s aides one day, and worked assiduously towards that goal. Even waking and sleeping early, which was practically the opposite of his schedule at home, was something he could adjust to, given time and incentive.

It was his mentality that took some time to adjust.

Meng Yao had perhaps grown up with too many of his mother’s stories, painting an image of a matchless paradise – at the start, he looked at everything around him, serene and elegant but not quite as rich and shining and thought that it would do, for now. When he’d first arrived, he had had every intention of making a good reputation for himself and using that reputation to get his real father’s attention – he’d liked Teacher Lan from the beginning, despite his best attempts to not let his heart be swayed, but he’d reasoned that if a teacher was like this, then a blood-related father would be even better.

And so, for the first half-year, he’d treated his time at the Cloud Recesses…not lightly, no. He was extremely serious about making sure to get the maximum benefit he could. And yet, at the same time, he still was not really committing himself to the place.

This wasn’t where he was going to live his whole life, he reasoned; it was just a stepping stone to a better future. That meant he would exert himself to point out things that made him look good, to eliminate obstacles in his path, to win himself allies, but not bother with those longer-term problems, the ones that really ought to be fixed but which would take a great deal of effort with little reward other than annoying people.

His feeling of superiority and emotional distance lasted right up until the first discussion conference.

From a distance, Jin Guangshan was everything Meng Yao could have imagined – perhaps a little too similar to the clients that his mother often saw, a little dissolute to pull off the air of a refined scholar he affected, but wearing more gold than Meng Yao had ever seen in his life, with a retinue of servants that dwarfed the other sect’s. Each of those servants were dressed more finely than even main clan cultivators in some of the smaller sects, and though Meng Yao’s Lan sect guest disciple clothing was of such quality that he didn’t need to fear their disdain, he couldn’t help but be secretly impressed.

He'd exerted himself more than usual to trade away all of his chores and duties, freeing himself up to take on patrol duty near the Jin sect. He’d perhaps daydreamed about some sort of encounter – nothing active on his part, of course, but he couldn’t quite resist playing through some fantasy of catching someone’s eye by chance, getting called over, a “You have a familiar set to your chin, who’s your father?”, a shy halting admission, recognition, a joyous reunion…

Instead, his father spent the entire night getting drunk and cursing the Lan sect’s hospitality for not providing him with girls to go with his liquor, calling Lan Qiren a miserable prude with a stick up his ass right in front of the Lan sect disciples that clenched their fists in barely concealed rage. He’d seen Meng Yao all right, ordered him to come forward, but it’d only been to mock him in front of all of his servants – and not even for being his bastard son, no, that would involve bothering to pick him out from the crowd or to ask who he was. No, he’d mocked him simply for being one of the poor disciples that Lan Qiren had taken in, all because his accent was marked with the distinct tones of Yunping rather than the sweetness of Gusu.

“Tell me, boy,” he said, breathing fumes into Meng Yao’s face and making him feel suddenly as if he’d never left the brothel – that the Cloud Recesses had all been a vague dream, and now he’d woken up and lost it all. “How does that old fart Qiren expect you to pay him back for all he’s done for you? I heard the Lan sect includes a pretty face as one of its standard requirements…”

Meng Yao put his gaze above his father’s head and pretended to be deaf.

“It seems like rather a lot of effort,” one of his father’s attendants remarked. “Even if Second Master Lan wanted a boy to warm his bed, couldn’t he just buy one like any normal person?”

“Bah, boys,” his father said, and leaned back, waving his hands in dismissal. “Why would anyone bother with a boy when you could have a soft woman instead? Just as long as they’re stupid enough – you know, there’s nothing worse than a woman who’s talented and knows it, too smart, always trying to get above their station…”

“You’re thinking about that whore in Yunping again, aren’t you? The one that interrupted your dinner and made a scene, claiming you’d promised to take in the son she bore you?” the attendant said, laughing. “I told you, you should’ve just killed her for her impudence rather than just having her beaten and thrown out. That way the matter wouldn’t still be bothering you…”

“Go away, boy,” another servant said to Meng Yao, who was frozen stiff in belated terror, nausea churning in his stomach as he realized his mother could’ve gone out one day and never come back, and he would never have known why – or maybe it was that he’d been spending his considerable time and brain on pleasing someone who would have done that, who nearly had done that. “Your accent’s brought back bad memories, don’t you see?”

Meng Yao left.

