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Jiang Yanli inhales deeply, closing her eyes in enjoyment of the jasmine tea she is holding between her hands. She opens her eyes and takes a small snip of the tea, smiling at the taste of the perfectly brewed tea. Perfectly by Meishan Yu standards that is. Something about the tea that the Jin Sect servants brewed just didn’t sit right with her all the time.
So she had insisted on brewing the tea for herself and Jin Zixuan to the horror of the servants. But Madame Jin had taken one look at the resolve in Jiang Yanli’s eyes and acquiesced. Now Jiang Yanli and her husband had gotten into the habit of sitting together in Jin Zixuan’s workroom and having tea while Jin Zixuan works through the Sect correspondence that Jin Guangshan ignored (and couldn’t be left to Jin Guangyao).
She sips her tea again, the picture of a perfect demure Jin wife (which she is not, but she can be patient and wait for Jin Guangshan to put his hands on too many of the wrong people).
Next to her, Jin Zixuan lets out another sigh and she looks up at him through her lashes. Her husband - a thrill shoots through her at the word that she hopes she will never lose - is rubbing at his temples with a hand while he stares at a letter with a frown.
“A-Xuan?” The 10-year old Jiang Yanli inside her squeals with glee at being able to call him that.
He looks up from the paper at her, loose pieces of hair falling into his face. She hides a smile behind her teacup at his frazzled look. This is everything she’d ever hoped for and more - if she ignores the faked-yet-real tension between her two incapable-of-communicating brothers (which she’ll fix how she normally does).
“What’s wrong?”
Blinking at her blankly, Jin Zixuan merely stares, head cocked to the side.
She’s unable to suppress a snort at the look. He looks like how one of Jiang Cheng’s dogs used to - dopey, eternally confused, adorable. “You’ve sighed over that letter in your hands at least 10 times now.”
“Oh.” He looks down at the scroll and then back up at her, pausing, “Actually, you might be able to help.”
She lifts her eyebrows. Thus far, she hadn’t been allowed to assist Jin Zixuan in his work as Sect Heir (even though she had been doing a lot of the same work for home and Meishan Yu). “I would?”
He nods and rises to his knees, shuffling over to the table she is sitting at with the scroll in hand. Jiang Yanli feels her face flush as Jin Zixuan settles next to her, his thigh a warm press against hers.
Letting out a sigh, Jin Zixuan smooths the scroll on the table in front of them. Jiang Yanli sets her teacup down and leans over the table to look at the scroll. She brings a hand to her mouth as she realizes that she recognizes the handwriting.
“Your brother,” he pauses, an expression of exasperated pain coming over his face, “has the most atrocious handwriting of anyone I know. And I know Wei Wuxian. I don’t understand how he managed to survive in Gusu under Lan Qiren with his handwriting.”
“That’s because he didn’t,” she says, smile growing behind her hand.
“What?” Jin Zixuan turns to better face Jiang Yanli with a concerned look.
Jiang Yanli lowers her hand and lets herself appreciate the man she married. For all that she had had some reservations alongside her adoration of Jin Zixuan, he had grown into someone she could clearly see herself having a future with. And he’d managed to get the stick that made him a jerk to her brothers out of his ass.
(She suspects she partially has Jin Guangyao to thank.)
“He wrote the essays, but he didn’t turn in the ones with his handwriting. A-Xian rewrote A-Chang’s essays to turn in to Lan Qiren.” Jin Zixuan’s mouth drops and she laughs lightly as she continues, “They’ve both done that ever since we realized that A-Cheng’s handwriting can’t be helped. Mother was angry that this was one area that A-Cheng could have been better A-Xian at but was incapable of.” She pauses, pursing her lips, “When A-Xian was sent back home, I think A-Cheng convinced - ? Convinced Nie Huaisang to rewrite his essays.”
“...I don’t even know what to say.”
Jiang Yanli picks up her teacup and takes another sip, wondering if she should continue. “...We always thought that A-Xian would be around to be A-Cheng’s second so we didn’t have to worry about his terrible handwriting. I guess whoever is acting as his second,” and oh how her heart pangs at the realization that she does not know who it is, “hasn’t yet understood that we don’t let A-Cheng write things himself if we can help it.”
Nodding once solemnly, Jin Zixuan lets silence fall between them for the appropriate amount of time (and it’s times like these that she remembers that for all his bluster, Jin Zixuan is the son of Madame Jin and properly educated in etiquette). “Are you able to read his handwriting?”
