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"Wei Wuxian! Where did she go?" Jiang Cheng screamed. He grabbed his brother by the front of his hanfu and shook him; Wei Wuxian felt almost as thin and fragile as—as— "WHAT DID YOU DO TO SHIJIE?!"
"Aiya, Jiang Cheng, I don't know!" Wei Wuxian shouted back, showing real panic in the visible whites around his eyes that made Jiang Cheng start panicking, too.
"What do you mean you don't know?! Another accident? I thought you insisted your cultivation of resentful energy was under control!"
"Ahaha, well, I mean..."
But people seemed finally to be noticing what was going on. "There he is!" voices cried out. "Get him! Death to the vile Yiling Laozu!"
Jiang Cheng felt his panic expand into rage in his chest. "GET BACK! ALL OF YOU!" he roared, lashing out with Zidian. "NO ONE TOUCHES HIM UNTIL I KNOW WHAT HE'S DONE WITH A-JIE."
"Jiang-zongzhu..." Nie Mingjue started to approach, but Jiang Cheng swept Zidian in a warning arc.
"Jiang Wanyin," Jin Guangshan tried, reappearing now the Yiling Laozu had been captured, and it would be so fucking ridiculous how everyone was so afraid of his idiot brother except they both still had their sister's blood on their hands.
Zidian snapped again; Jiang Cheng was done, done with all of this bullshit. The whole world could come at him if they liked, this was where he drew the fucking line.
—SIX MONTHS LATER—
Houtou Castle was half demolished. Ukoku turned at bay, cornered between Genjo Sanzo, Seitan sutra slung hastily across his shoulders over the Maten, and Sharak Sanzo with the recovered Uten clenched in her fist. Everyone was wounded from the fight to defeat the revived Gyumaoh. Gyokumen Koushu lay buried in the rubble behind them, Kougaiji almost dead at her hand.
Beneath the bandage covering the ruin of his eyes, Ukoku smiled a bloody-toothed grin and began chanting the Muten. The mountains seemed to shift as the other two sanzos invoked their sutras as well. Shadows billowed, unspooling darkness, emptiness that was suddenly filled with the notes of eerie music wreathing around two figures stepping out from its depths.
"Oh, great. What have you done now?" Jiang Cheng demanded
"What?" Ukoku said.
"What fresh hell is this now?" Genjo Sanzo snapped.
Wei Wuxian was making a pitiful face at his brother. "Aiya, Jiang Cheng, why is it everything is always my fault?"
"Yes. Why is that."
But Wei Wuxian was turning his head as though tracking a scent in the air or listening to a sound inaudible to everyone else present. "Someone around here is definitely doing something naughty with resentful energy."
Jiang Cheng groaned under his breath and readied his spiritual weapons.
"Don't know what it is, but I bet I can mess it up!" Wei Wuxian concluded brightly.
"Oh, no you don't," Ukoku tracked this, and restarted his recitation.
Lifting Chenqing to his lips, Wei Wuxian started to play. The shadows that had begun to deepen swirled and boiled up around them both as the Muten sutra unfurled. Jiang Cheng lashed out with Zidian, which was an effective move in almost every confrontation, and was thrown back by a flare of power. Ukoku's yelp blended into a shrill, piercing note of the music that drove an inrushing of darkness.
Abruptly, there was silence. The shadows vanished, leaving only Wei Wuxian standing with Chenqing in one hand and a tightly rolled scroll in the other. All eyes were on him. He plastered a smile on his face and gave a nervous laugh. Genjo Sanzo reached into his robes and bit a misshapen cigarette from the crushed pack, which he offered to Sharak Sanzo in turn, then stood at a loss for how to light it.
"Hey, asshole," Gojyo said from behind them, sitting slumped against a fragment of the once-massive walls. He held up a lighter. "So, Sharak," he croaked after his first drag, "do you think this Jiang guy is related to your girlfriend?"
Despite the cold, Jiang Yanli stood outside on the walls at dusk, looking down the road—a path, really—that led from the monastery's fortified gates. For just a few more minutes, she would indulge herself in yearning for the woman who had promised to share this new life with her, rather than thinking of all that had been left in her care. Most of those able to fight had gone with Sharak, but the novices had remained, and that kept at bay the silence she remembered from the early, ghostly days of rebuilding Lotus Pier.
