by Zhiye
Content warnings: graphic depictions of violence
If you asked Jiang Cheng to make a list of the things he found important, you would be handed back a fistful of torn up paper. (Why would he give you a list of the things you could attack him with? What kind of fool do you make him out to be?)
But maybe if you collected all those scraps, smoothed them out and arranged them back into a piece of paper, and did some guessing for the missing pieces—you would find three words.
First; family.
(“Shijieeee,” Wei Wuxian whines, clutching onto Jiang Yanli’s sleeve like he was a five-year old child instead of a sixteen-year old genius disciple. He had grown tall that summer, surpassing Jiang Cheng in height for the first time, which quickly became his new favourite thing to tease Jiang Cheng about. It only made his childish acts and exaggerated pout on his face seem even more bewildering.
“A-Xian,” his sister says, laugh in her voice, reaching up to ruffle Wei Wuxian’s messy hair. “You silly thing. I can always make more soup, okay?”)
Second; dignity.
(“An embarrassment! Do you have nothing better to do than shame our sect’s name?”
The whip cracked before it hit.
How, you will ask, how does he know?
It’s a sickening sort of warning, perhaps, and he would squeeze his eyes shut and brace himself against it. It would hurt less if he tensed up, some part of his brain whispered.
But what’s more pain, when your knees burn from kneeling, before a mother who does not know, taking beatings for a brother who will not know about the whip marks across your back. What’s more pain? Does it matter, then? He would spend the afternoon laying in bed, feigning illness while your sister looks on in worry and too-much-knowing; while the brother whom you’d taken the beatings for scampers about, unknowing and uncaring of anything but his lotus seed haul.
What does more pain matter?
(Dignity was choked out beneath the hands of family.)
He was the son of the Violet Spider. He was the future leader of Yunmeng Jiang. He was Jiang Cheng, and he—)
And thirdly,
There was no third.
(Thirdly, the unwritten one on the tip of his pen, the one that lurked in the deepest darkest parts of his chest—his parents’ approval. His parents’ approval, which came as often as a blood moon. His parents’ compliments, his parents’ praise. He would even settle for his parents’ attention. (He would not do the foolish thing of hoping for his parents’ love. He was too old for that kind of dreaming.)
The harder he sought for compliments, for satisfaction, the more painful his mother’s words. The more it hurt when his father looked at Wei Wuxian (like he wished he was his blood son and not Jiang Cheng). The more it hurt when he looked at Wei Wuxian and thought both brother and (his mother’s voice in his head) enemy.
He wasn’t bitter.
He wasn’t.)
“A-niang!” he cries, clutching onto his mother’s arm, only to be thrown aside. “A-niang, stop this,” he cries, crawling on burning knees to grab his mother’s robes. “A-niang!” he cries.
(He sees the fear that flickers in his brother’s eyes. It flickers, once, and disappears as if Wei Wuxian has drawn closed the curtains to the windows that peer into his soul and what faces Jiang Cheng is a wooden wall that lets nothing through.
But he sees the fear. It’s there, even if Wei Wuxian tries to cover it up.)
“Stay out of my way, useless child!” his mother snaps, and Zidian snaps. Across Wei Wuxian’s back, it snaps. Once, twice, three times is not enough, and blood soaks through purple Yunmeng Jiang robes.
He crawls. “Mother, have some mercy!” he sobs.
When did it come to this? He knew his mother hated Wei Wuxian, loathed Wei Wuxian, blamed Wei Wuxian for all the misfortunes that fell upon the sect. She hated him, and she made it clear, to her husband and to her children and to the boy who she hated so much.
But never did he think his mother would ever draw Yunmeng Jiang blood.
(But then, had she ever thought of Wei Changze’s son as a member of Yunmeng Jiang?)
Wei Wuxian’s eyes are dull.
Wang Lingjiao cackles.
Lotus Pier cries. He cries, eyes going wide, unable to believe what is happening right in front of him.
Lotus Pier screams. He screams, throat going raw, sobbing and screaming and thrashing as Wei Wuxian drags them away.
Lotus Pier burns. He burns, body crackling in the flames, and not even the torrential rain that comes (a mirror of his sorrow) can put that fire out.
Lotus Pier dies, and oh, does Jiang Cheng die with it.
