Chapter Text
There’s a lot of stories about the Burial Mounds. Mainly about how they devour anyone unlucky enough to fall in the ever-open, always hungry dark maw – and Wei Ying used to laugh and wonder how a plot of land could eat something, did they grow teeth and a stomach on their own ?
When you are laughing, it’s surprisingly easy to not suffer from nightmares. Laugh is repellant to darkness – well, unless the darkness is so strong and heavy that it manages to snuff happiness as a bucket full of water would douse a candle.
There are stories about the Burial Mounds changing people. That, he could believe – living beings are nothing but adaptable, he knows it from being an orphan in the uncaring streets and learning to choke on rotten radishes and sleep without a blanket and a roof to keep warm. Beasts and plants would come back no matter the devastation rained upon the land, the amount of poisoning in the soil and the air and the rain, and people were just the same if not worse because they don’t care to wait.
When a bird tries to fly above the Burial Mounds and doesn’t go high enough, it tends to fall from the sky – because of why, it’s unclear, either it’s fainting caused by the ambiant resentment or it’s the land directly assaulting any intruder – and when it hits the ground, the resentment surges and days later a cultivator is needed to shoot some unholy screeching creature down.
When someone manages to fall in the Burial Mounds, they really have to pray for remembering they packed a knife or another kind of blade, for they will need to slit their throat. The resentment still will twist and change them into a slimy nightmare dripping with blood and malice, but at least they won’t be aware of it.
Cultivators whisper about hapless travelers looking like their faces and their arms have been chewed off, looking like a clay statue that the artist decided to turn into a tiger or a deer midway, looking like they had been turned inside out with their blood replaced by flowing tar. Some of them still babbled about feeling the darkness right beneath their skin, creeping inside their bone marrow, poking and prodding like a carelessly cruel child playing with a cicada and not understanding why the critter won’t fly anymore after getting its wings ripped off.
Wei Wuxian has heard a lot of stories about the Burial Mounds when he’s thrown there by Wen Chao and his lackey, without his sword to end it now before his whole being could be turned and ruined into some awful mimic of a person.
The resentment surges, and it seeps deep inside Wei Wuxian, and he doesn’t even have a golden core anymore to try and fight the alien will and awareness now interested in playing with him until he bends and breaks.
And yet Wen Chao forgot something quite important, and the Burial Mounds don’t know it, Wei Wuxian is the First Disciple of Yunmeng Jiang, and Jiang is the strength of a river, Jiang is the shape of water.
No matter the obstacles on its path, water will flow and the river will find a way to the sea. Water is nothing but adaptable, and water doesn’t break. Indeed, it will erode the mightiest stone to sand and dust instead.
Wei Wuxian doesn’t bend and he doesn’t break and the Burial Mounds shriek in confusion and bewilderment as he takes the resentment and masters it, it’s exhausting and perilous just like redirecting a river flooding, but Jiang knows rivers and lakes, it’s easy when one knows the trick.
He walks out the Burial Mounds, and resentment swirls around him as a swarm of angry wasps, and he’s seemingly untouched, untwisted by the trial. He looks fine.
Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli are far too happy, far too relieved to be reunited with him to question such a blessing, and maybe Lan Wangji suspects something if the cold glint in his golden eyes and his insistance that Wei Wuxian should turn himself to the Cloud Recesses to be purified to death is to be taken as such, but Jiang Cheng won’t let him come too close, Wei Wuxian won’t give him the opportunity.
Because the resentment lies heavy behind the skin of his face, an icy weight in his dantian where he formerly held a golden core, and it just won’t stay quiet and nice.
It’s like an unruly child, always begging to be let out for playing and baffled when punished for pinching and hitting someone else, what’s happening, it was only playing, why is there screaming, why are you hurting ?
It would almost be funny in a very dark way if Wei Wuxian wasn’t so tired, if only people would stop pushing and pushing because he cannot keep the darkness properly leashed with the entire cultivation world (somehow embodied in a Lan-shaped package, Wei Wuxian still hesitates between Lan Wangji and Lan Qiren as the winner) breathing down his neck, waiting for him to trip and finally prove himself untrustworthy.
Wen Qing is horrified and disgusted and furious and intrigued when she gets to give him a physical, gets to see that no, for all his mastery of resentful energy the Yiling Patriarch still cannot prevent a few leaks and it has consequences.
Still, it could be worse. At least Wei Wuxian keeps his handsome features, even the Burial Mounds couldn’t bring themselves to commit the unforgiveable sin of depriving womankind from his prettiness ! Wen Qing outright snorts when he explains her this, because she’s a cold-hearted person without the slightest hint of the compassion a healer should have towards their fellow humans. Or if she ever had, serving Wen Ruohan beat it out of her.
« You cannot deny, this… this is a tremendous change » she hisses, and she stinks of anxiety so bad, it burns Wei Wuxian’s nose.
But what is a change more, in his life ? Life won’t stop throwing change at him, losing his parents, coming to Lotus Pier, meeting an unfairly beautiful young man glowing white under the moonlight, losing Lotus Pier, losing his golden core, seeing the Qishan Wen Sect be cast down from its lofty pedestal, turning his back on the cultivation world for the sake of the Wen Remnants.
Life won’t stop throwing change at him, and this is merely the latest one. Is he supposed to feel surprised at this point ? Because he’s completely exhausted instead, and he just wants to lie down and sleep for a hundred years.
Of course he won’t, his body hates him, and every surviving sect in existence now loathes him. Even Madam Yu’s ruthless, unrelenting hatred couldn’t prepare him for this – she merely wanted for him to disappear from Lotus Pier, but the righteous sects will stop at nothing less but the complete erasure of everything he wants to protect.
Such a prospect already was bad before he was thrown in the Burial Mounds, but now, with resentment gnawing on his insides and rearranging his biology, it’s unbearable to the point it’s physically painful.
Wei Wuxian is just so tired, and his body hates him, and the world just won’t stop spinning no matter how much he pleads. So he plasters a smile on his face, less and less convincing as time goes by, and he keeps trudging along.
He doesn’t have a choice.