She nearly snorts, bringing her hand up again to cover her wide grin. “No. No matter how much I tried I could never manage. I’ve no idea how he was able to decipher it, but perhaps it’s a skill shared among those with awful handwriting.”
Jin Zixuan sighs heavily and turns back to the letter. “I’m not sure how to appropriately send a letter to your brother then, asking for him to have someone decipher this letter without pissing him off.”
“Ah,” Jiang Yanli turns her attention to the letter and lets out a soft sigh as she picks it up. It had been years since she’d even attempted to try to read Jiang Cheng’s handwriting, but she’d at least try - though she had very low expectations.
She stares at the first word. Stares some more. Bites her lip. She suspects that it is some sort of salutation as Jiang Cheng at least could pretend to be polite, but what sort of salutation escapes her. She tries the next word, and the next, and the one after that.
Pressing her lips together, Jiang Yanli sets the letter down and turns her head to look at Jin Zixuan who is staring at her with hopeful eyes. She shakes her head minutely and her husband lets out a sigh filled with despair.
“I’m doomed,” he moans, head buried in his arms, “Your brother already hates me and if I send a letter asking for someone to decipher this one, he’s going to hate me even more.”
Jiang Yanli pats her husband's back as he despairs and her mind whirls. “...I might have an idea.”
Jin Zixuan’s head pops up, eyes wide and reminding her once again of one of Jiang Cheng’s old dogs. “You do?”
She nods and folds her hands into her lap properly. “But you might not like it.”
His eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”
“We can’t afford for relations between the Jin and the Jiang to deteriorate any further.” He winces but Jiang Yanli continues on, “And part of the reason that they are so bad is because of your father’s hate for A-Xian making A-Cheng and A-Xian’s relationship hard. And since A-Xian is the only one who could ever read A-Cheng’s handwriting…” she trails off and lifts a single eyebrow.
Jin Zixuan stares, “I don’t know what you mean.”
She refrains from rolling her eyes as she explains more, “I’ll ask A-Xian for help!”
“What?” Jin Zixuan bristles, “It’s too dan-”
“Don’t you dare say that it’s too dangerous. I’ve been there once before and A-Xian is my brother. He would never hurt me. And from what I’ve heard, his set up at Yiling has been safe. I may not be a particularly gifted cultivator but I can defend myself - not that I’d be defending myself against anything A-Xian does.”
“Wait, alone?”
“Of course I’d be going alone. It’s not like A-Xian would trust anyone you’d send with me, which rather defeats the purpose of me going. And I can’t take anyone from Yunmeng, that also defeats the purpose of me going.”
Groaning, Jin Zixuan rubs at his temples again, mouth pursed as he tries to puzzle through the solution Jiang Yanli has offered. She’s almost a hundred percent sure that this idea would be perfect. And she’s missed her brother immensely since the whole fiasco of a few months ago so this suits her needs perfectly. But what she truly needs is for someone to get both of her brothers to stop being self-sacrificing idiots and actually talk to one another.
(For all that Jiang Cheng takes after their mother, sometimes he picks the absolute worst times to take after their father.)
Swallowing, Jin Zixuan nods once, “Fine. But! We can’t tell anyone, especially not my father. You have to be careful, Yanli, ok-”
He yelps as she leaps forward and throws her arms around his neck tightly.
She buries her face into his neck and whispers, “Thank you.”
His arms come around her and he returns the hug.
*
Jiang Yanli frowns as she sets yet another returned letter down on her table. She knows that Wei Wuxian had received them - she can tell by the tear stains on the scroll - but for some reason her stupid brother had returned them without opening them. He either thought it was a trap of some kind or thought that he was protecting her. The latter more likely than the former.
She rolls her eyes. Her brothers, her younger brothers, seemed to think that they had to protect her from anything and everything. Ridiculous. She was their older sister. And just because her cultivation was weak didn’t mean that she was weak.
Mind made up, Jiang Yanli shoves the unopened letter into a drawer with the other three unopened letters. She’ll just have to show up in Yiling herself. Jin Zixuan can’t wait any longer to respond to Jiang Cheng’s letter without being rude so she’ll have to take matters into her own hands clearly.
She sweeps out of her rooms and heads to find Jin Zixuan to inform him she’s leaving. She’ll have to refrain from telling him that her brother didn’t actually respond because if he thinks there’s even a smidgen of danger he won’t let her go.
