#hensheng

(From Pinterest)

So in the light of me now actually writing a Xiyao and a 3zun fic, I have given Hensheng a normal amount of thought.

There is no canon origin of the blade that we know. Which means I can go wild on that one, and I have a headcanon I like a lot. I'm going to use this in one of the two stories, not sure which, but It will come up.

I'll say in advance that I go mostly by the books, where it works better than with CQL, but in my opinion it doesn't contradict that, either. We see Meng Yao killing the captain with a sabre, but since he didn't exactly plan to get caught on that, I don't think it contradicts my thoughts - it would simply not be his sabre.

We know that little Meng Yao got cultivation manuals from his mom. But we also know they were ... not great. Not to say useless. So it's safe to assume our guy started cultivating correctly in the Unclean Realm. When he was ... 14/15-ish. That seems late.

Now let's say we're a sect leader with a lil runt as our charge who is so very earnest and trying so hard. But since he's starting late, he'll never be as strong as he could have been. And since we're on a path that leads to violent self-destruction, we need to prevent that.

How? How do we make sure that our little guy doesn't get eaten by a sabre spirit within a couple of years. Simple. We don't give him a sabre. Instead, we give him a weapon that doesn't store resentment, that makes the Nie path safer for our earnest little non-Nie cultivator. Lets him embrace his full potential - as much as he can, given the bad start he got.

Short version: Nie Mingjue gave it to him because the Nie cultivation path is disruptive under the best circumstances, but devastating under less than ideal ones. The soft sword is safe. It's a physically flexible weapon - and it's spiritually flexible, too, allowing him to use a saber cultivation path with a non saber weapon.

Why don't other (high ranking, qi-deviation afflicted) Nie cultivators do that? Tradition. Stubbornness. And the saber has more raw power than the soft sword.

In CQL Jiggy says he found it randomly and threw it away. Why would he do that? Uncertain. Maybe he's embarrassed that he can't safely use a saber? Maybe because the fittings of the sword were of Wen make and he didn't want Nie Mingjue to get angry because they were altered? Maybe he thinks it's an inane question and this is the politest way to avoid more of the same? You pick. In the books, I don't remember mention of him owning any other weapon.

Edit: Regarding the name, I think that works superbly with that thought. Give an adolescent boy a sword and tell him to name it. Anyone seriously telling me it's not gonna be super edgy? Really?

@little-meowyao They're swords, they tend to be rather literal about this sort of thing u.u

something that i see brought up frequently in discourse that is critical of jin guangyao is the time he spends undercover with the qishan wen, which is often characterized as a negative indictment of his character and the first substantial proof we get in the novel of his duplicitous nature. which, to be fair to people who hold this opinion, is something that nie mingjue's perspective during the empathy flashback sequence absolutely reinforces, and if you aren't reading those chapters with your critical thinking/reading cap on, it is easy to internalize that viewpoint and consider it objectively true. but nmj isn't the only lens through which we get to view jin guangyao's actions and decisions, and i think what i love most about these excerpts concerning hensheng is how absolutely they contradict that discourse narrative. because yes, jin guangyao was a spy! he was a damn good one, too! i think that what seeing those kids re-enacting the sunshot campaign through innocent play makes clear is the whole cultivation world recognizes that without jin guangyao's deception of wen ruohan and the rest of the qishan wen cultivators, the sunshot campaign could not have succeeded! his success as an undercover agent for the sunshot forces, and ultimately his assassination of wen ruohan, are what propel him from obscurity and secure his place not only within the lanling jin, but within the heroic adventure tales that both the gentry and the common people tell each other, and their children.

Hensheng

Always stands on her toes, leaning slightly forward with her hands back and tilted out like a bird about to take flight (thinking about. Rue from the Hunger Games intro description).

She's not actually blurry or soft, her edges are sharp, but she shakes? And vibrates at a frequency that seems to be slightly faster or somehow out of sync with her surroundings. This makes her hard to look at straight on, like your eyes can't pin her down, and so her edges all appear slightly blurred, or (falsely) soft.

You can look at her but as soon as you look away it's hard to pin down an exact shape in your mind. Body or features. It's just impressions - golden, fairly small, smiling?

Her skin is what initially appears to be liquid, shifting like the surface of a gas giant. Except, upon closer examination, it's actually almost every color mixed together, or ever-changing. It sometimes looks more solid and something like mother-of-pearl, but occasionally grows more liquid, the surface shifting faster and faster, during which it is tinted gold by a soft warm glow from underneath.

Eyes are large and without pupils, similar shifting quality to her skin, but various shades of deep red, like rubies, or blood. It's impossible to tell where she's looking, especially because she always seems to be tilting her head and standing at a slight angle, like an intrigued cat trying to pretend she isn't looking.

Short-medium (chin length? but extremely choppy and uneven, like it was torn or hacked off with a knife) black hair that floats slightly around her face. Almost looks like she's been electrocuted.

She has a face, and her own voice, which is soft and high pitched, birdlike, but not exactly soothing, as it shares the shaky quality of the rest of her. Except her true voice and form are rarely observed, because even when she is mostly herself, she ever so slightly takes on the appearance and mannerisms of those around her. The longer a conversation goes on, the more it focuses on one person, or the more intense it gets, the more she shifts to subtly be more like them. Or not. Maybe someone familiar, or something they'd admire?

She has wispy gold-ish tendrils that extend from her all around, though they tend to be more numerous and active when she's engrossed in something or otherwise distracted, but then immediately retract when she realizes she'd being observed.