No, to be more blunt: he fled. He ran away, hot tears filling his eyes until he couldn’t see – belly full of regret and disappointment, crushed dreams feeling like broken shards of glass in his mouth and throat.

He tried to tell himself that it was better to find out now, when they were still distant, before he'd sold his soul for the futile chance to get that horrible man's affection, but he couldn't quite throw off the shame of knowing that if he hadn't heard such a thing up front, he probably would have done that. Would have humiliated himself like that, and for what? A man who regretted not murdering his mother?

He ran right into Lan Wangji, who was also on patrol.

Lan Wangji took one look at him and grabbed his wrist, dragging him away from the main pathway and all the way to his uncle’s rooms.

Lan Qiren was still awake despite the late hour, writing something at his desk, but he set aside his brush at once. “What’s going on?” he asked, frowning. “Wangji – Meng Yao – one of you report.”

“Meng Yao was on patrol by the Jin sect,” Lan Wangji explained as Meng Yao furiously tried to dash away his tears using his sleeve.

“Who permitted that? First year disciples aren’t permitted to patrol during discussion conferences,” Lan Qiren asked, his frown deepening. “It wouldn’t be proper – ah, but no, I recall now. I suppose it was inevitable. Wangji, well done, and thank you. You are dismissed.”

After Lan Wangji left, he turned his eyes on Meng Yao.

“You volunteered, didn’t you?” he asked.

Meng Yao felt his back go cold: Lan Qiren knew, then. It had never been said out loud by anyone as far as he knew, and yet it was clear that Lan Qiren knew who his father was – and probably his mother, too.

He knew that Meng Yao was – that he wasn’t anything more than –

“You are one of my most promising disciples, Meng Yao,” Lan Qiren told him, and poured him a cup of tea from his own pot, pressing it into his hands. It was finer tea than Meng Yao had ever had in his life, full of smoke and flavor. “The rules say Be loyal and filial, but they also praise reciprocity. You have not been recognized, and have not received your forefathers’ grace. You can fulfill your obligations to chivalry through your respect for the parent that raised you.”

Meng Yao stared down at the teacup. Lan Qiren had completely misunderstood the nature of Meng Yao’s concern – he was disappointed in what his father was, not worried about not living up to his obligations of being a filial child. And yet it was a little nice to hear that as far as Lan Qiren was concerned, the rules said that he could tell his father go hang for all he cared…

And that he ought to honor his mother, which was something no one who knew her had ever said to him.

“Even if she –” His voice stuttered. “Even if she’s a…”

He couldn’t say the word.

“Appreciate the good people is not qualified by class or profession,” Lan Qiren said, and his monotone voice was blissfully without emotion, as if this were just another lesson in class, and not the deepest hurt of Meng Yao’s life. “I have never met your mother, Meng Yao, but you are a good child – diligent, organized, sincere, with good judgment, and you clearly adore her. That tells me everything I need to know.”

Meng Yao burst into tears.

-

Meng Yao liked Lan Xichen a lot, but he also had to admit that sometimes, the older boy was, well…

“Dumb as a pile of rocks,” Su She announced.

“Do not criticize other people,” Meng Yao said piously, but then chuckled, shaking his head. “Say, rather, that he’s naïve and sheltered, and overly inclined to believe the best in people.”

“Like I said: dumb as rocks. How many times is going to get himself swindled into being someone’s sword or shield before he figures out that the problem is him?”

“Some people don’t have the capacity to understand the depths of humanity’s foulness –”

“Yeah, dumb ones.”

“Su She, please.” Su She held up his hands in surrendered. “At any rate, if Lan-gongzi is going to keep falling for people’s tricks, it’s beholden on us to help protect him.”

“You just don’t want Teacher Lan to be sad about something serious happening to his nephew,” Su She said knowingly, but he was already nodding. “All right, what are we going to do about it? He outranks us. We can’t exactly tell him to his face that he’s being…”

He paused.

Dumb as rocks went unsaid, but then, it didn’t need to be said out loud for the meaning to be clear.

Meng Yao sighed.

“You can only trick someone so many times,” he said. “If we want to keep him from getting tricked by other people, then we have to trick him first. And better.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lan-gongzi likes to save people,” Meng Yao explained. “He really sees himself as a chivalrous gentleman – he puts chivalry first, even though Teacher Lan says Learning comes first. That’s why he always sides with whoever he perceives to be the underdog in a given situation, no matter how wrong that impression is. That’s how most of the people who’ve been tricking him have gone for it: playing the victim, appealing to his sense of righteousness, pulling the curtains over his eyes to obscure what’s actually happening.”