(Jiang Yanli loves her husband dearly but the man is rapidly joining her two brothers in the realm of unnecessarily over-protective. Even Nie Mingjue isn’t this protective over Nie Huaisang. Though that might have something to do with Nie Huaisang being terrifying if one looks close enough - which most cultivators don’t bother to do.)
Knocking on Jin Zixuan’s door, Jiang Yanli waits for him to open the door, shifting on her feet, anxious to go.
Her husband opens the door with a questioning look and she peeks inside his rooms. Jin Guangyao is sitting at the tea table, hand wrapped around a tea cup and while she trusts Jin Guangyao, she doesn’t trust him that much. So she stands on her toes and whispers to her husband, “I’m going to leave to see A-Xian now.”
He blinks at her, mouth opening to ask more questions but she jerks her head to the side and his mouth snaps shut. Lowering herself down, she smiles and says, softly, “I’ll be fine. I don’t expect to take longer than a day, day and a half.”
Frowning, brows knitted together, Jin Zixuan nods slowly. Jiang Yanli smiles brightly at him and turns away.
That accomplished all that’s left to do is retrieve her sword and set out. Thankfully Yiling isn’t so far away that she wouldn’t be able to reach it in one day’s flight, though the journey from Yunmeng would be much faster.
(She hopes that Jiang Cheng hasn’t been so dumb as to completely ignore his own brother living less than half a day’s trip away. But she wouldn’t be surprised if the two of them have decided that they can’t contact each other at all.)
She withdraws her sword from where it rests in her wardrobe. A shiver of excitement thrums through her and she smiles widely as she leaves Koi Tower. Nodding to a couple of cultivators who are milling in the courtyard, Jiang Yanli heads towards the back practice fields that are seldom used. She’d prefer if little people saw her leave, though she can always pretend that she was going to visit her brother since the direction is the same.
The sun is setting by the time that Jiang Yanli lands in Yiling. She dusts off her robes and sheathes her sword, looking around the small town curiously. There’s a few people in the street who are giving her questioning looks but otherwise the street is empty.
Smiling to the nearest person, Jiang Yanli walks towards them and asks, “Have you seen Wei Wuxian?”
They gape at her, mouth opening and closing steadily like the koi in the lakes at home.
She waits for them to process her question - she’s used to people being flabbergasted by her straightforward questions, especially when she pretends to be her father’s daughter rather than her mother’s.
Finally, their mouth shuts with a click and they glare at her. “Why?”
Oh. She’s so happy that Wei Ying has endeared himself to the people of Yiling. Her brother had the habit of making people fall for him unintentionally (and she knows that Hanguang-Jun hasn’t been able to take his eyes off her brother since he bowled the man over with his exuberance).
“He’s my brother. I let him know I was coming.” She might not have received a response saying she could come but she’s the eldest of their siblings, she shouldn’t really need to ask.
The townsperson stares at her for a moment before nodding sharply. “He’s at the market right now.”
Jiang Yanli smiles, “Thank you! Would you be able to point me in that direction?”
“I’ll take you, Madame Cultivator.”
“You have my gratitude.”
They lead her through the streets of the town until the get closer to what must be the center of town that has the sound of loud laughter echoing from it. Her brother’s laughter.
Tears well up in Jiang Yanli’s eyes at the sound. It doesn’t sound like the true, unburdened laughter from their childhood but it’s still her brother’s laughter. She hadn’t heard him laugh in years. Brushing them away from her eyes, Jiang Yanli breaks into a brisk walk, then a jog, and then a run.
(Improper for a young lady but this is her brother.)
Bursting into the town’s square, she makes a beeline for her brother who has dropped the radish that he was holding and is staring at her, open-mouthed.
She stops right in front of him, tears streaming from her eyes and holds open her arms expectantly.
Wei Ying is a little too skinny, too gaunt, and too wild-eyed, but his own tears start falling and he bends down and folds himself into her hug. Almost as if he was a child again and Jiang Yanli had been the first one to offer him a hug after his parents had died and Jiang Fengmian had whisked him someplace that he didn’t know.
Jiang Yanli holds him tightly, fingers clutching his robes that are not the quality that they used to be. She wonders what he’s done with his old robes, his Jiang robes, because her brother shouldn’t be wearing rags. But somehow she’s not surprised that he is. He’s always been a bleeding heart for the trampled and beaten-down, and they should have known that it would get him in trouble he couldn’t smile his way out of.