(Blood, he thinks. Blood. He smells it. It hangs, heavy in the air, along with the smell of mildew and old water. Frenzy, panic, desperation fills the air. He cannot move. His arms feel like cold stone. He aches with something bone-deep, aches like how he felt when Wen Zhuliu plunged his hand into his abdomen and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until his core shattered, it aches like that.
“I’m sorry.” Something drips onto his face. One, two, three. He tastes salt.
“I’m sorry,” someone says, voice thinner than silk thread, weaker than a bubble of morning dew. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve failed.”)
“I’m sorry.”
He is so tired.
(He comes to, uneven ground beneath his feet. He comes to, and he opens his eyes but still cannot see, and remembers the thick cloth tied once, twice, three times around his head. He comes to and for a moment he is confused, he is disoriented, and he does not understand.)
“I’m sorry,” they repeat, and they let go.
Jiang Cheng is so tired of hearing those words.
(“The operation to repair your golden core has failed.”)
Drip, drip.
Jiang Cheng is four days into laying in a damp cave when a thought bubbles out of the rest.
What am I doing?
Drip, drip. He’s long gotten used to the drip, drip of water somewhere in the shadows of the cave. Periodically he will fade back into existence to hear that drip, drip, and then he will fade out again. Light moves across the ceiling of the cave, but he cannot tell if it is day or night or not.
For him, the skies have stopped moving.
Drip, drip.
On the fourth day, hundred-thousand-ten-thousand drips, Jiang Cheng asks himself:
What am I doing? he asks, and another dozen drips pass before he pushes himself off the cold, stone, ground. He runs a hand over the phantom emptiness in his stomach. He has to remind himself to straighten his shoulders.
But what is the point? He picks himself up. He picks Zidian up but it does not hiss, does not spark, does not wrap around his wrist. What is the point?
Drip, drip, says the cave. Drip, drip, but his tears have already dried.
The sun is high as he stumbles through the market, weak from hunger. Right. He couldn’t go days without eating anymore. Was the emptiness in his stomach from the lack of food or the lack of a golden core? He didn’t know.
He’d smudged his face with dirt and undid his hair before he entered the city. They would recognise him. He bought a drab cloak, the cheap fabric rubbing against his skin, but providing disguise nonetheless.
His coin purse is heavy, one blessing at least. With his brother never remembering to bring money, Jiang Cheng always found himself paying for all the things that caught Wei Wuxian’s eye. He stumbles, once, twice, but straightens back up every time. It must look strange, someone so haggard and messy with a posture befitting a noble. Maybe he should just let his shoulders curve in.
What’s the point?
He lurches toward an inn restaurant. “P—” His throat seizes and he lets out a series of chest-deep coughs. “May I borrow a paper and pen,” he manages at last. The innkeeper, eyes deep with pity, offers him a cup of water as well. It goes down tasting like blood.
A-Jie,
I need to go. Don’t worry, don’t look for me. Stay in Meishan, keep yourself safe.
I’m sorry.
He’s three strokes into jiang when he stills. Suddenly furious, he scribbles the beginnings of the character out until the pen tip bows. Even with so little words his hand trembles. The characters come out shaky and half-indecipherable. How low has the Yunmeng Jiang heir fallen? he laughs at himself, sardonic. In the end, he doesn’t sign it.
“Please pass this note to the Meishan Yu Sect,” he says, digging out a handful of coins.
And then, Jiang Cheng disappears.
Jiang Cheng disappears.
“Sect Leader,” a man in sun-embossed robes begins, kneeling before a large carved throne. He draws his hands together so they hide the shaking. He cannot hide the shaking in his voice, or his hesitation, however.
“Speak,” booms the man sitting upon the carved throne. His sleeves drape elegantly over the arms of the regal seat. The clothes he wears are finer than the silent men lining the hall, sun pattern even bolder. But of course, nothing less for the man who holds the cultivation world in his palm.
A bead of sweat slips down the soldier’s temple. “Sect Leader Wen...”
The fist that pounds into the arm of the throne has the room shuddering. “I said, speak.”
“Four more patrols were wiped out in Qinghe, Sect Leader.
“By him.”
Jiang Cheng disappears. They all think he has died off somewhere, bruised and beaten and burned, without a golden core. What can he do, without Wei Wuxian, who’s been thrown into the Burial Mounds and left to rot as well?
Just like that, Yunmeng Jiang disappears.
Blood spurts warmly over his hands. His knuckles are seared white; the splattered blood only starker that way. Beneath him, the Wen-dog falls still, final breath bubbling. Perhaps dead, but free from the torture of having its chest opened up by a dull stone knife.
