Chapter Text
When Wei Wuxian wakes up, it takes him by surprise. That doesn’t generally happen after one has been dead for a while, so he rather thinks his shock is warranted.
Much to his dismay - it hurts. He has always had a fairly high pain tolerance, and for a moment the intensity of the sensation is almost unbearable - unfamiliarly so. He should be able to shrug this off easily, but the longer he’s aware he’s hurting, the worse it gets. From this perspective, staying dead would have been preferable—barring the moment of his death, this is more painful than anything being dead had to offer.
His head is pounding, there’s a sharp flare from deep, fresh lacerations on his arm, and hunger and thirst clawing viciously at his insides in an all too-familiar way.
He blinks, or tries to—his eyes won’t quite open the first time, ears full of his own sluggish pulse. He’s badly hurt, exhausted, and awake. He tries to get his bearings—if only his head could stop spinning even while he’s lying down.
It’s cold, he’s on the floor—and he is awake.
… How is he awake?
When he manages to open his eyes, a hand swims into focus—it’s pale, shaking, and definitely not his. These are not Wei Wuxian’s fingers—they are slender, almost delicate, and well taken care of, fingernails not broken or chewed to the quick.
“... What?”
Oh. That’s not his voice either.
But it is his array, from what he can see beyond the hand.
“This is…”
He pushes himself up on shaking arms. The one that’s been carved open oozes blood—he remembers this ritual, and the necessity of the caster’s blood for the array. No wonder he feels so tired—the wound has probably been bleeding for a while, judging by how dry the array itself is, but the body of whichever unfortunate soul completed it hasn’t had time to go cold.
… Weren’t they supposed to utter a wish? He doesn’t remember hearing one, but his mind is foggy—he badly wants to go back to sleep—he wants to go back to being dead—his head hurts so much—he’s never been so tired—
No, he must have been, he’s lived a tiring life. Maybe his mind just blanked out the memory, it had always been good at that.
There’s a second slash along the outside of his arm, getting blood all over his—wait. Is that... are those golden robes? ... He’s wearing—Lanling Jin!?
What the fuck?
“Seems like it worked,” says a nearby voice. There’s a faint undercurrent of excitement in it, bordering on glee. Like a child about to get a red packet for the New Year.
Wei Wuxian looks in the direction of the speaker with a flinch, the light streaming in from the entryway momentarily blinding. He barely manages to stay upright, holding the bleeding arm close to his middle and balancing on the other.
What the fuck is happening?
“I guess he wasn’t so useless after all,” a second voice says. This one is calmer, and familiar to him. His eyes lock onto Jin Guangyao’s ever-pleasant face, then note the punk hanging back half a step behind him, grinning wide and looking a little manic.
“Welcome back, Yiling Laozu,” Jin Guangyao says.
Wei Wuxian stares. He has no idea what is happening, where he is, or even who he is. Why is he here? Did they trick someone into summoning him? … However it happened, the ritual worked. Whoever did it must have understood the notes well enough to complete his unfinished work.
He’s not even sure who the kid by Jin Guangyao’s side is; it doesn’t matter. He’s going to tear them both limb from limb for what happened in this room.
… In a moment.
He lets himself sink sideways, trying to catch himself on the healthy arm so his head doesn’t hit the stone floor. He’s not quite sure if he manages it, but he’s already unconscious before he’s done slumping over, so it doesn’t seem to matter.
The second time Wei Wuxian wakes up, he’s still kitten-weak, but at least there’s the minor improvement of being in a bed this time. His wounds have even been heavily bandaged, and judging by the physical state of this body, it’s sorely needed. In his previous life he might have shrugged off a curse like this without much effort, but whoever summoned him seems either young or a late bloomer; the golden core in his belly barely flickers. Not that it would do much good either way, this curse won’t go away with its help alone, and even bandaging the wounds seems pointless.
Well, it might slow getting blood all over this fresh set of robes—they’re very finely made, the overly intricate embroidery of the Jin Clan’s peony on the chest shimmering at the edge of his vision when he looks around. His “predecessor” must not be some nameless Jin disciple, then. Even the Jin wouldn’t put that much effort into dressing up a random nobody whose severe wounds are going to repeatedly bleed through the expensive fabric.