(Yu Ziyuan had always told her brothers that one day they’d dig themselves a hole that they can’t smile their way out of if they don’t learn how to maneuver themselves through politics. And she was right. But no matter Jiang Yanli’s conflicted feelings towards her mother’s treatment of her brothers, she knows that her mother would’ve been able to get them out of this mess.)
Wei Ying starts to lift himself out of her arms and Jiang Yanli resists the urge to just tuck him under her arm and fly to Yunmeng where things could be normal once again. She watches him straighten to his full height, face contorted in a familiar expression of self-deprecation.
Planting her hands on her lips and straightening, she says, “Don’t you dare blame yourself for the mess you’ve gotten into. You were just doing what was right and what these other fools should have done earlier.”
Wei Ying snorts and looks surprised at the sound, a happy smile gracing his face. Jiang Yanli returns it.
“Thank you shijie, but you can’t be here.”
“Why,” her eyes narrow.
He winces, “You can’t be associated with me! Jiang Cheng and I severed our connection so that you wouldn’t be harmed by those - those Jins!”
“I think that I am old enough to make my own decisions about how I interact with. And you’re my brother, A-Xian. No one will ever, ever be able to stop me from seeing you. Besides, my husband gave his full blessing to me for this trip.”
Wei Ying blinks, “Wha - ?” His mouth snaps shut and then opens before snapping shut again.
She can see him trying to puzzle through what she means before landing on the conclusion that he has no idea. Her brother is a genius, just not with people. Neither of her brothers are particularly gifted with people, leaving her to do all the heavy lifting.
(There is a lot of heavy lifting for her to do.)
“You left Yunmeng, A-Xian. Don’t you know what that means?”
His eyebrows furrow and he shakes his head.
“You left A-Cheng, all by himself, as Sect Leader.”
She watches Wei Ying’s face carefully to see when it’ll dawn on him.
“...Oh shit.”
Lifting a sleeve to cover her smile, Jiang Yanli nods, “Indeed.”
“Fuck. Who’s he insulted now?”
Wei Ying’s gaze is intense and Jiang Yanli is soothed by it. That intensity means that he still cared for them and the sect that he’d grown up in. She’ll admit that she was a little hurt by his easy abandonment of them for the Wens, but she can understand why he made that decision.
(Empathy is a little harder for Jiang Cheng to grasp though, which is why she has a plan.)
“No one, yet. Thankfully, Sect Leader Jin has left all their Sect correspondence to my husband,” the distaste in Wei Ying’s face shows clearly what he thinks of that, “so no one has figured out the fact that A-Cheng’s handwriting is utterly incomprehensible yet. Hopefully, A-Cheng hasn’t sent any other letters to anyone but I am unsure.”
Wei Ying waves a hand, “If he sends one to the Nie, A-Sang should be able to figure it out. He was getting good at guessing what A-Cheng was writing when I was expelled.”
Jiang Yanli lifts an eyebrow, impressed. “And the Lan?”
“...He’s fucked.”
She snorts. “Not yet he isn’t. I need you to translate this letter for me.” She removes the letter from her sleeve and then says, “And then we’ll have to see what we can do to help him.”
Wei Ying looks down, “Would he even listen to me anymore?”
Jiang Yanli smacks his head with the letter. “Just because the two of you staged that stupid fight doesn’t mean that it’s true. He cares for you. You’re his older brother.” She rolls her eyes, “If you two could simply talk to each other without yelling, none of this would have ever happened.”
He cringes and Jiang Yanli purses her lips, “You’re both going to fix this, somehow. Understood?”
Nodding meekly, Wei Ying takes the letter from her hand and moves to open it before pausing and considering where they are. “Why don’t we go back to the Burial Mounds?”
Jiang Yanli smiles and follows her brother.
A short time later, Wei Ying has transcribed the letter from her brother onto a sheet of parchment and is folding it up to hand to her.
Jiang Yanli takes it gracefully and tucks it into her sleeve along with the original. Standing from the table in the small dwelling they’re in, she points a finger at her brother and says, “Fix this and figure out a way to actually talk to him. I don’t want there to be any problems at the one-month ceremony, understood?”
Wei Ying stares up at her, before letting out a soft sigh and nodding.
“Good.” She leans down and embraces him in another hug that he melts into. Rubbing his back slowly, Jiang Yanli stares at the wall across from her as she thinks. She whispers, “I’m scared, A-Xian. Both you and A-Cheng are in places whereI can’t protect you anymore. And you’ve incurred the wrath of all of the Sects by doing what is right. I don’t know if that’s a world that I want to raise my child in.