Its core glows brightly, one last time. He douses it with his hands.
He stands up.
He disappears.
Even in the privacy of a hundred li into a dense forest, he does not remove his mask. He washes his hands in a cold stream and feels something for once. Though it’s barely a tingle. The blood scoured off his skin floats in ribbons down the burbling stream.
It’s a full moon. Even though thick foliage he can see the brilliance of it, a glowing silver disk in the all-consuming blackness of the night. It was a bad night to do what he did. Sullying the beauty of the night, wrist-deep in a Wen-dog’s bloody chest.
He scrubs harder. His hands shine white as the moon, pallid skin clinging to his thin bones. Blood is so warm. He can’t rid himself of the warm, sticky, revolting feeling that clings, as his skin does to his bones.
He adjusts easily to sleeping outdoors. Silk sheets and carved wooden beams over his head are a fond but faint memory. He eats when he can find food, and doesn’t when he can’t. He feels nothing. He presses bloody fingers into the wounds he gets from the Wen-dogs’ frantic attempts to free themselves, but still cannot feel.
Oh, his memory is shattered. On warm nights he dreams. The things he sees—are they memories, are they what ifs, are they visions from the future?
(“A-jie,” he mumbled, curled up in his sister’s embrace. The sun had long gone down and the water stretching before them is so so dark, so so deep. It feels like he could drown in those depths—but he is a disciple of Yunmeng Jiang.
The sun had long gone down, but their parents’ sharp voices continued to echo through Lotus Pier.)
He can’t tell.
The first Wen-dog he had killed was a little soldier. How dare they step foot here, he had thought, furious, as if Yunmeng had not been taken over by them all those weeks prior. Their first major territory—of course they would flaunt, draining Yunmeng of wine and trampling Yunmeng land.
The first Wen-dog he had killed was a little soldier, and it pleaded as it died.
The death of one’s patrol member certainly sobered up Wen-dogs fast. “You’re outnumbered!” they barked, as if he cared. Zidian sat cold around his fingers. In his hand, the golden core of a dead dog. It went out faster than his own.
Next time, they shan’t be spared from the pain.
Five hundred.
He finishes the five hundredth tally, more rock fragments joining the dust at his feet. Five hundred, he thinks, and it’s a tangible number that would make him feel sick if he cared enough. He stares at the hundred neat wu’s carved into the wall. Amongst them, bloodstains that he would remove if he cared enough.
Five hundred tallies. Five hundred dead Wen-dogs. Five hundred golden cores snuffed out by his fingers. The punishment they gave him, he would return five times, ten times, a hundred times over.
He was courteous like that.
The five hundred and fifty fourth Wen-dog he kills, he is caught. He knows the patrol is a trap the moment he sees it. Why else would Wen Ruohan send his strongest soldiers to a tiny village at the bottom of the mountain? Why else would they sharpen their swords, so nervous, so anxious, so afraid of their own shadows? He knows it is a trap, but he is far from caring.
What would they do? Kill him? Torture him? Burn his home, kill his family, destroy his core?
He kills them anyway. A sword is only as good as its wielder. He kills them anyway, ripping into them with his stones and his fingers, tearing open their bodies as they scream for mercy. It is a trap, but they are woefully unprepared.
Five hundred and fifty four, he thinks, as he approaches the shadow in the caravan. Silent all while he killed the other Wen-dogs. He hides the sounds of his footsteps even though he is certain they know he is there. From the shape of their shadow, they are a noble of some sort.
Perhaps he knows them. He was a noble, himself, not too long ago (though it feels like an entire lifetime has passed).
(What would Jiang Cheng think of him now?)
The five hundredth and fifty fourth Wen-dog he kills, he is caught, though not by a Wen as he was expecting.
“You!” Nie Huaisang says.
In the beginning, you asked Jiang Cheng to make a list of the things he found important.
He would take the paper in trembling hands, scared to touch it as if the blood he thought was on his hands would mar the white paper. You would hand him a brush, and he would hold it like a knife. He notices, but doesn’t, and stares at his bony hand like he knows something is wrong but is unsure what.
“It’s okay,” you say, and he looks at you like he knows you but is unsure of who you are. So lost. Swamped in the spare Qinghe Nie robes because he has lost so much weight. “It’s okay.”
You take the paper back. It’s blank.