Soon, her own son would be running along those familiar paths, bringing life to them once more. His uncles would teach him to swim among the lotuses and row out with him for lazy, stolen days under the summer sun.
Here in these mountains of winter, where the heavens seemed close enough to reach out and touch, the sun had already slipped behind its ridged screen. Drawing in a piercingly cold breath, Jiang Yanli turned her thoughts as firmly as her body, away from idle fancy and back to her chatelaine's duties.
A resounding crash shook the evening's crystalline peace. Rushing along with the sentries to see what was towards, Jiang Yanli's first thought was of the avalanches this might touch off. She'd have to see if there was a direct threat to the monastery, then make sure rescue parties were ready to mobilise—
"What are you trying to do, kill us?" a voice came echoing sharply up from below; Jiang Yanli's breath caught in her throat. "Wei Wuxian!"
"—It's all right." Jiang Yanli had to clear her throat before her voice came out audibly. "It's my brothers."
Flying down the stairs, though, the first person Jiang Yanli saw coming through the gate was—
"Sharak!"
"Yanli!" Strong arms enfolded her, squeezing her breathless. Then there were chapped lips on hers and the familiar acrid taste of the incense sticks that seemed to be a foundational part of a sanzo's observances.
"...A-Jie?" Jiang Cheng's voice broke in on this long-awaited reunion, reminding Jiang Yanli of another, less looked-for.
"Uh," Wei Wuxian added.
Jiang Yanli his her face in Sharak's shoulder for a moment before gathering her poise back around herself.
"Found something of yours while I was out," Sharak said, and Jiang Yanli had to cover her mouth again as giddy giggles threatened to overtake her.
"How ever did you find them?" Jiang Yanli asked. Peeking around Sharak's formidable shoulder, she noticed for the first time how many others there were: the other sanzo's party, monks who had gone with Sharak to fight, a few youkai faces she didn't recognise. A lifetime of training asserted itself, and she stepped around Sharak to address them all. "Please, be welcome, come inside. We'll get a warm meal into you all. We'll hear all your tales in due—ah!"
Laughing with delight, Jiang Yanli let her brothers hug her, soothing away all their garbled apologies. Oh, oh, but they'd found each other again. That was most important; the details could wait.
Nevertheless, she couldn't help noticing—"A-Xian, what's this? Have you started wearing the Jin mark?"
"Oh, ahaha, that," Wei Wuxian said nervously. "Apparently, I'm the twenty-fifth Muten Sanzo of China!"
As it turned out, there were advantages to cultivating resentful energy through one of the foundation scrolls of heaven and earth.
"I've got someone here who wants to see you!" Wei Wuxian announced, holding the infant Jin Ling as though he were made of spun glass.
In truth, he was quite the opposite. "He's so big now!"
Just as carefully, Jiang Yanli took her baby back into her arms. She tried to brace herself for every eventuality. What if he started crying and wouldn't stop? What if she was a stranger to him now? What if—
A chubby little hand reached up for her face as Jin Ling made heartbreakingly familiar little baby grumblings. Jiang Yanli half-laughed a sob of relief and looked up to find Sharak hovering awkwardly, looking uncharacteristically nervous.
"And this is your A-Ma Sharak," Jiang Yanli told Jin Ling, turning him. "Do you want to say hello, Ling-Ling?"
Tentatively Sharak extended two fingers towards the baby; he seized one tight in his perpetually sticky grasp. "Hello, small child. I'm glad you're here. Your mother's missed you very much." Sharak stroked his big, blocky head—so much hair now!—and let a rare tender smile out when this was also well-received. "I guess there's two of us for her to look after, now."
Jiang Yanli thought if her heart grew any fuller it would burst.
"So, how are things in the jianghu?" Jiang Yanli asked, alone with her brothers for the moment. She still hadn't set down Jin Ling, even though her arms were starting to get tired. "I hope Jin-zongzhu didn't make things difficult for you at all."
"Ummm..." Wei Wuxian exchanged a freighted look with Jiang Cheng.
Jiang Cheng visibly suppressed a sigh and cut to the chase. "He's dead."
"We don't know he's dead," Wei Wuxian argued, with the sound of repeating himself.
