Red Sun

He couldn’t sleep. It’s not as surprising as anyone who knew him might have thought (but your problem is that there isn’t one, right? You killed them all). It wasn’t hard to stay awake as a simple man, albeit one with the stubbornness of a mountain; without the golden core, he was an ordinary man, and five nights without sleep was all that could send his mind into, however briefly, oblivion. But he has a golden core. And he is young; he is strong in body, even if exhausted in soul; and he cannot sleep because he sees all those whom he has failed; and it is his fault; his, his, his, his, h i s— That is why Wei Ying does not sleep. It’s not even a matter of not trusting that Wen Ruohan won’t actually kill him in his sleep (he’d be so happy to die in a peaceful sleep), but that his worst enemy is the closest thing to him. He spent his first nights gazing into corners: into the darkness that comforted him; into the distant stars that would not let him take his place beside them; into the emptiness from which he saw no way out, but which was mercifully silent. Such were his first eight nights, spent in long-awaited stillness and soft solitude. Without the ghosts of the past in the people he had killed or let down; without the new faces in the clothes whose lives he might have stolen in the war; without the interactions and lies, the play of a lonely broken actor when his sister, his family, his son are dead. “Ha—”, he grasps his chest, not breathing again, again feeling the pain he tried to ward off; shijie; he gasps, and the sound from his throat is closer to an animal than a human sob; A-Yuan; and he coughs, this time without blood, though he expected to see it. He vomits straight up on the sheets, bile and water, because he hasn’t eaten anything since he got here. There’s still no blood, and it makes him laugh. And he laughs, panting. It hurts. Are you so pathetic that you are incapable of walking away with the dignity of a cultivator falling into madness? — is a strange voice, it sounds like the layers of Madame Yu and Jiang Cheng; they would be right, so right. Wei Ying laughs in pain; Wei Ying sobs as he gasps in laughter; Wei Ying spends the next four nights like this. On his eleventh sleepless night, he gets out of bed for the first time and picks up a dainty brush. And he once again paints arrays of his work.

***

Wen Qing could admit that her opinion of her uncle was never positive, to say the least. (Wen Qing’s positive opinion, however, was reserved for those whom she considered her family, not those who were.) And she was extremely unhappy with what had been going on recently. In particular, the marriage of her uncle. If Wen Ruohan was on the same level as her grumpy patients that never listened to her, after that he fell into the trash category. Unfortunately, she could not say such a thing out loud about the leader of her clan. At least for the safety of her beloved family. So Wen Qing clenched her teeth when she learned of her uncle’s marriage to a fifteen-year-old boy. She was silent when he asked for a tincture or incense of herbs to help 'relax' for the first wedding night. She was silent when more of those herbs went missing from her office, and the thief didn’t even bother to hide the scene of the crime — only a man who thought he owned the place could do that. But it had been fourteen days since her uncle’s spouse had appeared (she would rather die than call the young man, who was only a year older than her brother, her boqiu*), and she, as the head doctor of the whole outrage, had been obliged to see the young man for at least ten more days. So she came to other people’s rooms on her own. Wen Qing was prepared for some kinds of patient stress, from a doomed attitude, to polite humility. Well, she was not prepared for mania. That doesn’t mean she didn’t deal with it; only that she didn’t expect to see it here and now. “No-no-no, Wen-zongzhu, I am more than sure that I could not have thought of such a thing”, Wei Wuxian pronounces, looking at the papers laid out in an array unknown to his; the young man is pale, the skin under his eyes darkened and exhausted, his pupils narrowed, and his arm movements excessively wide; “I don’t even remember wanting to play with time”, there is a chuckle that says more about the young man’s moral state than the wrinkled state of his clothes and the chaotic room. Wen Ruohan, who threw only a nod in her direction, not even taking his eyes off of Wei Wuxian, casually confirmed the topic of their conversation: “I only show you what I remember, Yiling Laozu”, the title cuts to the ear from being unused; Wen Qing doesn’t think she’s ever heard anyone call Wei Wuxian that before; or anyone, for that matter. She comes closer, picking up another quiet and fleeting: 'that shouldn’t even have worked, where can you find that much energy…? ' — and decides to cough, announcing herself. “This doctor’s name is Wen Qing”, she bows reflexively, years brought up as the head of the second branch of the family, “nice to meet you, Wei-zhengshi*”. She feels the approval of her uncle to her right — disgusted. Wen Qing raises her head and she thinks the young man is a short step away from hysteria.