The room is nice too—nice bed, nice curtains—and a nice array on the door that is definitely keeping this place sealed! How do they think he’s going to run away when he can barely sit up, even with the headboard supporting him?
He doesn’t pick at the bandages—he knows the wounds will look the same as before. Wei Wuxian is pretty sure he knows what the wish was too, even if his predecessor neglected to tell him, and those wounds won’t heal until it’s complete.
Not that wishes like this are difficult to guess—he’s lived a life of too much violence already, and he’s pretty sure the vicious urge to bodily tear someone apart didn’t come naturally.
So, Jin Guangyao got the Yiling Laozu back. Sucks for Jin Guangyao, since Wei Wuxian is definitely going to die again if he can’t do whatever his summoner wanted him to do. Jin Guangyao must think he has this in the bag, that Wei Wuxian will do whatever he’s asked to. He almost doesn’t dare imagine what he’ll be threatened with to ensure that compliance. There are still at least two people left who might be in danger. He’s not particularly worried about Jiang Cheng, but Jin Ling—it doesn’t bear thinking about. ... So he tries not to.
For a lack of other options, Wei Wuxian lays still for a short while, but he’s never been able to stay down, even when beyond the point of pain and exhaustion.
The room is more than just “nice”, when he takes the time to observe it.
The bed is draped in several layers of sheer curtains, fine enough to let the air circulate, but layered to keep out mosquitos and anything more than the most gentle draft; it’s an odd detail, given that there seem to be no windows in this room.
The bed’s frame is carved. Not with little stick figures by a kid, but with ornamental fish and actual jewels inset by a master craftsman who probably wouldn’t be able to afford to put a single plank of it in his own home. The mattress doesn’t yield at all when he shifts his weight to sit up, and the padded silk topper on top of it is finely woven, seams hidden so they don’t pinch in the night.
Even if the golden robes and Jin Guangyao’s presence weren’t a dead giveaway, this is clearly Koi Tower. He doesn’t know another sect that would display this degree of obvious, tacky wealth.
They cannot want anything good—not from Yiling Laozu. He needs to escape, but what comes next? There are few paths out there for him that aren’t leading back to where he came from, but he’s not willing to die again without taking at least one of these bastards with him. In the meantime, until an opportunity presents itself, he’ll get his bearings and figure out his next steps.
There’s a low writing table nearby. Wei Wuxian shuffles over to it and sinks down to look through the things arrayed on top. It’s obviously been used frequently and without the greatest care—many smudges of cinnabar and ink mar the surface.
Now that he has the strength to look up properly, it’s impossible not to notice that the walls of the room are covered in hundreds of sloppily-hung talismans, all in the same hand as the array.
This is the room of his predecessor—but what sort of person gets to wear such nicely hemmed Jin robes, and can’t be trusted with a window? ...
Maybe it’s underground. Or a hidden room—Koi Tower is certainly confounding enough that one could hide a room in a corridor somewhere and nobody would ever notice the extra space. If anyone even knew the corridor existed to begin with.
He leans his chin on his hands and idly reads the talismans: protection, protection, purification, protection... His predecessor was very paranoid about the influence of resentful energy for a guy willing to perform the body sacrificing ritual ... Interesting.
The array on the door is out of place by comparison, a seal carved right into the wood and stone. Was that for his predecessor, or is it a special touch just for Wei Wuxian? Perhaps his predecessor had no better avenues of escape than he does.
The former occupant had at least made himself quite comfortable—the low writing table isn’t the only well-loved piece of furniture in the room. Wei Wuxian takes a deep, bracing breath and forces himself to move over to a second low table.
A vanity.
There’s a tiny pot of cinnabar, a brush for applying the vermillion forehead mark, and a small bronze mirror.
Wei Wuxian takes the opportunity to look at himself. He cannot help but notice that this face is incredibly young.
“Ahh, what did they make you do, kid?” he murmurs, looking into his predecessor’s eyes. His skin is smooth and soft; it’s quite a good looking face, with just a little bit of baby fat still left on the cheeks. He looks to be on the far end of his teenage years, with the potential to grow into quite a lovely young man! His eyes, however, look far too old.