“A-Cheng is so lost without both of us. When I agreed to marry Jin Zixuan, regardless of my feelings towards him, I thought you’d both be together still. He needs you, us, so badly,” she huffs out a laugh, “He’s still the useless boy that we grew up with. He’s good at some things but he’s terrible with people. And he thinks you’ve abandoned him. For all that you both are ‘pretending’, I don’t think it feels like that to him. And I don’t want you two to fall apart because of this. If you’d just, just talk to us about why you have to use demonic cultivation,” she pulls back and searches Wei Ying’s eyes, “We’d understand, A-Xian. We love you. And I know you. You’d never do anything that would hurt people.
“And demonic cultivation can’t be hurting people if you’re using it. I’m sure that if you just told us why, we could figure it out.”
He looks down, mouth shut firmly, and Jiang Yanli withdraws her arms. “We’ll always be here for you if you want to tell us. We love you, A-Xian, and nothing you do will change that.”
“I… I need some time, shijie.”
She feels a pang of disappointment but pushes it away. “Just don’t take too much time, okay? You’re going to have a nephew soon. And I’d like for all of us to be at his one-month ceremony.”
He swallows and nods.
Jiang Yanli leaves him sitting in contemplation and steps onto her sword.
She lands in the middle of the night in the abandoned practice field. As she steps off her sword, she stumbles slightly and mentally admonishes herself. She’d known that two flights of that distance would be hard on her core and low level of cultivation but all she had wanted to do after seeing the condition of Wei Ying was to sob into her husband’s robes. Why wasn’t there anything that she could do to fix this.
Entering Koi Tower through the servants’ passageways, Jiang Yanli ignores the curious looks that they shoot her. For all that Koi Tower has entirely too many servants than what she’s used to in Yunmeng and Meishan, she knows that they won’t sell her out to the Jins. They’ve been hurt too much for that to happen.
(The first thing she’d done when she’d come to Lanling was befriend the servants. And for all that the Jin liked to pretend that they were the most well-connected sect, they couldn’t even manage their servants well-enough to determine who was a spy or not. Madame Jin had tight control over the servants under her control but none of the other Jins even bothered caring about their own servants.)
She stops in front of her husband’s door and knocks lightly. If he’s asleep, she’ll just go back to her rooms and cry herself to sleep, but what use is a husband who won’t comfort her.
(Her mother had taught her what an unhappy marriage looked like.)
The door creaks open and she blinks up at her husband’s concerned face.
“A-Li?” he says softly. “I didn’t think you’d be returning tonight.”
Emotions suddenly swell up inside her. Jiang Yanli sniffles and Jin Zixuan’s eyes widen. He opens the door wider and beckons her inside, folding her into his arms as soon as she steps inside and he shuts the door behind her.
She sobs quietly into his robes as he strokes her back, muttering indistinguishable words into her hair.
Slowly, her tears start to subside and she breathes into his chest.
“What happened?” he asks softly as he maneuvers them to sitting on his bed.
Jiang Yanli sniffs once more and says, words muffled into his chest, “Why is my family so, so tragic?”
His hand pauses on her back before returning to its rhythmic strokes. “Is this about Wei Wuxian?”
She nods and inhales deeply as she lifts her face out of his chest. “He’s - he’s so thin. And pale. And he’s just not happy. I miss when he was happy. I have you now, but I feel like I’ve lost everything else. Does the world hate my family? Or were we just always doomed to fall?”
Jin ZIxuan’s hands cradle her face gently and his thumbs brush away her tears. “I think that the cultivation world has been on the top of the world for too long. And we got used to it. So now that the Wen are gone, we took it out on everyone else. And I’m sorry, A-Li, for all that the Jins have done to ruin your family. I know that it’s because of my father that Wei Wuxian and Jiang Wanyin had to sever ties.”
Jiang Yanli shakes her head. “It’s not your fault. You tried to fight for my family. And I will always appreciate you for doing that. It’s hard to stand up to fathers.”
She stares at her hands in her lap for a long moment before shaking her head. “I always thought that we had a strong bond as siblings. Like Sect Leader Nie and Nie Huaisang. Or the Twin Jades. But my brothers won’t talk and I don’t know how to get them in the same place without anyone else judging them long enough for them to have a conversation. Because they won’t otherwise.” She laughs, thinking about their childhood, “I always had to sit them down in the kitchen and withhold my soup so that they would talk through whatever argument they got into.”
Jin Zixuan’s hands move to hold hers, “Why can’t you do that now?”
