Chapter Text
Wen Ning feels the resentful energy holding him together burning up. He feels smaller, and lighter, as the spiritual energy blazes around him. Though he is freely giving up his resentful energy, the spiritual energy still hurts, in ways that dead nerves cannot convey. Agony pierces directly through his soul, gouging it from his flesh.
The world becomes too bright for him to see, all shapes and colors washed out by brilliant light. The array tears apart the resentful energy holding his body together. Spiritual cognition freed from his corpse floats loose in the world, tethered to nothing.
Finally, a tear forms in the world. What is left of Wen Ning falls through. The world blisters, bubbles, breaks.
His spiritual cognition hits a barrier, triggered by the scraps of resentful energy holding his mind together. The barrier repels him. The wards outside Dafan village reject the resentment that holds him free of the world, meager though it is.
Wen Ning knows his soul is in that village. He feels the draw, but he is forced apart. His spiritual cognition will not join with that body, it is too young to hold him. They would both suffer if he tried to join his soul and merge cognition now, when the structures of the mind are immature.
Only the faintest scraps of resentful energy remain outside the wards of Dafan. The Wen who run the village do not neglect their duties – they perform proper rites, and respect the areas surrounding their home.
Wen Ning needs far more resentful energy than can be found in this area, if he plans to possess a corpse. Nothing here will give him close to the amount needed. Wen Ning turns away from his home, from his family, from his own entrance to this world.
The Burial Mounds are not particularly close to his home village, but as he travels through Qishan, resentment becomes easier to find and consume. The complacency of Wen Ruohan to the suffering of his people started early. Like all tyrants, he turned his malign attention first onto the people who relied on him. Those too weak to do anything while he watched them suffer. Only after he subjugated his own people and allied sects did he turn his attention to the rest of the world.
All that is left of the transported Wen Ning are the tattered remains of his future cognition, stitched through with the rage of wrongful death and wrath for the destruction of his closest friend. That is more than enough to draw and feed on the resentful and hungry ghosts he finds. Wen Ning knows death in a way that no other resentful creature could. He lived, died, and lived again in death.
He feeds and he travels, careful not to remove all resentful beings in his path. He regains more of himself as he draws in resentment – enough to know not to leave a suspicious line of drained yao, monsters and ghosts pointing to the Burial Mounds.
The barrier around the Burial Mounds keeps the living out and the dead in. Wen Ning passes through easily.
He expected the howling resentment to be worse than anything he experienced in the future, after it was tamed by Master Wei. But the dead land appears no worse than when last he visited, building a cenotaph with A-Yuan. The souls liberated by Master Wei were not drawn back to their torment even with the reversal of time.
Here in the land only inhabited by the dead, nothing changed. The burnt remains of their village and the offerings at the memorial stand untouched by the alteration in time-flow. While those who died after his birth are returned to their own past, those long dead remain unchanged. Perhaps because this was once a celestial land, the array could not affect it. Wen Ning drifts through the old village. His own memories assault him, as the Burial Mounds pull them from his consciousness.
H-hanguang-Jun, I felt the bond between Master Wei and I snap. Is there no way to h-heal him?
The Burial Mounds remember their master, and Wen Ning's loyalty to him. None of the resentment fights him... The scraps and fragments of resentful souls linger before Wen Ning, allowing him to feast and absorb them into his control.
M-master Wei would do anything in his power to save any one of us, but he would never risk innocent people. Even if it meant he would never reincarnate, he would still prefer that...
He has no physical form to bow in gratitude, but he takes care as he consumes the resentment to empathize with the suffering of those trapped here and never released.
The transfer of spiritual cognition from their adult self at birth – the mind could not contain it. There is no way to break time without self-sacrifice. A person already dead, with their spiritual cognition separated... Perhaps such a person could reverse time, and still maintain their own knowledge of the destroyed future.
Wen Ning is fully himself, as much as he can be without a body, after days? Weeks? He has no concept of how much time has passed while he nurtured the resentment of the Burial Mounds as his own power.
