Chapter Text
䷝
When Lan Wangji reaches the small settlement where the Wen Survivors had once tried to make their home, days after the siege had been won, all that is left for him to find there is ash and bones.
With how bloodthirsty the Jianghu had become about Wei Ying and the poor people that he saved from certain death in the Jin prison camps, Lan Wangji knew the chances were low that he’d be able to save anyone. But from the moment that Xichen came to notify him about Wei Ying’s death, Lan Wangji hadn’t been able to keep himself from hoping at least the child of Wei Ying’s heart might have been spared the horrific slaughter and the destructive fire that had been set afterward to clean up the scene of the crime.
That is all he wanted, he’d told the heavens during his shaky sword ride. Just one survivor. Just Wen Yuan. The child was innocent in everything, after all, too young to even remember the war, so why did he have to die?
Frantically, he combs through every last hiding place that he can think of, ignoring the way the wounds on his back break open again with every careless move he makes. His robes are soaked through with his own blood from his shoulders to his lower back. The wicked whip marks have cut through enough nerves under the skin that they’ve largely stopped hurting.
At any other moment, not feeling such a grievous wound would have been worrying for Lan Wangji. Right now, he thinks of it as a blessing because it allows him to search the whole settlement without passing out from the pain.
In the end, though, it doesn’t take long for Lan Wangji to find proof of what he’d already feared to be true. A tiny skeleton lies haphazardly piled up with the rest of the Wens on the ashy ground outside the Demon Subdue Cave. Even with all the flesh burned off of it, there’s no denying who this is. Wen Yuan. Poor little Wen Yuan, who’d sat in Lan Wangji’s lap the one time Lan Wangji went against his uncle’s wishes and came to visit his Zhiji. Poor little Wen Yuan, who had lived in oblivious happiness despite his circumstances, who had smiled up at him and Wei Ying so sweetly, without any fear about what was to come.
With the bone-deep lashes on his back as of yet untreated and his spiritual energy depleted from his hurried sword ride to Yiling, Lan Wangji lacks the strength to give Wen Yuan and the rest of his family a proper burial. But he cannot shake the fear that vandals might come back to do unspeakable things to their remains, and so he does the only thing he can think of. He hides the bodies in the blood pool, the only feature of the Burial Mounds still seemingly untouched by the wrath of the sects.
On Lan Wangji’s first and only visit to the Burial Mounds, Wei Ying had told him that the pool itself was older than all the resentment in the Burial Mounds combined and that it was because of this that it was so perfect for raising his strong fierce corpses in. Whether Wei Ying had been truthful about that or not, one thing was certain: The Jianghu’s fire had not burned hot enough to evaporate any of the magically charged-up liquid.
For every bone Lan Wangji sends down into the red depths, he murmurs a prayer to any god who might listen to him. Once he is done with them all, he kneels in front of the water and presses his forehead to the ground, both an apology for how his own actions and inactions had partially doomed them, and also a promise that he will try to make amends for his missteps in life in whichever way he can possibly think of.
For a moment, just before he can step through the opening of the cave, he thinks he hears a familiar song echoing between the stone walls. Wangxian. Played inexpertly on a flute so that it sounds almost like human wailing, but the melody is so unmistakably Wangxian that it cuts through the numbness of Lan Wangji’s body.
Maybe some sort of echo of Wei Ying’s soul is trying to play their song as a lullaby for A-Yuan and his family, now that they have been at least somewhat laid to rest?
At the thought of that, Lan Wangji feels his eyes heat up with tears for the first time since his punishment. He had not cried when he’d learned of Wei Ying’s death, both because he didn’t want to give his brother the satisfaction of seeing Lan Wangji broken down by the news and also because, until now, Lan Wangji’s brain simply refused to believe it.
There is no denying the impossible cruelty of the universe now, though. The sharp pain of it finally clears through the fog in Lan Wangji’s mind and makes the tears spill over until he is sobbing uncontrollably, his red-stained fingers digging into the cave wall to keep himself from collapsing, curling into a ball, and waiting for death to reunite him with his beloved.
He cannot die yet, Lan Wangji tells himself. One day, he swears, he will come back to grant the Dafan Wen a proper burial the way Wei Ying would have wanted them to have. He will play Rest for little A-Yuan and his family and possibly even Wei Ying should some part of him still linger here then, so they can all pass on to the next life peacefully, knowing they were not forgotten, knowing that they’d not been reviled by the entire world, knowing that Lan Wangji did his best, even if it was too late to save them.
Lan Wangji climbs his sword and returns home with a new goal in mind. He will heal, he will return, and then, finally, he’ll be able to find peace for himself. He just hopes that the healing part of it will go quickly.
䷝
Lan Wangji crosses through the wards of Cloud Recesses before sunrise on the day after he goes to visit the Burial Mounds and finds it devoid of all life.
He is heavily weighed down both by his regrets and the wounds on his back that have started radiating with the tell-tale heat of infection. He is tired of it all. Tired of being hurt, tired of having failed in his quest to find Wen Yuan alive, tired of seeing with his own eyes the destruction that his sect has brought to a place meant as a sanctuary, and so he doesn’t say anything when his brother ambushes him at the gates to chastise him about his actions.
Xichen has a whole speech prepared that he gives Lan Wangji on their way to the Hanshi, one about righteousness and presenting oneself with honor and a whole list of other things.
“I should never have let Wei Wuxian get close to you,” Xichen finishes. “You were a shining example of our sect before that. Letting him lead you astray is the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”
Lan Wangji has already stopped listening by the end of Xichen’s speech, too enraged with the bullshit his brother is spouting.
