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Wen Qing already had regrets about performing this surgery. On a mountain, with only Wen Ning for assistance, and that stupid boy Wei Wuxian laid out before her. Even before she cut him open, she knew it wasn't her brightest idea.
Of course, the prideful part of her who liked to know what she could do hadn't had many regrets at all while they organised this. There had been more curiosity than concern for failure. She had a few concerns for her own self if she did not follow through, since Wei Wuxian was erratic, and Jiang Cheng was concerning. She didn't fear they would do anything to her person, but she couldn't shake the thought that Wen Ning would do something even stupider, like following Wei Wuxian to war, instead of just bringing enemies home for medical attention.
Her regrets formed into a very specific gnawing thing, deep in her gut like a burr, as soon as she cut Wei Wuxian open.
She stopped, her scalpel raised at the end of her first cut, staring down at the mass of tangled leaf litter and living vines crushing Wei Wuxian's organs.
Wei Wuxian, that idiot, saw her expression and tried to sit up to see what she was seeing. The needles she'd placed kept him down, paralized, but obviously the look on her face wasn't professional enough to soothe his curiosity.
Wen Qing had never seen such a significant hanahaki infestation in person.
She'd seen internal hanahaki structures before, often on the old or infirm. Patients finally came to a surgeon when their joint pains flared, or their bowel symptoms became unmanagable. When hanahaki settled in the lungs, it was usually cleared (or at least managed) by coughing, and certainly was obvious enough (and romantic enough) that the underlying source of suppressed emotional turmoil was soon addressed, unless the sufferer was particularly obtuse. When hanahaki filled the sexual organs, people wrote pornographic material about it, and usually fixed the particular problem with judicious and thorough application of cock or quim.
When hanahaki filled the golden core, it burnt away the leaves and buds, so there would be char and curled dried leaves, like the aftermath of a long drought.
Those who came for surgery usually had abdominal cavity infestations, or slow growing ossification of a peripheral limb. Then she'd cut them open and see all their regrets and unspoken emotional wounds tangling their insides with half-dead vines, buds which were set to bloom decades ago fossilized within their abdominal cavities, hardening the spaces where organs needed to move. It wasn't a simple procedure, to cut away the dead rot of a life half-lived, but it was the reason she'd performed enough abdominal surgeries at her age that she knew enough about the structures of a golden core to even be attempting an experimental procedure on Wei Wuxian and Jiang Chang.
Those whose hanahaki expressed itself in petals falling from their lips until they gained the courage to follow their hearts were the lucky ones. Those with painful orgasms, their spend filled with rose petals and seed pods, might have a few uncomfortable days (better than childbirth, worse than kidney stones, according to her mentor), but their minds could usually take the metaphysical hint, and do something about the unexpressed desires.
"Wen Qing?" Wei Wuxian asked.
"Be quiet. I'm concentrating," Wen Qing muttered, even as Wen Ning moved closer to Wei Wuxian's head, becoming a physical obstacle between Wen Qing's observations and Wei Wuxian's still conscious eyes.
She really should have knocked him out completely, but she had enough concerns about this procedure that keeping him awake, at least to begin, had seemed like the better plan.
Wei Wuxian's guts were atrophied, taking twisted paths around the growths in his belly. His liver was cradled in a net of brambles. One of his kidneys was a few cun higher than the other, impaled on a vicious looking spike. Everywhere else, there was the dead. Leaves composting into sludge around his lower spine. The fibrous remnants of something which had tied everything together years ago, but now only it's skeleton remained. It tugged at his small bowel and liver in ways which wouldn't have been too uncomfortable when he was smaller, but had to hurt as the organs had to find ways to move, shift, find new places to operate around the growths.
Wen Qing palpated his liver, the kidney she could reach, the lower bowel. They all had growths inside them.
She braced herself, reached inside and up, to touch the rhythmic movement of his diaphragm. That was distorted as well, under the left lung. Both sides of the diaphragm, then. Judging from how thorough the infestation was below, his heart and lungs were probably also surrounded by the manifestations of every emotion he has ever squashed. Wen Qing wouldn't have suspected it of him, if she hadn't seen his guts laid open. Verbosity was not the same thing as truth.