“Okay. So?”

“So, we’ve both got miserable backstories – you being taken from your family at a young age and then bullied, me with my mother and, even worse, father. If we get him on our side, early on, he’ll side with us over anyone else – that way we can keep him from getting roped into other people’s private grudges.”

Su She frowned. “That seems a little manipulative.”

“It’s for his own good, and that’s what’s important,” Meng Yao said, and smiled faintly. “Wouldn’t you agree, Lan-er-gongzi?”

Su She jumped, turning around just in time to see Lan Wangji, who had been standing in the shadow of a nearby tree, step out.

He had a serious expression, as always, but a thoughtful one.

Meng Yao waited patiently.

“You cannot take advantage,” Lan Wangji finally said, and Meng Yao knew he’d won the most important ally in the battle to save Lan Xichen from himself. “That would change it from a virtuous act to a selfish one.”

“Like we need anything from him,” Su She said haughtily. “Maintain your own discipline.”

“Arrogance is forbidden.”

“It’s not arrogance if it’s justified! It’s just self-confidence!”

“Do not argue with family,” Meng Yao quoted, and was pleased to see both of them drop it at once. “Listen, we all share the same goal, and we have to start somewhere, don’t we? We’re stronger together than apart. Together, we can do anything, even protect Lan-gongzi.”

That and more, he thought as the other boys nodded, following his lead. Lan Xichen is just the start.

-

“The Wen sect will make trouble sooner rather than later,” Meng Yao said thoughtfully, one day. His friends turned to look at him. “Yes, I’m serious.”

Lan Wangji nodded, serious as always, but Su She scoffed.

“You can’t even convince that Wei Wuxian boy to leave poor Lan-er-gongzi alone,” he said snidely. “How exactly are you expecting to bring down the Wen sect?”

“I don’t convince Wei Wuxian to leave Lan-er-gongzi alone because Lan-er-gongzi doesn’t want to be left alone,” Meng Yao said. “Obviously. Isn’t that right?”

“You should call me by name,” Lan Wangji said, which wasn’t answering the question and definitely wasn’t denying anything. “You were saying, about the Wen sect?”

Meng Yao smiled.

-

“What brings one of Teacher Lan’s most promising disciples to the Unclean Realm?” Nie Mingjue said, peering at him thoughtfully. “You’re at the wrong time to be one of the usual messengers.”

Meng Yao smiled at him.

“I think you’ll find that we have similar goals, Sect Leader Nie,” he said. “When it comes to making sure that certain people in our lives don’t get hurt by the bad decisions of others, I mean. In your case, it’s your younger brother, who’s a friend of mine –”

Friend, source of information, it was all about the same thing in the end. Meng Yao didn’t have real friends outside the Lan sect, but he’d been very careful to cultivate good relationships with all his most important peers.

“- and for me, well. A teacher for day, a father for a lifetime. I’m sure Sect Leader Nie can understand the importance of protecting one’s father – right?”

“You don’t need to use any sophistry on me,” Nie Mingjue said, rolling his eyes. “If you have an idea on what we can do to stop the Wen sect before they go and burn someone’s house down, I’m all ears.”

By chance, Meng Yao did.

It was a good plan, too, daring and brave in equal measure. If it worked the way he hoped it would, he’d win enough fame to get Jin Guangshan to beg for him to join the Jin sect – not that he would, of course.

Meng Yao knew what he wanted, and he knew how he was going to get it, too.

-

“This is a lovely house, A-Yao,” Meng Shi said, running her hand along one of the soft tapestries on the wall. “Truly lovely. Whoever you rented it from has good taste.”

Meng Yao bowed. “Thank you for the compliment, Mother. I put a lot of thought into it.”

“You own it?” she asked, surprised. “But don’t you live up the mountain, with the sect?”

“I do. This is for you.”

“For – me? A-Yao! This is too much – how much must it have cost–”

“I saved the Lan sect’s core texts from being destroyed,” Meng Yao said. “I’m an inner sect disciple now – I could ask for a dozen houses like this, and they’d grant them to me without blinking twice. Teacher Lan would insist on it.”