She startles and looks up at him, “What do you mean?”
“Get them both together somewhere no one would expect to see them together and then make them talk.”
She frowns. She’d been planning on just visiting Wei Ying until he told her what happened and why he wouldn’t accept any help from them anymore and then fixing the situation herself but… This could work.
Squeezing Jin Zixuan’s hands tightly she beams and says fervently, “Thank you.”
He blinks at her. Before matching her smile with his more restrained one that she will always love. He’s become someone worthy of her love now and she loves him even more for it.
Jiang Yanli pulls out the letter in her sleeve and hands it to him. “A-Xian’s transcription. I told him that I was going to mention the handwriting problem to A-Cheng to fix it, but I’m going to do something else.”
Jin Zixuan takes the letter and raises an eyebrow. He says, warily, “Thank you, but what are you going to do? I really can’t afford for anyone to see a letter from the Jiang Sect and then get offended over the handwriting of its Sect Leader.”
She waves a hand, “Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of it.”
He stares at her suspiciously but nods regardless.
(“Trust, in a marriage, A-Li,” her mother had once said with a faraway look, “is the most vital thing. If your husband questions your every decision or doesn’t trust you to comport yourself appropriately, you should question your husband’s decisions and conduct. When you lose trust in a marriage, it becomes a grotesque thing that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone, let alone you. You may take after your father, but you’re my child. And the Meishan Yu will always be a maternal sect. If you are ever in need of help, they will help you.”
Yu Ziyuan’s purple eyes had focused on Jiang Yanli and she’d understood what her mother was implying. She had also wondered why her mother hadn’t taken her own advice. Later she’d realized, that for all that her father sometimes seemed apathetic towards her mother, her mother still loved him fiercely.)
Two weeks pass by and Jiang Yanli spends the time writing letters to set up her… web. She isn’t the Violet Spider’s daughter for nothing. She might not particularly enjoy using what her mother had taught her, but she would do it for her brothers.
A week later, everything is finally set up adequately and Jiang Yanli sets to penning her last two letters. One to Wei Ying, saying that she needs help with another letter of A-Cheng’s, but that she can’t travel as far as Yiling again due to her pregnancy (which is partially true). And the last to Jiang Cheng, asking him to meet her so that he can help with some of the planning for his nephew’s one-month ceremony away from Lanling so she has a moment to breathe away from the Jins (she knows that he’ll agree immediately).
They send her the fastest replies agreeing to her proposal that she’s ever seen and she rolls her eyes.
“What is it?” Jin Zixuan asks from behind his own letters.
“My brothers are,” she lets out a strangled noise of frustration that encompasses their entire being. Why they insist on being oblivious and refusing to talk about things baffles her, as does their desperation to escape the pressures that they’ve placed on themselves. If only they’d thought about that when they severed their ties because of their own self-sacrificing nature.
“They are,” Jin Zixuan calmly returns.
She snorts, “They’re menaces that fail to harness that menacing behavior against the people that deserve it, or if they do, it’s entirely by accident.”
Jin Zixuan looks up from his letter and tilts his head thinking. “...You’re right.”
“I know I am. I don’t understand why they never listen to me about things that were under my purview at Yunmeng. Even as children, my parents knew that my brothers would never be the type to be able to maneuver through politics well-enough to not dig themselves into a hole that they can’t get themselves out of. That’s why they were told to never engage at Cultivation Conferences, like Sect Leader Nie! And yet they somehow forgot all of that.”
Jin Zixuan snorts and simply shrugs in response. She groans and sets the letters down, heaving a sigh.
“No matter. I’ll make sure that they’ll work through their shit and that A-Xian stops keeping secrets that he doesn’t need to be.”
“Are you sure that you don’t want me to come? Or for me to send an escort with you?”
Jiang Yanli lifts an eyebrow, “I love you, A-Xuan, but you’re not subtle. And neither are any of the Jin that you’d trust to send with me.”
He pouts and she smiles.
“Thank you though. I appreciate it. But I’m sure I’ll be fine. This village is far from any reported Night Hunt locations and I’m not planning on going near any areas that might be dangerous. I’ll be traveling incognito and I’m sure that A-Cheng will actually be there before I am. He has a terrible habit of being too early to things.”
Jin Zixuan laughs, “If you’re sure.”
The next day, Jiang Yanli steps onto her sword once again on the back practice field and flies towards the village that she’d chosen for her purposes. The inn owner that she’d written to had been eager to correspond with the new Young Madame Jin and had been willing to offer up his whole premises for her use.