Wei Wuxian coughed, and then tried to move again. This could not be comfortable. The needles she'd placed were primarily paralysis, and their numbing qualities usually were overloaded rather quickly. If this was a patient appearing to her for surgical removal, she could take things slowly, one mass at a time, snipping things she could excise, shifting that which she could not. Even her mentors would have opened this man up multiple times, checking where the new growths sprouted between procedures; surely it was impossible to remove all the roots in a single surgery.
Wei Wuxian was not her primary patient. He was an organ donor. She only had this one time, because judging from the state of him, he was not going to come back for his own needs.
"Hold still, Wei-gongzi," Wen Ning said, and Wen Qing nodded her thanks to him.
Wei Wuxian didn't say anything. His eyes were glassy with pain, but he didn't make a noise. Of course he didn't. He was far too experienced with holding in his emotions; he might be able to lie to someone else, but not to someone who had seen his guts spread open, more plant matter than animal filling his innards.
"I'm going to do a quick and dirty clear out of your vines," Wen Qing said, meeting Wei Wuxian's eyes. "It won't be clean, and it won't be pretty. I can't see the primary rootball."
"You don't have to."
"I can barely see your golden core, let along extract it. I'll need to cauterize your meridians, or else the flow of unanchored qi will feed your infestation."
Wei Wuxian nodded, and Wen Qing returned to her work.
Vines clipped and extracted. A rotting mass of composted growths that slopped off her fingers when she tried to move it. Woody fibres pulled from between lengths of bowel, some penetrating thorns left in the tissue because extracting each one required a suture or two to close the bowel behind them, and some were too high a risk for infection.
Finally, she could see his golden core cleanly. Or not so clean. It was surrounded by a cage of flexible roots, like the flexible green air roots of an orchid.
Well.
That solved the problem of if a golden core would dissipate when removed from its owner's body.
Or rather, it meant the question of would a golden core maintain its shape would not be answered by Wei Wuxian's golden core. Wen Qing could transplant the whole mass, and then do her best to clean up the core once it was within Jiang Cheng.
She glanced over to her second patient, unconscious, waiting. Hopefully this level of hanahaki infestation was not a familial trait. Wei Wuxian still hadn't screamed. His breathing harsh, rattling--perhaps there was a tertiary infection in his lungs after all?--but he hadn't screamed. It was more unnerving than if he had been sobbing for the past hours. He'd been talking to Wen Ning, sporadically, nonsensically. She hadn't been paying attention to his words. Wen Ning would let her know if it was important.
She finished cleaning as much of Wei Wuxian as she could, before sterilizing her hands and moving on to Jiang Cheng.
Jiang Cheng's abdomen wasn't entirely clean of hanahaki, but she could at least see the origin. They were both so young for it; usually nothing took root until well after puberty, childhood worries coming and going in flickers of petals and leaves. Jiang Cheng had a ball of tangled roots, undefined, not yet growing vines or leaves or buds, tucked deep in his pelvis. Popo always said that unspoken love, romantic or platonic, started in the pelvis, near the lower dantian.
She cleared it quickly, a neat little mass leaching nourishment from the bone.
Then it was easy enough to sever the orchid-like air roots from wherever they originated inside Wei Wuxian, separate out the whole core, and lift it from Wei Wuxian's body. He was focused on her hands, on the mass of bright yellow green in her hands.
She used a few of the roots as conduits to attach Jiang Cheng's meridians to the core, and then started unweaving the flexible threads from around the core. It slipped further into Jiang Cheng's dantian, settling into place.
Wei Wuxian hadn't passed out yet. She kept expecting him to, simultaneously wondering why she was still surprised that he had not. The man must live his whole life in pain, so why would today overwhelm him?
She hoped, vaguely, with more medical curiousity than malice, that Wei Wuxian's hanahaki infestation was attached to his golden core. Perhaps Jiang Cheng would grow thick, inflated, filled with regret and tangles of emotions he couldn't express.
At the very least, she'd made a bit more room for the growths in Wei Wuxian's belly.
She stitched up her patients, and hoped nothing had taken root in her own belly today.