He will need a body if he plans to protect all of his family. As a mass of resentful energy, he will be easy to disperse by any cultivator. Just as the body protects the soul, a corpse will protect his cognition from spiritual attacks. He just needs to find a body that is freshly dead with resentment he can use to raise it, and then satisfy easily, leaving him in control of the corpse.
Xian-ge saved us so many times already. He would never want us to do this for him. But he isn't here to stop us anymore, because he was murdered. And his soul destroyed for good this time, never to reincarnate. There is no other way to get him back. Even if it changes my fate and prevents me from joining this reincarnation cycle, knowing we could meet again in another is worth it. Please, cousin Ning.
Wen Ning has enough resentment fueling him to be picky about the body he will inhabit. The ones in the Burial Mounds are too broken and decayed to be useful. He will find one outside.
The wards around the Burial Mounds have no power to keep him. This was his home after his death, he knows it more than any ancient, unmaintained barrier.
Wen Ning moves cautiously away from the protection of the Burial Mounds. At this stage he cannot be caught by a cultivator. His resentment is strong enough to be noticeable, but there is nothing to preserve him against attack.
He passes two villages, finding no bodies that will work for his purposes. As he approaches the third, he senses strong spiritual energy. Fortunately, the cultivators are not hunting, they are fighting among themselves. Wen Ning is ready to flee, when he senses a familiar qi.
It only takes one wisp of resentful energy snagging the ankle of Zhao Zhuliu during the battle for the sword of the young, injured cultivator to bury itself in his heart. They both look surprised.
Wen Ning knows he only has a moment to flee before someone senses his resentment, and he takes no chances, clinging low to the ground, turning wildly. After an hour with no pursuit, he reaches out his senses as far as they can go without exposing his consciousness. There is no sign of any tracking.
He creeps back, closer to where the fight occurred. The young cultivator lies passed out from blood loss, in no position to fight, or even notice the resentment. Wen Ning does not recognize his sect uniform. Zhao Zhuliu is dead.
Wen Ning only considers for a moment before he lets the resentment from the Burial Mounds out to animate the corpse. He will need to get the body back to the Burial Mounds in order to fully attach his spiritual cognition, but he has more than enough energy to move it like a puppet.
Zhao Zhuliu's own resentment demands he lash out and murder the cultivator that killed him, but Wen Ning trained as a healer. He forces the body to rip up clothing and bandage the still bleeding wounds on the unconscious cultivator. He does not have fine enough control yet to do more than that.
Wen Ning would have liked to clear the resentment and allow the soul to pass on, giving possession of the body to his own cognition freely. However, he will not allow Zhao Zhuliu to murder any more people. The possession can also be done without the appeasement of the original soul.
He forces Zhao Zhuliu's body to turn and make it's way back to the Burial Mounds.
Nightless City is less dreadful than he remembers it. People are less fearful than they would be in ten years, the earliest Wen Ning remembers being in the city. He still knows all the pathways and hiding spots he used to avoid Wen Chao in his first life, and uses them now to avoid people, even though he appears unremarkable.
To anyone looking at him, this is a sickly but otherwise normal mortal body – quite pale, and with somewhat stiff movements. The death wound on this body was less severe, and he had been able to preserve it quicker than Master Wei had been able to do for his own original body. A few months in the Burial Mounds allowed him to complete all the talismans used to attach spiritual cognition to a corpse and animate it fully under his control.
The wards of the Fire Palace ignore him – the talisman beads he carved to control the resentful energy animating his new body allow him to pass unnoticed. In his last life, he had been able to sneak up on Hanguang-Jun and Master Wei, even though Master Wei designed the talisman himself. There is nothing more advanced in the sect compound wards that can detect him. Several wards are still able to prevent him from entering, but he avoids those when he finds them.
The wards used to suppress resentment in the dungeons run through the foundation of the building. There are several places where he can scuff and wear them away without anyone noticing. Wen Ning bears the rage and vengeance of hundreds of unearned deaths from the Burial Mounds, seeding it in the corpses left to rot until their cell is needed again, giving them power far greater than anything seen in Qishan in generations. Even those with soul calming ceremonies will rise and fight. Anyone who ordered or participated in the torture and deaths of these people will not find it easy to eliminate them.