But is that Wei Wuxian’s battered soul peeking through, or another remnant from the former occupant?
He chuckles, turning away from the mirror. No use thinking sad thoughts! They never help anyone.
Wei Wuxian explores the rest of the vanity. He quickly finds some perfumed skin powder—probably a necessity even for lowly servants at Koi Tower—along with rouge, and a small red box that turns out to be full of red lip paper when he lifts the lid.
It’s all full of talismans. Wei Wuxian isn’t sure what kind of nonsense someone might get up to with lip paper that requires a spirit-warding talisman. He’s briefly amused by the stray thought of a talisman for warding off unexpected kisses—he could have used one of those during the Phoenix Mountain Hunt in his previous life!
Maybe there is something special about the lip paper after all? Should he try it? He takes one of the sheets, struck by the memory of sitting in Jiang Yanli’s room when she first learned how to use them, the crisp red of her kind smile when she came to visit him in Yiling—
He snaps the box closed again.
He resumes his rifling through the tiny porcelain jars and brushes. Everywhere he looks: talismans alongside completely innocuous objects. There are even talismans stuck to the legs of the table, like the furniture itself might get up and cause trouble for his predecessor if he didn’t—
Wei Wuxian blinks at those, flipping up the two topmost ones from one of the table’s legs. The third is different, modified by the placement of a few strokes plus a few upside down and reversed radicals that wouldn’t have caught his eye if he himself had not been experimenting with concealment charms.
This concealment charm, to be precise.
He has a vague memory of scribbling down the notes on this. Ultimately it wasn’t useful—hadn’t helped him contain the energy signature of the Yin Tiger Seal at all—but it could be good for hiding something small.
He pries the talisman off, patting around the vanity until he finds a small, suspicious joint along the side.
Finally, something useful! He gets his fingernails under the edge of it and pulls.
There’s a tiny hidden compartment, containing only a single sloppily bound notebook and yet another talisman. It appears to be for… smokeless fire?
Wei Wuxian flips through the notebook, quickly realizing this is the information he so badly needs to get out of this situation alive. It’s a diary—but it’s written to Wei Wuxian directly. The opening lines alone indicate that the writer anticipated no longer being alive by the time the notebook was uncovered, and fervently hoping it would be Wei Wuxian who found it. A risky gamble, but one that succeeded and would now hopefully shed more light on his situation.
He takes a deep breath and flips back to the beginning, determined not to miss any details.
His predecessor was called Mo Xuanyu. He was one of Jin Guangshan’s bastards—doted on as a child, then abandoned. Taken in as a youth to study cultivation at Koi Tower, he became Jin Guangyao’s much-favoured little brother, and enjoyed his personal protection.
Wei Wuxian scoffs. “Personal manipulation” would be a more appropriate description. It’s laid out quite neatly in Mo Xuanyu’s suddenly shaky handwriting—as if recollecting it for Wei Wuxian’s benefit was difficult.
Jin Guangyao is so, so important! He's considered a war hero, he killed Wen Ruohan, he's the venerable Lianfang-zun, he's sworn brothers with the leaders of the Lan and Nie sects! He’s well-regarded and well-connected! ...
And yet, Madam Jin viciously berates him in public for the smallest missteps, and our father sometimes beats Jin Guangyao when he disappoints him...
Look at me, A-Yu, who else is going to keep you safe here? Our father doesn't respect me, even with all that I’ve accomplished. Why should he act kindly towards you, when you're inevitably not going to be enough? You have nothing to offer him, he took you in on a whim. You could have stayed forgotten if not for that whim, and he can still toss you out, he’s abandoned you once before already. My mother is dead because Jin Guangshan abandoned her, and your mother could die too. You need to stick with me, A-Yu, and I will try to shield you. If you can help me make sure our father is amicable towards us, I will try to give you the protection you will need.
… Protection which landed the kid in a blood-soaked room, somewhere in a hidden basement of Koi Tower, offering his body to summon the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation back from the dead.