The most solid wisps are two short pieces starting at her crown and twisting out above her head, pointed up and curled like horns or more like ears (they turn towards noises and occasionally go flat against her hair); a long one down her back that gets thicker at the end; a series of short spikes along her shoulders and getting longer down her arms until they're almost longer than the sleeves of her robes; and a series of feather-like wisps sitting over her fingers. Alltogether they make her look somewhat like a bird, or maybe a cat -- a very flustered great horned owl? When she's upset or startled the wisps can stick straight up or fluff out.

The more tendril like ones (which are less opaque and continuous) tend to slowly creep out around her, like feelers, trailing along surfaces and prodding at objects -- like they're scoping out the room, or looking for something. Very, very rarely, and only when she's fully distracted, they might twist along around someones ankle, or their wrist, or a piece of their hair. The second they move or try to look the wisp (which has no substance and can neither be felt nor actually hold anything or anyone) disappears.

She can spin thin silvery threads between her fingers, which she occasionally uses to tie small objects together, or weaves into webs. They're not very strong however, and slowly fade away after a few days, or sometimes when she leaves the room. She mostly seems to use the strings like a fidget toy, weaving shapes between her fingers like cats cradle. Very very rarely, she weaves little people or creatures out of the string, and leaves them to be found -- a gift.

All of her teeth are very sharp, with two longer ones on top like fangs. She doesn't have claws, but her nails are very sharp, pointed, and can harden into metal, growing longer and thinner until they almost look like needles coming out of her hands.

They don't appear most of the time, but she has glowing red eyes that appear on the back of her head, around her neck like a collar, and on the outer edges of both hands. It's not clear what they're for or whether she can see out of them, because her hearing is so sensitive she's impossible to sneak up on anyway.

She is solid. She is. She is. She's just hard to pin down, and the blurred edges and glitching and wispy tendrils don't make it any easier to get an idea of exactly where she is, or what she's doing. But sometimes, when she gets scared, it looks like she's teleporting, or popping very very fast in and out of existence, only within a short range of herself. Sometimes it looks like she splits into mirror images of herself all at once, letting out a squeak, before re-solidifying in the center into one person.

She moves very gracefully and lightly, tending to perch on furniture, but never sprawls, or looks fully settled down. Like an extremely polite but weary cat, that hasn't decided whether it's allowed to be here yet. Sometimes, she seems to be so wholly liquid that this grace makes her resemble something more like a snake, or a sentient river. This is especially true when she (very rarely) curls around people--perching on their shoulders before slowly relaxing into some sort of feather boa, or, running at them full speed to clamber up and twist around their legs.

Saw this excellent set of gifs from ep23 by @zelkam and went "Wait! Wait wait wait. That's a soft sword!"

So I went to check ep23 and indeed, Meng Yao kills Wen Ruohan with a soft sword:

Then I recalled (been a while too long since I last rewatched these episodes 😅) that this is actually confirmed by Wei Wuxian and Jin Guangyao's discussion during the victory banquet (in ep23):

JGY: You seemed to want to say something to me as we were greeting rach other.

WWX: It's nothing. Just that the weapon you used to kill Wen Ruohan on that day of the Sunshot Campaign seemed to be a flexible blade. Why doesn't Young Master Jin carry it today?

JGY: Young Master Wei, sorry to have made (it) a show. It was just a random blade I picked up. Later, as I found out it had dark energy, I threw it away.

(As a side note, how observant Wei Wuxian is! He was exhausted from using the Tiger Seal, choked by Wen Ruohan, about to lose consciousness, and yet he noticed that!)

Yeah, right. We all believe you, Jin Guangyao 🙄. Soft swords (rare as they are) just tend to lie around. And that soft sword looks very - very - similar to Hensheng:

In ep23, the blade has fittings that are clearly Wen, with dark-tarnished metal parts and a dark-red handle:

And as we see in ep41, for example, Hensheng has white, gold and green fittings that are very clearly Jin, as befitting Jin Guangyao's status.

But fittings can easily be changed, and the overall similarity is so great that it is quite clear (or at least I am convinced) that it is the same blade (and as already mentioned, soft swords are not that common). I am also quite convinced that it was not "just a random blade" he picked up.

If that is so, when did Meng Yao acquire the sword? Did he acquire it at some point after his banishment from Unclean Realm? Or did he acquire it during his time in Nightless City, a hidden sword for a last line of defence in an enemy stronghold? Or, was it a gift from Wen Ruohan?

As I mentioned, soft swords are not that common and high-class spiritual swords do not come cheap, so it is unlikely that Meng Yao would have been able to acquire one after his banisment, when his means must have been quite limited. It is more feasible that he could have acquired one sometime during his stay in the Nightless City, but I think I am most intriqued by the last possibility. Meng Yao seemed to have gained a high status and a position as some kind of advisor or right-hand man to Wen Ruohan, so it is feasible that he gifted the sword to his servant. This would be supported, firstly, by the custom made Wen fittings (no standard fittings for that type of blade!) and, secondly, by Jin Guangyao's mention that the sword had "dark energy" (translated sometimes as the sword being sinister) and by his eagerness to downplay the whole thing as "just a random sword I threw away" (can you just imagine Nie Mingjue's reaction to that piece of information in the aftermath of the Sunshot Campaign...).

Also, I have always found Hensheng (恨生, Hènshēng), to hate/regret life, to be a bit peculiar name for a cultivator's blade (even for Jin Guangyao's blade), but if the origin of the blade would indeed lie here, it would add an entire new dimension to why Jin Guangyao chose to name it so. Or was the blade named for him?

So in the end, if what I am speculating here is right, Wen Ruohan had his own weapons turned against him, in more ways than one.

And as an end note, there is no mention about the origin of the blade in the MDZS wiki, so it is not mentioned in the novel? Anyone remember if there is anything implied? Also, Hensheng definitely is a soft sword in The Untamed, contrary to what is written in the wiki.