“Teacher Lan,” his mother murmured. “That’s the one you’ve taken to treating as your own father, isn’t it? You’ve spoken so much of him, in your letters…”

“There’s no need to scheme,” he told her. “He wouldn’t notice your flirtations, anyway.”

His mother arched her eyebrows at him.

“He’s really oblivious.”

“Still…”

“Really no need,” Meng Yao said, and couldn’t help but smile at the memory of Lan Qiren pulling him into a hug when he realized that the books – and Lan Xichen – were all safe from the Wen sect’s attempt to burn down the Cloud Recesses, and, later, again, that Wen Ruohan was dead. He may have deliberately schemed for that second hug, and he might or might not have plans for more. “He already takes me as a son.”

His mother relaxed.

“Good,” she said, and smiled herself. “So, A-Yao, was I right, all those years ago? Was the Lan sect a good fit for you?”

The Song of Clarity was a healing song, and an extraordinarily powerful one; it was almost wholly beneficial. There was absolutely no reason that anyone would bother to utilize any of the half-dozen ways that a cultivator skilled in musical cultivation would use to protect himself from the songs he played, and therefore no justifiable or plausible way for Jin Guangyao to use any of them, either. Nie Mingjue had been Lan Xichen’s close friend for years – even though his inability to comprehend music meant that he did not cultivate music nor understand it, he knew all the tricks of the trade. He might not notice a substitution, but he would certainly notice if Jin Guangyao were to inexplicably start taking defensive measures against the music.

In short: if Jin Guangyao wanted to poison Nie Mingjue with the Song of Turmoil, he had to poison himself, too.

He’d thought about it very carefully before deciding to proceed regardless. He’d always been a bit of a gambler, reckless in his own way; he would never have gone to Wen Ruohan and the Fire Palace if he hadn’t been willing to put his own life at risk, and yet that gamble had paid off as well as his initial approach of the Jin sect hadn’t. Jin Guangyao had thought about how powerful Nie Mingjue’s cultivation already was, how much it had advanced during the war, and how for the Nie sect powerful cultivation went hand in hand with an early demise, and he’d made a cold-hearted calculation that estimated that he could use the Song of Turmoil to drive Nie Mingjue into a qi deviation before he himself was too badly affected.

He’d of course taken measures to try to preserve himself. Su She had painstakingly learned the Song of Clarity from him, the other man’s displeasure at having to learn yet another Lan song outweighed by the pleasure of being able to do something to help Jin Guangyao – Su She was delightfully eager to please, and easily assuaged by the most pathetic morsels of praise in a way that was, when you dug deep into it, surprisingly similar to Lan Xichen; it really made one wonder what the Lan sect did to its disciples that made them turn out like that – and Jin Guangyao had had him play it for him on a regular basis. He’d figured that with him getting the full Song of Clarity regularly, interspersed with the poisonous Song of Turmoil, while Nie Mingjue received only the latter, he would be able to outlast his sworn brother, even though his cultivation was far weaker.

He’d paid very careful attention to his behavior, exercising iron will to suppress even small bouts of irritability or irrationality, writing everything down to try to review with a clear mind – he’d thought he had it under control. He’d thought he was winning.

He’d underestimated the Song of Turmoil.

He’d underestimated Nie Mingjue, or perhaps overestimated himself. When the qi deviation came upon him – and he’d figured out at once what was happening, a horrifying clear moment of understanding before his mind was subsumed into seething rage of the sort he’d always felt but never expressed – he had known that he had failed, and that it was all over. They said that you never recovered from a qi deviation…

“You’ll be all right, san-ge,” Nie Huaisang said, still fluttering at his bedside like one of his precious birds, bleating like a sheep. “We figured out at once what was happening, naturally – if there’s one thing we know in the Nie sect, it’s qi deviations! We have all sorts of techniques to deal with them.”

“Effective ones?” Jin Guangyao croaked. He’d gambled, yes, but he’d thought that he’d be able to win; his cultivation was already weak, already laughed at by those who were inferior to him in all other respects, and he couldn’t bear the thought that he’d harmed himself permanently in the process.

“Effective enough,” Nie Huaisang said with a shrug. “You’ll need to be careful for a good long while, and pay attention in the future, but it shouldn’t damage your cultivation permanently, if that’s your concern.”

It was. Jin Guangyao exhaled.

“We can’t stop a fatal one in its tracks, but if we get there early enough, there’s stuff we can do,” Nie Huaisang continued. “You were very lucky that it happened here, in front of da-ge – if it’d been at Jinlin Tower, with no one around by the Jin sect, who knows how long it would’ve taken them to get you care?”