He does not destroy the wards. All Sect Leader Wen needs to do is stop killing dissidents, and the wards will hold.
Sneaking into the sect leader's wife's quarters is disturbingly easy. Their marriage was arranged, and never attained any sentiment. Possibly Wen Ruohan lets his wife enjoy her own affairs now that she has given him two sons. Or possibly he never wants her to feel safe and secure in her own home.
In a treasury room Wen Ning finds several expensive, but clearly unused, pieces of jewelry that would be fitting betrothal gifts for a bride bought by a powerful sect. Pieces meant to showcase wealth, with no consideration for comfort or the stylistic preferences of the bride.
The wards only try to keep the jewelry from passing the doorway, so Wen Ning uses water from the blood pool to complete the final stroke of an illusory butterfly talisman and escapes with a few of the smaller pieces. With no spiritual energy or blood of his own, he resorted to creative activation methods for talismans. The water from the blood pool works almost as well as blood itself. He carries a few small jars with him everywhere, as well as a few pre-made talismans Master Wei showed him during their time at the Burial Mounds.
(Wen Ning does not think about how much A-Yuan loved the butterfly talisman. If he does, he will think about how much he has already changed, and how any change at all may affect A-Yuan's fate and prevent his birth.)
Fortunately, Wen Ning requires no sleep so he has plenty of time to hide the stolen jewelry in the rooms of the most corrupt but least bloodthirsty elders and administrators. Hidden enough that the sect members themselves will not uncover the pieces, but that any more-than-cursory search will reveal them.
Even if the elders and administrators survive the bloodbath when the suppression wards fail, any investigation will reveal incredibly suspicious links between them and the sect leader's wife. None of them will be allowed a future in the Wen sect.
Wen Ning's last stop in Nightless City is the library. He does not know what the future will hold, and while he placed extensive wards around the interior of the Burial Mounds based on Master Wei's designs, it is possible that Wei Wuxian's parents are fated to die young – or that the beast destined to kill them has already escaped and is waiting.
He steals several basic books on cultivation and core formation, along with a few books on talismans that go over the radicals, placement, and effects. Nothing that can be traced back to the Wen sect specifically – old copies and basic information only. A few volumes of poetry and music, as well.
Master Wei had been happiest when designing new inventions, creating new ways to protect cultivators and civilians alike. Wen Ning also takes a book that goes over various methods of sealing devices and designs so they cannot be replicated or stolen. Fortunately, he had liberated a quiankun bag early in his exploration.
If he should be fated to meet Master Wei in this life, he will provide him with the foundation to thrive in this world.
Wen Ning knows he needs information on the cultivation world to cope with the changes rippling outwards from everything he has done so far. He cannot use Zhao Zhuliu's sword as a spiritual weapon, but he can use his own monstrous strength to cut through creatures using it as a regular sword. He takes night hunts against beasts and fierce corpses when he can, because he can eliminate them even without spiritual power if necessary, if they will not tell him their regrets and let him fulfill their wishes. There are few resentful creatures he cannot understand. Only spirits avoid him, as he is powerful enough to possess a body.
Wen Ning cannot use the name of his birth, so he becomes Wei Qionglin, a minor rogue cultivator and forager.
Every night hunt where he can help an innkeeper or brothel worker, he asks only for information. He has no easy charm like Master Wei, no gift for deception like Sect Leader Nie, and no pristine reputation like Hanguang-Jun. But he can be helpful and kind.
When food and shelter are all the payment someone can offer, he takes the food. He gives it to the people on the streets in the next village he goes through.
He accepts silver and gold when night hunting for those who can afford a cultivator's services – he has no use for food or shelter or riches, but he knows how his family suffered in poverty, barely avoiding starvation. He saves funds that could support people he cares for in the future.
He also forages for various herbs and monster parts as he goes, selling them to apothecaries, or making basic elixers for villages where there is no apothecary. Little in the world can truly harm him; he goes places the living cannot, and carefully collects high-quality ingredients.