The picture of little A-Yuan’s broken body is still fresh in his mind. In his opinion, anybody who had stood by to let this injustice happen could not then go around and claim to be disappointed in Lan Wangji without showing themselves as a sanctimonious fool.
That’s what he tells Xichen, too, once he stops lecturing him. And then he says the same thing to their uncle, and then the sect elders, once they come to investigate who it is that dares to have a screaming fit right outside their Sect Leader’s private quarters.
“Who are you to judge me?” Lan Wangji screams at them; for once, all poetic cadence gone from his words in favor of pure, raw feeling. “To judge me, or Wei Ying or the remaining Wens? Do the rules of our sect not state clearly that one should not bully the weak? That we should not oppress others just because we are strong?”
No matter how loud he gets, though, his words might as well have been silence for all the impact they have.
They net him not understanding nor an admission of guilt by the elite of his sect. Rather than that, the elders declare him unwell and then sentence him to indefinite seclusion in the Cold Pond Cave.
“I hope the water here will calm you and help you see clearly again,” Xichen says before he locks Lan Wangji inside his icy prison.
The water does not calm him. Nothing does.
Through the feverish nights that follow, during which his golden core tries to burn the infection from the wounds on his back, Lan Wangji finds it hard to think of anything but fire and rage.
For a while, he is not at all certain that he will survive it.
This must have been how the people in the Burial Mounds had felt when the combined strength of the great Sects came down on them, he thinks in one of the few moments where he’s lucid enough to be afraid for his life.
Lan Wangji doesn’t want to die.
He doesn’t.
He really doesn’t.
He’s just not sure if he wants to live, either. Even in service of bringing peace to the Wen like he’d sworn to do back in the Burial Mounds. What point is there to life, when the world turns out to be completely rotten? If those that promised to protect the weak were ruthlessly ground down under the guise of righteousness, but the ones who killed little children in peace-time became celebrated heroes instead?
After the fever finally abates, Lan Wangji still has this rage simmering under his skin.
Even three years of solitude don’t put a dent in his anger.
How could they, when all he has as company are his nightmares and regrets? How could they, when every night he wakes up and remembers the faces of innocents that were slaughtered for nothing but sect pride and social standing?
Lan Wangji uses his time in seclusion to strengthen his body and to learn how to live with the limitations that the punishment scars put on his movement. Even though he does not have Bichen with him, he still goes through his sword forms once every hour of every day.
Before his seclusion, he’d have described his cultivation as something airy or something light. That is the way that he’s been taught from childhood, after all. Lan Sect cultivation has always been likened to the clouds that surrounded the Gusu Mountains. But by the end of his seclusion, everything is different. The rage inside of him is no longer content to simmer in the background, and the airiness in Lan Wangji’s cultivation fans out into flames.
䷝
When Lan Qiren is the one who comes to release him from his forced seclusion, Lan Wangji refuses to engage with any of his uncle’s pointed digs at his failings. He curls his rage into a knot in his stomach, sitting and waiting there like a coiled snake, and then follows his uncle to the Jingshi, hoping to finally be reunited with his sword so that he can set out on the one path left to him after the all-encompassing fire has burned everything else away.
Later that night, when he picks up Bichen for the very first time in three years, its sword glare is no longer blue, the way it had been since it was forged for Lan Wangji from a piece of meteoric iron and a tiny sliver of Lan Wangji’s qi. It is a flickering flame instead, red like Wei Ying’s eyes had been when he’d rained his destruction down on Wen Ruohan and red like the blood that the Jianghu had paid him for with in return.
Without thinking about it much longer, Lan Wangji sets his foot on the single plank bridge that Wei Ying once walked before him.
He disavows all regrets and any sentimentalities and uses Bichen to set the Cloud Recesses ablaze.
The library goes up in flames first. Lan Wangji stands there for a long while, watching the flames licking up the sides of the building and then toward the roof. In the far distance, alarm bells start ringing. Lan Wangji remains where he is, content to give the youngest disciples time to run away.
They are still malleable, he thinks. They can still learn to be different. Can still choose to follow the path of justice and kindness and good. Can still turn their backs on the elite of the Jianghu and create something new and beautiful from the ashes that Lan Wangji plans to spread across all of the sects.
In the end, it doesn’t take long for Xichen to seek him out and confront him.
“What do you think you are doing? Are you crazy?”
Lan Wangji takes great pleasure in the fact that there is not a single bit of disappointment left in his brother’s eyes. All Lan Wangji can see there now is fear. Fear for him, or fear of him; Lan Wangji cannot tell the difference anymore. From the expression on his brother’s face, most likely neither can he.
Lan Wangji answers only the first part of the question and does so with a grim nod towards the library, “What should have been done long ago. Do you remember what Wen Xu said when he attacked the Cloud Recesses before the war? He said the fire would cleanse us and help us be reborn from the firelight.”
Xichen grits his teeth together and responds by pulling Shuoyue from its sheath.
Lan Wangji ignores his brother’s battle-ready stance and points Bichen towards the bamboo forest to set that ablaze as well. “During my seclusion, I came to understand that the Wens had the right idea, even if their execution was lacking. If they’d burned all of the Sects to the ground simultaneously then we could have started anew, with all the rot and decay that has infected the system gone.”
He remembers the blood pool back in the Burial Mounds and how it had been left untouched by the flames that the allied Sunshot forces used to try and clean up after themselves. Their fire hadn’t burned hot enough.
Lan Wangji is different, though. He will leave nothing untouched. He is an inferno just beginning to burn. A volcano on the edge of eruption.
During the war, they called him Hanguang-Jun, the light-bringing lord, and now Lan Wangji will bring them light in the form of flame—to show them the error of their ways.