Slowly, Jin Guangyao’s mind, which had been slow and sluggish and wrapped up in despair, started to function again. Nie Huaisang by his bedside, expressing concern, seeming sincere (as if that empty-headed idiot could do anything other than be completely sincere), and now this reference to the qi deviation happening while he was back at Jinlin Tower…

Had they not realized what had happened?

No, they couldn’t have. Nie Mingjue, for all his professed disdain of Jin Guangyao, trusted him a ridiculous amount – he’d never questioned the Song of Clarity, never suspected Jin Guangyao of turning on him, never thought for even a moment that someone might target him for an assassination in any way but the straightforward and obvious. Jin Guangyao had sworn him an oath, he so very obviously reasoned, and so Jin Guangyao would not betray him…what a ridiculous, naive man. So – no. They couldn’t have figured out the Song of Turmoil, and that meant they had no idea what exactly it was that had caused Jin Guangyao to suffer his qi deviation.

And that meant…

He had no idea what that meant.

However, he did notice one thing absent in the room that he would have otherwise expected to be there. A great hulking big absence.

“Where’s da-ge?” Jin Guangyao asked, hoping against hope that Nie Mingjue had just stepped out of the room and wasn’t off doing something stupid. Unfortunately, as he himself knew all too well, Nie Mingjue’s temper was even more volcanic than usual, full as he was of the Song of Turmoil’s insidious poison; he was easier to set off, harder to calm, and far more likely to act irrationally.

He could be doing anything.

“Oh, he went back to talk to your father,” Nie Huaisang said, and Jin Guangyao stared at him, aghast – that was so much worse than he’d even considered possible. “He was very upset on your behalf, of course.”

“Upset,” Jin Guangyao echoed, his voice hollow. “On my behalf…of course?”

“Well, naturally!” Nie Huaisang blinked at him, clearly unsure of why Jin Guangyao was so surprised. “San-ge, you’re new to the cultivation world, you might not have realized it. But qi deviations in cultivators that follow an orthodox path are extraordinarily rare, especially when they’re as young as you are – and of course we all know that you’re an orthodox practitioner! Why, you barely have time to focus on cultivation at all, given how much work they have you doing, it’s positively criminal…”

Nie Huaisang shook his head, though whether it was in sympathy for Jin Guangyao’s predicament or merely at the thought of anyone doing that much work, it was hard to say.

“Anyway, it was obvious at once that someone must have done it to you deliberately,” he continued, sounding very practical and rational and not at all like he was saying things that were completely wrong – but only if you knew things that Nie Huaisang did not know. If you only knew what Nie Huaisang did, or more to the point, what Nie Mingjue did, the conclusions they were reaching were in fact quite reasonable. “And the only places you ever spend enough time are here and there, and obviously we weren’t doing anything to you here – which means that someone must be doing something to you there. Oh, san-ge…I’m really sorry. It must be such a disappointment to you!”

Jin Guangyao was still trying to grapple with how the Nie had reached such a horrifically incorrect conclusion to actually start processing what they were doing with that conclusion.

“Disappointment?” he echoed dumbly. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know. You’ve been trying to impress your father so much all this time, working yourself to the bone, night and day without rest, and all this time he was having you – well, it wouldn’t be going too far to say that he was having you poisoned! We still don’t know how exactly it happened, the doctors weren’t sure, but it must have been something pretty nasty; as I said, qi deviations just don’t happen in people as young as you, not naturally. Da-ge was positively enraged!”

Jin Guangyao just bet he was.

“You sound very sure that it was him,” he said weakly. “Why…”

He trailed off, realizing how stupid the question was even before he finished asking it. Who else would be motivated to kill him? Jin Zixuan and Jin Zixun, whose inheritance he might have threatened, were already dead. Mo Xuanyu, who his father had brought back to the Jin sect as a deliberate fuck you to Jin Guangyao, had all the backbone of a bowl of tofu pudding. Jin Ling was one.

It was at least theoretically possible that it could be blamed on Madame Jin, who notoriously hated him, but she’d been ill ever since her beloved son had died; it seemed unlikely that she would get up the energy to care about him unless he did something overt that made him seem like a threat to Jin Ling, which he had no intention of doing.