***

Wen Ruohan easily admits to himself that he is troubled. Exactly as a shard of his soul, he watched Yiling Laozu fade away, and could do nothing. Therefore, he tries to intervene. He insists on his presence in the light of day, where Yiling Laozu is just sitting on the veranda, looking out over the city, empty and unseeing, very far from both of them and this city (maybe he is mentally in the Burial Mounds with his grandson; maybe with his brother and sister among the rivers). When Yiling Laozu actually looks at the streets in the distance, at the training of Wen’s disciples, he grows even darker — Wen Ruohan wants to think that he knows Yiling Laozu’s train of thought, and he must be thinking about how he could have killed all those people in the war, and so he blames himself. (And Wen Ruohan really knows this man well.) When the nights come, Wen Ruohan lights incense to calm him, hoping that at least this time Yiling Laozu will give his wandering mind a rest. It doesn’t. So he tries again. And again, and again, and again. As many times as it takes before Yiling Laozu returns to the people. Wen Ruohan will make the world wait, saying nothing, and keeping his distance so as not to frighten him away. Yiling Laozu did not rest from the… siege, did he? And before that: the death of his sister. Wen Ruohan does not want to see that grief again. Building someone else’s happiness is a long process. (He never thought he would open the scrolls of philosophical reasoning about the human soul that Nie Tao had once insisted on. He did not open them when his didi went into obscurity. What is that to say about him as a brother?) Wen Ruohan was not an understanding or loving man, he was not even known as a patient man; however, death taught him the latter. He would choose patience over powerlessness any day. He learns to wait by doing little, very, very little for such a beautiful man as Yiling Laozu; and let it be that he wants to beg the man to eat, let it be that he wants to put him to sleep, let it be that he wants to give Yiling Laozu whatever he wants — he knows that, in fact, he needs nothing. Not now, not at this stage. So Wen Ruohan merely stays nearby, waiting. And then a small part of Yiling Laozu returns: the one who conquered the Burial Mounds; one that would cause a furor in the cultivator world if someone saw it; the one who sent them here. Yiling Laozu began to create. His hands covered in ink, and papers scattered in the chaos between the usual sheets, book and talisman — all the things he was used to seeing in a couple of years in a dark cave as a dead man. Yiling Laozu is pale and unhealthy-looking, but he has more life in him than the last sun, when he silently refused to even get out of bed (Wen Ruohan urgently summoned Wen Qing, desperately wondering if he had made a mistake in letting it go to waste). Yiling Laozu turns in his direction, abruptly and with that frenzy of pursuing a particularly slippery idea: “Wen-zongzhu”, and the smile is unkind to him, and full of the madness of the man who destroyed his army single-handedly; and Wen Ruohan feels that there is more peace on his heart, for Yiling Laozu is showing emotion, “the man I wanted to see”. Wen Ruohan cannot resist his urge to smile, though completely opposite to his interlocutor, and completely soft. “What can I do for you, Yiling Laozu?” the man snorts in his direction as the smile slides off his lips; the sharp tip of his brush is pointed in his direction, ink splattering from the tip onto the floor and some papers. “Don’t call me that”, Yiling Laozu says and, before Wen Ruohan refuses, immediately continues, “are you the reason we are in the past?” Extremely straightforward and without the possibility of circumventing the question. Anyone else would have found the question pointless. Except for both of them, of course. “I will not cease to be amazed at your character and ingenuity, Yiling Laozu”, and said with absolute sincerity, nodding his head; he sees Yiling Laozu involuntarily wrinkle his nose; maybe at the appeal, maybe at the compliment, you don’t know for sure here. “I understand that you were a ghost with… Wens”, there is a hiccup, it is full of swallowed pain; Wen Ruohan wants to release him from the pain, taking for himself, “but!” some playfulness, sharpness and a drop of that naughty boy that Yiling Laozu was. “How could you send us here?” Wen Ruohan comes closer, taking a seat on the other side of the table, avoiding the sheets of paper with the masses already written on them; he would not want to trample on Yiling Laozu’s magnificent work. “Yiling Laozu, this is just your workings of why we are here”, he holds out his hand, asking for a brush; from hand to hand, not touching each other, of course, “I have caught sight of your work, and embodied it”. He draws, much and extensively, it was a great seal that he was able to recreate instantly and from memory, only by the grace and fury of the dark energy — their goals then were as perfectly aligned as ever. It is a long process, where he passes part by part to Yiling Laozu, who grunts and wails more and more. Wen Ruohan can understand why: to perform such a ritual would require thousands of sacrifices. It is possible, but costly. (There were enough dead in the Burial Mounds who wanted rest, and would easily give themselves for the salvation of someone who had been good to them over long, wicked centuries; Wen Ruohan is one of those souls.) Ink spread as Yiling Laozu dipped the brush in the inkwell and then waved his hands, his loose hair was more tangled than usual, the red ribbon found its usual place, and Yiling Laozu’s reasoning with himself grew louder and livelier. Wen Qing came, and he nodded to her, not daring to take his eyes off Yiling Laozu, uncomprehending his own invention — marvelous sight, if you ask him. Unfortunately, and he could foresee it, Yiling Laozu was not yet ready to see his niece. This pause, this moment of silence, this breathless moment — his another failure. He should have seen it coming. Yiling Laozu was unprepared, and Wen Ruohan was terribly presumptuous. Yiling Laozu smiles, broken and wrong, and blood flows from the corners of his eyes, nose, ears. The second qi deviation.