Wei Wuxian feels sick as the story unfolds—how Mo Xuanyu was set by Jin Guangyao to study his notes on demonic cultivation, how much he learned, how badly he wanted to study arrays and talismans further with Wei Wuxian, if he had the chance to. He sounded almost excited in that part of his notes, as if he had momentarily forgotten that he was writing this to be found after his own death...
Apparently, Jin Guangyao pointed him towards the sacrificial ritual without letting on what it actually was. He made it sound like it would just summon the Yiling Laozu to help them with their research on the Yin Tiger Seal, assumed that the boy’s lack of formal cultivation education would have him unaware. Unfortunately, for them both perhaps, Mo Xuanyu was bright—so gifted with an obvious natural hand for arrays and talismans that by the time he grew close to finishing Wei Wuxian’s incomplete design, he’d long since realised what the array would do, and that he had no way to escape it.
… So he’d made a wish.
Poor, poor Jin Guangyao. Plans don’t work as intended when you start by pissing off the sacrificial lamb, especially when the lamb is supposed to be summoning the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation himself.
I’ve tried to buy you some time, Mo Xuanyu had written in the margins next to the full diagram of the finished array. The modifications are beautiful—a gentling of the curse on the summoned spirit, enough so that its effects will be significantly delayed. Jin-shao-furen has been kind to me. I’m sure she would want to meet you, even if you can’t succeed in the end.
Wei Wuxian’s fingers go lax on the diary; it falls to the table with an echoing thud.
The Jiang Yanli he remembers did not know any “Mo Xuanyu”—Wei Wuxian is sure of it.
He would have heard of a big-eyed, slightly round-cheeked teenage boy. She wouldn’t have been able to resist stuffing him full of cakes and soup, telling Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng about her new third didi.
They must have met later.
After the battle.
She’s alive.
There’s nothing in his stomach to throw up, no tears he could cry. This body was scraped empty when he got it, a mere shell for Wei Wuxian to settle into. The bright young man who wrote to him is dead.
Mo Xuanyu, who modified the array he knew would be used to murder him; not to save himself, but to give Wei Wuxian time to live that Mo Xuanyu knew he didn’t have.
… He was so young.
Wei Wuxian raises the diary again, shaking slightly, and continues reading.
Mo Xuanyu was out of time. He’d delayed the completion of the ritual for a long time, even going so far as to attempt a fake version of it several times. Jin Guangyao’s patience was becoming frayed, and Xue Yang—probably the kid who stood behind Jin Guangyao when Wei Wuxian woke up—was terrorizing him nearly every waking moment.
His final hopes are that his mother is safe, and if Wei Wuxian is able, that he protects her. She lives in Mo Village, with his aunt and terrible cousin. At least, she did—Mo Xuanyu isn’t sure she’s still alive, not if the ritual’s success would make her a liability. He’s lived in Koi Tower long enough to understand that Jin Guangyao has no compunctions when it comes to making sure his plans go through without issues.
Mo Xuanyu’s last words echo in Wei Wuxian’s head long after he’s read them: I’m sorry for abandoning you to this wicked fate. I was helpless to do anything more for you, even after everything I learned from you. I’m sorry... and thank you.
Wei Wuxian burns the notebook with the smokeless fire talisman. All of it, including the crisp diagram of the sacrifice ritual. Nobody should have that—not Jin Guangyao, not Mo Xuanyu, nobody, not even himself. A brilliant young man may have otherwise survived if he didn’t have the misfortune to be put to work deciphering Wei Wuxian’s barely coherent ramblings.
Nothing is worth that cost.
It seems death hasn’t stopped him causing trouble for the people around him—even people he had no idea even existed have suffered for his mistakes.
Even shijie’s survival—good news in any other circumstances—now puts her in danger.
Because of him.
… Again.
What’s the point in trying to ensure his own survival if both his existence and its lack cause suffering to innocent bystanders? The only reason to even try to make it through this alive is to take revenge for the gentle, bright boy who sacrificed himself to bring him back. And then—
Later. He’ll figure out what comes afterwards later.
Wei Wuxian drags himself upright and stumbles over to the bed again.
He doesn’t know if it’s a mercy or torture, but that night, sleep doesn’t come to him at all.