(His father-in-law, Qin Cangye, might have the motivation if he ever figured out what secrets his wife had been keeping from him, or the fact that Jin Guangyao had proceed with the marriage regardless of what he’d known about it – even if the motivation for that had been relatively pure, as those things went – but he didn’t know and would never know, and no one else did, either. So that was out.)

No – if Jin Guangyao had really been being poisoned by another, then the only one plausibly to blame was Jin Guangshan. The one who saw Jin Guangyao as a stain upon his name, the one who didn’t want him, the one who disdained him no matter what he did…

Nie Huaisang patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. “It’s all right, san-ge, let it out,” he said encouragingly. “It’s all right to be upset, we won’t hold it against you. And you were so very angry when the qi deviation happened, you were saying all sorts of ridiculous things, completely out of your mind…if you’re thinking about filial loyalty, don’t. Your father gave up all rights to your filial loyalty when he tried to kill you; that’s how that goes, you know. But don’t worry! Da-ge will make it right again.”

Jin Guangyao thoroughly doubted that. On the contrary, he had rather considerable fears about what Nie Mingjue might consider ‘right again’ to be, and also whether it involved his father being dead.

Which…actually would solve a remarkable amount of his problems, now that he thought about it. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to support Mo Xuanyu for the inheritance of the Jin sect, not against him.

Well, as long as his father didn’t get a chance to say anything about the work Jin Guangyao had been doing with Xue Yang – or mention the Song of Turmoil – or any of the other of the filthy things he’d been having Jin Guangyao do for him…

On second thought, Jin Guangyao devoutly hoped that Nie Mingjue just slaughtered Jin Guangshan on first sight.

“Is there anything I can get you that would make your rest easier?” Nie Huaisang asked, solicitous and caring. “Or any person? The doctors say that you should be around friends, if at all possible – anything to help you relax better. I’ve already put in orders for all your favorite foods and drink, and of course you can stay in bed – in fact, we insist you stay in bed – but if there’s anyone else…?”

“…are you familiar with Moling Su at all?” Jin Guangyao asked, thinking that Su She might be convinced to help him prepare for a very quick exit in the event that Nie Mingjue did stop to chat with Jin Guangshan before slaughtering him. “They’re new – their sect leader is Su Minshan…”

“I don’t recall, but I can have someone dig him up,” Nie Huaisang said with the carelessness of the scion of a Great Sect, who feared nothing and answered to no one. “Like I said, you just rest here – relax, be at peace. It’ll all be over soon.”

Jin Guangyao had never heard such ominous words before in his life.

“Right,” he said, and dredged up a fake smile. “Right. Thanks. Much…appreciated.”

The Song of Clarity was a healing song, and an extraordinarily powerful one; it was almost wholly beneficial. There was absolutely no reason that anyone would bother to utilize any of the half-dozen ways that a cultivator skilled in musical cultivation would use to protect himself from the songs he played, and therefore no justifiable or plausible way for Jin Guangyao to use any of them, either. Nie Mingjue had been Lan Xichen’s close friend for years – even though his inability to comprehend music meant that he did not cultivate music nor understand it, he knew all the tricks of the trade. He might not notice a substitution, but he would certainly notice if Jin Guangyao were to inexplicably start taking defensive measures against the music.

In short: if Jin Guangyao wanted to poison Nie Mingjue with the Song of Turmoil, he had to poison himself, too.

He’d thought about it very carefully before deciding to proceed regardless. He’d always been a bit of a gambler, reckless in his own way; he would never have gone to Wen Ruohan and the Fire Palace if he hadn’t been willing to put his own life at risk, and yet that gamble had paid off as well as his initial approach of the Jin sect hadn’t. Jin Guangyao had thought about how powerful Nie Mingjue’s cultivation already was, how much it had advanced during the war, and how for the Nie sect powerful cultivation went hand in hand with an early demise, and he’d made a cold-hearted calculation that estimated that he could use the Song of Turmoil to drive Nie Mingjue into a qi deviation before he himself was too badly affected.

He’d of course taken measures to try to preserve himself. Su She had painstakingly learned the Song of Clarity from him, the other man’s displeasure at having to learn yet another Lan song outweighed by the pleasure of being able to do something to help Jin Guangyao – Su She was delightfully eager to please, and easily assuaged by the most pathetic morsels of praise in a way that was, when you dug deep into it, surprisingly similar to Lan Xichen; it really made one wonder what the Lan sect did to its disciples that made them turn out like that – and Jin Guangyao had had him play it for him on a regular basis. He’d figured that with him getting the full Song of Clarity regularly, interspersed with the poisonous Song of Turmoil, while Nie Mingjue received only the latter, he would be able to outlast his sworn brother, even though his cultivation was far weaker.