(She knows her brothers and the explosive collisions that they always tend to have.)
The village is only a couple hours away by sword flight and as she descends on the village, she can feel her core already struggling. She curses her low cultivation for making her have to be creative on how she can use qi.
Stepping off her sword, Jiang Yanli closes her eyes and breathes deeply, trying to get her breathing back under control. Or at least at a point that she can pretend that it’s under control. A moment later, she lets out a short huff and sheathes her sword. After throwing her hood over her head and adjusting her cloak around her to cover her robes a little better, Jiang Yanli strides towards the village’s inn.
She knocks on the door of the inn and it swings open. The innkeeper’s eyes widen and he opens his mouth as he bows hastily. “Young Madame Jin!”
Smiling at him, Jiang Yanli bows shortly back to him, “Thank you for agreeing to do this Master Li.”
“It’s no worry!” He hastens to wave her into the building, “I’ve prepared everything you’ve asked for.”
“Thank you,” she bows again and he bows back. She laughs lightly behind her hand, “My guests will be arriving through the back door, so it’s not necessary for you to remain to welcome them.”
If the innkeeper saw the infamous Yiling Patriarch and Sect Leader Jiang in one place, even her hold on him wouldn’t be able to prevent that gossip from spreading like wildfire.
He nods eagerly and shows her to the kitchen. All the ingredients that she’d asked for him to prepare are laid out carefully on the main table and she nods in satisfaction. “Thank you.”
She waits for him to leave before turning back to the ingredients laid out on the table. Thankfully the fire is already burning in the stove. She’ll have to readjust the amount of coin that the innkeeper will be receiving from her.
A knock at the back door startles her from her thoughts and she smiles to herself.
Jiang Yanli opens the door and smiles up at her youngest brother.
“A-Cheng!” She opens her arms and pulls him into a hug.
He grumbles in her arms but returns the hug, gingerly.
She scowls as she lets him go and smacks his arm, “I’m pregnant, not fragile.”
Jiang Cheng winces and rubs where she’d hit him. Softly, he says, “I’ve missed you, jie.”
She pulls him into another quick hug and then beckons him into the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” he asks upon spotting the ingredients on the table. His eyes widen, “Are you making soup?”
Smiling, Jiang Yanli nods, “Nobody at Lanling will let me make it there, so I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t getting rusty.”
“Do you need help?” His eyes shine without the weight of his responsibilities, reminding her of when they were kids and hiding out in the kitchens while she made soup to patch up whatever hurt they’d endured.
“I’d appreciate it,” she passes over a cutting board, knife, and the lotus root.
The room is filled with silence save the sound of them preparing ingredients. Jiang Yanli finds her eyes being drawn again and again to the back door. Where Jiang Cheng has the tendency to show up too early to things, Wei Ying has the opposite problem. So she doesn’t know when her other brother will arrive and it’s making her nervous. She doesn’t know how the both of them will react to each other. Doesn’t know how deep the hurt between them goes. Doesn’t know how stupidly stubborn they’ll be about this.
Turning to the pot on the stove, Jiang Yanli begins to put the ingredients into it. Behind her, she can feel Jiang Cheng tense as he stares at her back.
“Is he treating you well?”
She drops the rest of the lotus root into the pot and then turns back to Jiang Cheng. “He is. He’s grown a lot, A-Cheng. And I love him.”
Jiang Cheng grimaces and she laughs, “You can’t be so awkward around love! What’s going to happen when you’re faced with a pretty face one day and you don’t know how to think.”
His nose scrunches up and he crosses his arms, “No thank you. I don’t ever want to suffer through that.”
Jiang Yanli lifts an eyebrow but nods. She opens her mouth but is interrupted by a knock at the door. Her brother’s head snaps towards it and he narrows his eyes, standing, one hand on Sandu. “Were you expecting someone else?”
She lifts a hand, motioning for him to sit back down. Walking over to the door, she takes a steadying breath and then opens it.
Wei Ying stares down at her with a bright smile that slowly freezes as he registers Jiang Cheng behind her. He tenses and moves as if he’s getting ready to bolt. Jiang Yanli grabs a hold of his robes quickly and drags him into the room, shutting the door behind him. “Don’t even think about it.”
Letting go of his robes, Jiang Yanli places her hands on her hips and stares at both of her brothers who are exchanging wary glances. “Sit down, both of you.”
Wei Ying slowly sits next to Jiang Cheng, body still tense.