(He never goes too close to Dafan, but he does place wards outside his first home equal to what protect the Burial Mounds. No resentful creature can enter, and people with killing intent will be denied entry. Little Wen Ning will grow up missing part of his cognition, but in a family of healers he will receive the best possible care.)
He quickly leaves any area where he senses strong spiritual power, indicating cultivators are present. Therefore, he only hears second-hand gossip from the common people.
A few months after his trip to Nightless City, almost two years after the birth of Wen Ning in Dafan, an innkeeper tells him that Nightless City was partially destroyed and a quarter the sect was killed or injured.
“Immortal master, the city itself was raised to the ground by demons possessing the bodies of rebels! The Chief Cultivator fought bravely against the evil creatures, but they overwhelmed him and consumed his body whole! They tore apart hundreds of cultivators before they were destroyed...”
Wen Ning goes to Lanling a week after the Jin sect hosted a conference to discuss the devastation at Nightless City. Fresh gossip flows faster than good wine in the social areas of Lanling. He re-visits a brothel where he previously laid to rest one of the workers who came back with unfinished business – the girl died unexpectedly and wanted to give back a comb she stole and hid from another worker.
Wen Ning greets one of ladies he talked with during his previous investigation, completing the pleasantries without blushing thanks only to his lack of blood flow. “Lady Wu, please accept these herbs, if brewed as a tinsane they h-help ease joint pain.” Wu Shunmei pours tea gracefully, but Wen Ning could see how carefully she moved during his last visit. Powders and paints can only conceal so much of her age. She accepts the package, and if she is surprised or displeased, Wen Ning cannot tell. Her composure remains immaculate.
“Young master, you are very kind to come visit us again. Hopefully you will relax and enjoy your stay, we were all very impressed with how quickly you settled poor A-Lian. And you asked for so little in return!” Her eyes sparkle as she teases him gently, coyly lifting sleeve to conceal her smile.
“Lady Wu is kind. I hope everyone is well, with no m-more disturbances since I left?”
“Not of that nature, but surely as a cultivator you have heard of the great upheaval – few of the Jin sect entertain here, but many other clans have passed through in the last two weeks. Such a terrible thing!” Lady Wu clearly remembers that he refused payment on his last visit, but asked for any gossip they could share about cultivators, since Lanling housed a great sect. She already knows why he is here, but would make him ask anyway.
“Ah, I have been night hunting in small villages these past weeks, I m-missed the conference entirely. You know more than I do, surely. Please, anything you can tell me would be appreciated.”
“So polite! Well, I doubt anyone knows much about what happened outside of the immortal cultivators, but I heard that the Wen sect suffered a great tragedy! The corpses of those executed for treason suddenly returned, and began attacking prominent members of the sect. The sect leader himself managed to destroy them, but only after losing many cultivators and his own life! The sect was represented at the conference by Wen Xinyi, who is the acting sect leader and guardian for the only remaining heir.”
Wen Xinyi was one of the younger aunts of Wen Ruohan. A competent cultivator, one who often taught meditation and advanced sword forms at Nightless City. Her husband married into the sect, but their own children died young. A safe choice, one who would not seek to supplant the direct bloodline heir.
“H-how could they allow the corpses to grow so resentful, surely the cultivators properly put them to rest even if they were traitors?” Wen Ning's forced calm is a blessing – in that his face did not show his actual thoughts – but also a curse, because he could not emote any real surprise. No doubt it led Wu Shunmei to interesting conclusions.
She leans in close to whisper, “That is something many of us mere mortals wonder! The sects were formed to protect everyone from resentful creatures, how could a great sect have created so many themselves? And ones fierce enough to kill cultivators? What hope would any person have against that kind of power?” Wu Shunmei lives in Lanling and clearly knows the answer to that herself. The Jin sect leaves no one with the impression that practicing cultivation requires any deep ethical foundation.
“Were the common folk protected during the attack? If the sect lost so m-many cultivators, how did the rest of the city fare?” Wen Ning had added a few standard repelling talismans to the main exits of the sect quarters, hoping it would direct the corpses to stay in the areas used by cultivators. In combination with enhancing their resentment only towards the ones who participated in their torture and murder, the non-cultivation staff should have been safe.