He’d paid very careful attention to his behavior, exercising iron will to suppress even small bouts of irritability or irrationality, writing everything down to try to review with a clear mind – he’d thought he had it under control. He’d thought he was winning.

He’d underestimated the Song of Turmoil.

He’d underestimated Nie Mingjue, or perhaps overestimated himself. When the qi deviation came upon him – and he’d figured out at once what was happening, a horrifying clear moment of understanding before his mind was subsumed into seething rage of the sort he’d always felt but never expressed – he had known that he had failed, and that it was all over. They said that you never recovered from a qi deviation…

“You’ll be all right, san-ge,” Nie Huaisang said, still fluttering at his bedside like one of his precious birds, bleating like a sheep. “We figured out at once what was happening, naturally – if there’s one thing we know in the Nie sect, it’s qi deviations! We have all sorts of techniques to deal with them.”

“Effective ones?” Jin Guangyao croaked. He’d gambled, yes, but he’d thought that he’d be able to win; his cultivation was already weak, already laughed at by those who were inferior to him in all other respects, and he couldn’t bear the thought that he’d harmed himself permanently in the process.

“Effective enough,” Nie Huaisang said with a shrug. “You’ll need to be careful for a good long while, and pay attention in the future, but it shouldn’t damage your cultivation permanently, if that’s your concern.”

It was. Jin Guangyao exhaled.

“We can’t stop a fatal one in its tracks, but if we get there early enough, there’s stuff we can do,” Nie Huaisang continued. “You were very lucky that it happened here, in front of da-ge – if it’d been at Jinlin Tower, with no one around by the Jin sect, who knows how long it would’ve taken them to get you care?”

Slowly, Jin Guangyao’s mind, which had been slow and sluggish and wrapped up in despair, started to function again. Nie Huaisang by his bedside, expressing concern, seeming sincere (as if that empty-headed idiot could do anything other than be completely sincere), and now this reference to the qi deviation happening while he was back at Jinlin Tower…

Had they not realized what had happened?

No, they couldn’t have. Nie Mingjue, for all his professed disdain of Jin Guangyao, trusted him a ridiculous amount – he’d never questioned the Song of Clarity, never suspected Jin Guangyao of turning on him, never thought for even a moment that someone might target him for an assassination in any way but the straightforward and obvious. Jin Guangyao had sworn him an oath, he so very obviously reasoned, and so Jin Guangyao would not betray him…what a ridiculous, naive man. So – no. They couldn’t have figured out the Song of Turmoil, and that meant they had no idea what exactly it was that had caused Jin Guangyao to suffer his qi deviation.

And that meant…

He had no idea what that meant.

However, he did notice one thing absent in the room that he would have otherwise expected to be there. A great hulking big absence.

“Where’s da-ge?” Jin Guangyao asked, hoping against hope that Nie Mingjue had just stepped out of the room and wasn’t off doing something stupid. Unfortunately, as he himself knew all too well, Nie Mingjue’s temper was even more volcanic than usual, full as he was of the Song of Turmoil’s insidious poison; he was easier to set off, harder to calm, and far more likely to act irrationally.

He could be doing anything.

“Oh, he went back to talk to your father,” Nie Huaisang said, and Jin Guangyao stared at him, aghast – that was so much worse than he’d even considered possible. “He was very upset on your behalf, of course.”

“Upset,” Jin Guangyao echoed, his voice hollow. “On my behalf…of course?”

“Well, naturally!” Nie Huaisang blinked at him, clearly unsure of why Jin Guangyao was so surprised. “San-ge, you’re new to the cultivation world, you might not have realized it. But qi deviations in cultivators that follow an orthodox path are extraordinarily rare, especially when they’re as young as you are – and of course we all know that you’re an orthodox practitioner! Why, you barely have time to focus on cultivation at all, given how much work they have you doing, it’s positively criminal…”

Nie Huaisang shook his head, though whether it was in sympathy for Jin Guangyao’s predicament or merely at the thought of anyone doing that much work, it was hard to say.