“Neither of you are leaving here until you figure out whatever the problem is that has both of you all twisted up.”
They both immediately start to speak over each other, protesting. She clicks her tongue and their mouths snap shut. “Talk.”
Silence.
She turns back to the soup, content to just focus on it until they get over whatever hang ups they have. Settling into the rhythm of making soup that is muscle memory at this point, she lets her mind wander, studiously ignoring the furious gestures that her two brothers are making at each other behind her back.
Wait.
Turning from the stove to face her brothers, Jiang Yanli stares for a moment before whispering hoarsely, “What happened to Suibian, A-Xian? How did you get here?”
He turns to face her with wide eyes and opens his mouth and shuts it in rapid succession, face taking on a stubborn expression.
“He won’t take her back,” Jiang Cheng bites out angrily.
“What?” Jiang Yanli turns back to Wei Ying, “Why?”
Wei Ying grits his teeth and averts his eyes.
A horrifying thought sinks into her. “Did - did the demonic cultivation do something to your core?”
His eyes snap up to meet hers, mouth slightly open in shock.
“It did, didn’t it?” her voice cracks.
He shakes his head minutely.
Jiang Cheng growls, “Then what is it? No matter how much I insisted on you taking her back, you just refused and laughed it off. Your sword is not a laughing matter. You never explain anything and just go off on your own to do whatever the fuck you want. We’re your family. They’re not.”
“Enough, A-Cheng,” Jiang Yanli cuts him off, recognizing the rage simmering under his skin, “A-Xian, what happened? You disappeared for a few months, and you never told us what happened. And now you refuse to let us help you.” Quietly she says, “Stop pushing us away.”
Wei Ying’s mouth twists in an indecipherable expression and Jiang Yanli realizes just how old her brother seems, he seems like he’s aged so much in the past few months. She swallows, fighting back tears.
“Please.”
It comes out in bits and pieces between tears and yelling and horrified gasps.
By the end of it all they’re all crying as they realize what a disaster had happened.
To herself, Jiang Yanli adds one more grievance against the Wen and the Jin. She loves her husband and she loves the Wen remnants that her brother had taken in because he loves them, but she’s not that good. She can’t forgive people for ruining her brothers’ lives.
Next to Wei Ying, Jiang Cheng is breathing in shuddering gasps. Jiang Yanli reaches over to tentatively embrace him. She’s so, so grateful for Wei Ying giving up something so desperately important to him for her brother, just because it was the right thing to do since she’s sure that her brother would have died without a core, but. But she wishes there was another way.
There were only bad and worse choices. And Jiang Yanli can’t fault Wei Ying for doing something that no one else would’ve. Her selfless brother, too good for the cultivation world and all its horrors.
(Sometimes she thinks that he would’ve been better off free from the sects.)
Jiang Cheng clutches her robes and sobs brokenly into them. She strokes his hair soothingly and reaches out with her other arm to motion Wei Ying to join them.
He slowly reaches out and buries his head into her robes, sobbing in tandem with his brother.
Jiang Yanli strokes both of their heads and laments their fate. Her brothers were young, too young. They should have had more time. But the world didn’t care for things like youth and time.
She’d been protected by them for far too long. It was time to do her duty as eldest and protect them.
(Perhaps she might ask Sect Leader Nie for tips.)
Slowly their sobs subside and when they start to shift in her grip, Jiang Yanli tightens it. She doesn’t want to let them go. Doesn’t want them to face the cruel world that has wrenched her family from what it knew. What it was happy in.
But she must. Because her brothers would be the first to say that they’re adults now, regardless of how she still sees them as children whenever she looks at them.
“Why now?” Jiang Cheng croaks.
Jiang Yanli blinks down at him, confused, before it dawns on her what he’s asking. She snorts. “It’s all your fault, A-Cheng.”
He frowns in her loose embrace and she shoots a wry smile to Wei Ying who laughs wetly when he realizes what she means.
“Your handwriting is so bad that it made us get over ourselves and talk.” She ruffles his hair, “Thank you, little brother, for never learning how to write properly.”
He sputters indignantly and she laughs while stepping back.
Behind her, something sputters and Jiang Yanli curses under her breath.
“The soup!” Jiang Cheng and Wei Ying both exclaim sadly.
Jiang Yanli hurries to the stove and stares at the burnt remains of her lotus soup. She turns back to her brothers who are staring at her with wide, desperate eyes and she grimaces. “I’ll have to start it again.”
They whine.