"Oh, my. What exactly happened?" Jiang Yanli said, rather than several other options she was far too well-brought-up to voice.
Wei Wuxian put his head on one side. "Funny thing. Apparently the Jin had some people experimenting with demonic cultivations. When I had that, uh, little altercation with that Doctor Yi-Yi guy, it seems their piece of yin metal went crazy, too. Jin Guangshan was there—checking up on their progress, I guess—and got sucked right in with the rest of them."
"They haven't shown up here, have they?" put in Jiang Cheng, sounding worried.
"How awful!" Jiang Yanli said, ignoring this exchange of glances as she had the previous one. It was sad about the other cultivators, anyway, and she hated to think of more political turmoil, especially if it was going to be laid at Wei Wuxian's door. "We'll certainly keep an eye out, though. Who's running things in Lanling now? Guangyao wasn't—"
"He was in Cloud Recesses at the time, visiting Zewu-jun," Jiang Cheng said.
Jiang Yanli felt genuine relief at that. "How is he? Did he ever marry that sweet Qin Su?"
Jiang Cheng's brow furrowed in his thinking frown as he made an effort at recollection. "Uh, he broke off the courtship when the news came about Jin Guangshan. Said he couldn't think of such things while he was in mourning."
(What really happened—although none of those present would ever learn the details—was that shortly before Wei Wuxian's transdimensional experiment, Jin Guangyao returned from making his usual devotions to Merciful Guanyin and the Blessed Jiroushin, patron of administrators, to find an unsigned note on his desk. It suggested that he investigate more thoroughly before seeking the hand of Qin Su. Jin Guangyao, who had been contemplating some rather direct measures to move the betrothal along, instead announced a sudden trip to Cloud Recesses, leaving Jin Guangshan to conduct the inspection of Xue Yang and the other demonic cultivators on his own. Sometimes, mercy is more effective when exercised before the fact.)
"Uh-huh, naturally he'd be real broken up about it," Wei Wuxian said, voice dry with sarcasm. "Oh, well, at least he has Zewu-jun to comfort him!"
It was Jiang Yanli and Jiang Cheng's turn to share a look.
"And Jin-furen?"
"Retired to some estate or other," Jiang Cheng reported. "I don't think she wanted to let Ling-Ling go."
"Yes, I see. Well, do please convey my gratitude to Guangyao, along with my best wishes. I'm sure he'll do a wonderful job as sect leader." And she hoped silently that Jin-furen might find peace, which she never would have watching Jin Guangyao rule in Koi Tower. The situation between the two of them had always been so painful to witness, and Jiang Yanli able to do so little about any of it. How grateful she was, to be free of all that web of politics and resentment. And how fortunate, to not have to feel guilty in her escape. "And you two? Have you cleared up all that Yiling Laozu nonsense finally?"
Wei Wuxian gave a nervous laugh. "Ahahaha, I think they're more scandalised by my being ordained as a Buddhist priest than when I was just cultivating resentful energy. Lan Zhan is still trying to persuade me from my heretic ways. But guess what! He found little Wen Yuan alive and rescued him! Ah, he's just the best!"
His siblings exchanged another look. Oh, well. It would probably take a whole other order of miracle for Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji to get themselves sorted out.
Despite telling herself everything would work out in whatever way it was meant to, Sharak felt a persistent tension leave her shoulders when Jiang Yanli's brothers departed in a whirl of shadows. The arm she had around her wife tightened in reassurance, and she leaned in to peer at the thickly bundled lump that was their son, still getting used to that. Jin Ling scrunched his serious blob of a face back at her in a very un-Yanli-like fashion. So long as he didn't end up taking after his uncles. Sharak frequently got the sense that Kanzeon was laughing at them all, most frequently when she visited the temple and heard actual laughter echoing off the incense-blackened vaults of the ceiling. And people actually devoted their lives to gaining holy favour.
"Are you two making faces at each other again?" Jiang Yanli asked, laughter in her voice.
"He started it," Sharak said, lifting the child-lump from her wife's arms and holding him up, the better to fix him with a stern look. "I told you you'd have to look after both of us."
Jiang Yanli shook her head at herself, smiling broadly. "There's nothing in any world I'd like more."