“Anyway, it was obvious at once that someone must have done it to you deliberately,” he continued, sounding very practical and rational and not at all like he was saying things that were completely wrong – but only if you knew things that Nie Huaisang did not know. If you only knew what Nie Huaisang did, or more to the point, what Nie Mingjue did, the conclusions they were reaching were in fact quite reasonable. “And the only places you ever spend enough time are here and there, and obviously we weren’t doing anything to you here – which means that someone must be doing something to you there. Oh, san-ge…I’m really sorry. It must be such a disappointment to you!”

Jin Guangyao was still trying to grapple with how the Nie had reached such a horrifically incorrect conclusion to actually start processing what they were doing with that conclusion.

“Disappointment?” he echoed dumbly. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know. You’ve been trying to impress your father so much all this time, working yourself to the bone, night and day without rest, and all this time he was having you – well, it wouldn’t be going too far to say that he was having you poisoned! We still don’t know how exactly it happened, the doctors weren’t sure, but it must have been something pretty nasty; as I said, qi deviations just don’t happen in people as young as you, not naturally. Da-ge was positively enraged!”

Jin Guangyao just bet he was.

“You sound very sure that it was him,” he said weakly. “Why…”

He trailed off, realizing how stupid the question was even before he finished asking it. Who else would be motivated to kill him? Jin Zixuan and Jin Zixun, whose inheritance he might have threatened, were already dead. Mo Xuanyu, who his father had brought back to the Jin sect as a deliberate fuck you to Jin Guangyao, had all the backbone of a bowl of tofu pudding. Jin Ling was one.

It was at least theoretically possible that it could be blamed on Madame Jin, who notoriously hated him, but she’d been ill ever since her beloved son had died; it seemed unlikely that she would get up the energy to care about him unless he did something overt that made him seem like a threat to Jin Ling, which he had no intention of doing.

(His father-in-law, Qin Cangye, might have the motivation if he ever figured out what secrets his wife had been keeping from him, or the fact that Jin Guangyao had proceed with the marriage regardless of what he’d known about it – even if the motivation for that had been relatively pure, as those things went – but he didn’t know and would never know, and no one else did, either. So that was out.)

No – if Jin Guangyao had really been being poisoned by another, then the only one plausibly to blame was Jin Guangshan. The one who saw Jin Guangyao as a stain upon his name, the one who didn’t want him, the one who disdained him no matter what he did…

Nie Huaisang patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. “It’s all right, san-ge, let it out,” he said encouragingly. “It’s all right to be upset, we won’t hold it against you. And you were so very angry when the qi deviation happened, you were saying all sorts of ridiculous things, completely out of your mind…if you’re thinking about filial loyalty, don’t. Your father gave up all rights to your filial loyalty when he tried to kill you; that’s how that goes, you know. But don’t worry! Da-ge will make it right again.”

Jin Guangyao thoroughly doubted that. On the contrary, he had rather considerable fears about what Nie Mingjue might consider ‘right again’ to be, and also whether it involved his father being dead.

Which…actually would solve a remarkable amount of his problems, now that he thought about it. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to support Mo Xuanyu for the inheritance of the Jin sect, not against him.

Well, as long as his father didn’t get a chance to say anything about the work Jin Guangyao had been doing with Xue Yang – or mention the Song of Turmoil – or any of the other of the filthy things he’d been having Jin Guangyao do for him…

On second thought, Jin Guangyao devoutly hoped that Nie Mingjue just slaughtered Jin Guangshan on first sight.

“Is there anything I can get you that would make your rest easier?” Nie Huaisang asked, solicitous and caring. “Or any person? The doctors say that you should be around friends, if at all possible – anything to help you relax better. I’ve already put in orders for all your favorite foods and drink, and of course you can stay in bed – in fact, we insist you stay in bed – but if there’s anyone else…?”

“…are you familiar with Moling Su at all?” Jin Guangyao asked, thinking that Su She might be convinced to help him prepare for a very quick exit in the event that Nie Mingjue did stop to chat with Jin Guangshan before slaughtering him. “They’re new – their sect leader is Su Minshan…”

“I don’t recall, but I can have someone dig him up,” Nie Huaisang said with the carelessness of the scion of a Great Sect, who feared nothing and answered to no one. “Like I said, you just rest here – relax, be at peace. It’ll all be over soon.”

Jin Guangyao had never heard such ominous words before in his life.

“Right,” he said, and dredged up a fake smile. “Right. Thanks. Much…appreciated.”