She lowers her eyes. “None of the discussion at Golden Carp Tower involved any information on the commoners.”
“Ah. If they have appointed an acting sect leader, then the heir m-must be too young to rule, is it one of Wen Ruohan's sons?”
She nods gently. “Yes, apparently only the youngest child survived out of the main family. Poor dear is only 9 years old, and has lost both parents and his brother.” Wu Shunmei clearly wants to move on from such a sad topic.
Wen Ning reminds himself that Wen Chao is only a child, one that has not yet committed any crime; he is merely spoiled and a bully. “How awful. Will they seek to make Wen Xinyi the new Chief Cultivator?”
“How could they dare? The Wen sect will be recruiting and rebuilding for the next decade! And the shame of causing such a thing to happen in the heart of their own sect...” She gives an exaggerated shudder. “Sect Leader Jin had the wealth to gain the support of several minor sects and the Wen, but neither the Lan nor Nie would support him. Ultimately, Sect Leader Jiang was selected as Chief Cultivator, though his sect is the smallest of the great sects.”
“H-how fortunate for him – he will be able to show his capabilities.” Wen Ning doesn't comment further on what he thinks of those capabilities. He saw Master Wei's back several times while living in the Burial Mounds. The lashes given by Madam Yu before the fall of Lotus Pier had not been the only scars from Zidian. Sect Leader Jiang either tacitly approved the abuse, or was completely ignorant of the well being of a child under his care.
Chief Cultivator Jiang will have his hands full with the chaos from Nightless City. What an inauspicious beginning to his ascension.
Wen Ning still feels guilty over killing Jin Zixuan in the previous time. In many ways the blow was deserved, as the man was attempting to disarm a guest defending himself from an ambush orchestrated by Jin Zixuan's own sect members who refused to stand down even when ordered. His actions were made out of naïveté and belief in the honor of his clan, despite the direct evidence of their duplicity. He never drew his sword, to attack or defend, believing there could be a peaceful resolution in compromise. Of course, by choosing to take physical action only against the side under attack, he effectively supported the aggressors.
Had he succeeded in taking Chenqing away, Wei Wuxian would have died, Wen Ning would eventually be destroyed, and the Jin would have collected the complete Yin Tiger Tally. The Wen remnants in the Burial Mounds would have been wiped out, with no protectors left. The Jin sect would have faced no repercussions for the ambush and murder of a guest they invited to celebrate the life of their newest heir. Jin Zixuan and Jiang Yanli would be very sad, of course. And Wen Ning does not want to think about what Jin Guangshan would have done with the full power of the Yin Tiger Tally.
Stopping Jin Zixuan was the right thing to do, but killing him was not necessary. Though Wen Ning was not fully in control of himself and the situation was extreme – he still feels the shame of his action.
Now, Wen Ning hopes he has not contributed to an earlier death for the young boy Jin Zixuan is at this time. Theoretically, his betrothal to the daughter of the new Chief Cultivator should protect him from most of the in-fighting following the death of Jin Guangshan.
The former Sect Leader Jin clearly felt the sting from his failed bid to become Chief Cultivator, and decided to ease it in the way he knew best. Frequent trips out of his heavily secured tower in order to drink and meet young women. Some paid, some flattered, some unable to say “no,” when he cornered them.
Finding a corpse directly wronged by Jin Guangshan took no effort at all. The first graveyard Wen Ning visited gave him several options, their resentment calling to his own. He chose the young maid that killed herself when she learned his rape of her resulted in a pregnancy. Her grievance was just and could not be denied. Even without additional resentment, she was close to rising. With a boost of raw resentful energy from the Burial Mounds, she burst from the ground and leapt onto the roof of a nearby building.
Wen Ning left the city shortly after, not wanting to be seen in the same area the corpse came from. Once the girl killed Jin Guangshan, she would be at peace and the resentment from the Burial Mounds would be appeased. She needed no direction on how to take her vengeance. Wen Ning ignored the part of himself that very much wanted to watch Jin Guangshan suffer.
Wen Ning's priority now is to protect the common people from the fallout of his actions. And to keep his family safe.