Chapter Text
The boy is a menace.
Lan Qiren can’t deny it. He doesn’t want to deny it. Not only would it be against the rules listed so forcefully in stone on the wall of discipline to utter an untruth like that, but it would do violence to the testimony of his own eyes and ears to pretend, even for a moment, that he has not been utterly outraged and even distressed by what he has heard.
Yes, distressed. It is not merely a matter of unorthodox thought or ridiculously dangerous theorizing. That would be outrageous enough itself. But it is also an echo of the past, an echo he cannot help but hear even though no one else—even the smirking boy still standing in his class, the words barely out of his lips—remembers it. And that echo rends his heart.
He had known, of course, that Cangse Sanren’s son was Wei Changze son, was the first disciple of Yunmeng Jiang, was the Wei Ying, courtesy name Wuxian, who had just answered his question about proper treatment of a bloodyminded spirit so flippantly. And so he was not surprised to see the echo of her face when A-Zhan dragged a rulebreaker in on the first day (the first night) that visiting disciples were allowed into the Cloud Recesses.
But while he had been prepared for his face, he had not been prepared for his mind.
He had thought that someone raised from youth by Jiang Fengmian (no fool, but weaker than he should) and Yu Ziyuan (no tyrant, but no more flexible than she had to be) would not, could not be like the rogue cultivator-stroke-wandering genius he remembered.
But of course, Wei Changze had been just as bad, as soon as Cangse had had a chance to convince him he could be, and he had grown up in Lotus Pier too.
It was distressing to meet another mind that moved in diagonals, when cultivation was an orthogonal space.
And worst of all, because he reminded him of her, he reminded him of the worst thing she had ever done to him.
No, not shaving his beard. That had been mildly annoying, and frankly he thought it was unfair that it had come back scragglier than before, but it was nothing compared to how she had rearranged his worldview on the fly.
For Cangse Sanren was not just a genius cultivator because she thought differently than everyone else and had learned not from a sect but from the legendary immortal Baoshan Sanren. If all she had been was untamed, she would have merely been a frustration, as soon forgotten as she was out of the lectures and out of Qiren’s sight.
No, she was the one thing worse than someone who didn’t care about the rules.
She was someone who knew them all and could cite them, perfectly, in ways that somehow justified the ridiculous things she did.
And that was the true root of his distress. Seeing her son, hearing her son recite unorthodoxy in his own classroom, he could not help but think of the exact set of rules Cangse would have cited to demand he ought to listen, instead of doing what he wanted to do and throwing the book in his hand at the troublemaker’s head before banishing him to rewrite the entire Lan library worth of books as punishment.
“Be generous,” she undoubtedly would have begun, because she loved those big, expansive ones that didn’t mean nothing but also couldn’t possibly mean everything she wanted them to mean. Or could they? No, they couldn’t. But that was what made her so frustrating, wasn’t it?
“Do not be ill-mannered.” So no throwing the book at the boy, at least.
“Do not regret after offering.” Not that he’d actually offered Wei Wuxian anything, but she would probably have pointed out that if he wasn’t offering the boy a chance to fully discuss the question when he asked it then he was definitely not being generous, and might even be being ill-mannered by trying to embarrass him rather than effecting learning in the classroom. And so if he was truly offering the boy a chance to discuss the question, could he take that back, in good conscience?
Ugh, and if she said that, she would no doubt bring in “be careful with your words,” “do not take your own words lightly,” and “do not say one thing and mean another,” with a healthy dose of “do not be unreasonable” (as if she was ever reasonable!), “learning comes first,” and “do not give up on learning,” to boot!
Then she would probably have gotten even more pointed with him.
“Destroy the five poisons.” For all that Wei Wuxian was being infuriating, he had truly not expressed himself with great pride—or even ignorance, for while he was proposing a heterodox approach that could not be stomached, he did not seem unaware of that, merely questioning of why. Qiren himself, on the other hand, was certainly angry, and Cangse would have no doubt added proud (of the Lan lectures and his own knowledge) and perhaps ignorant (or at least willing to allow others to remain so, if he did not engage with the boy’s questions). And how could he destroy the five poisons, then, if he did not allow the conversation to continue out of his own anger and pride?
“Do not succumb to rage.” A more pointed version of the last. Worse, she would probably add “do not be haughty and complacent” as well.”
“Be peaceful when insulted.” Even if the boy’s outrageous notion was, well, an outrage and an insult to the proper way of doing things and thus to Qiren’s own teaching (pride, Cangse’s voice giggled in his ear), was it not his duty to be peaceful in the face of it?
And then she would no doubt have slapped him across the face—metaphorically, of course—with her three favorite rules to quote: “correct others by correcting yourself” (he could almost hear a faint “Qiren” in her voice after that one), “do not praise yourself and slander others,” and “do not jump to unfounded conclusions.”
As if it were an unfounded conclusion that resentment was inherently dangerous and therefore unusable!
But just as he had sputtered in the face of her when she was living and present in the flesh, he cannot help but hear her ghost when confronted again with a face, so like hers, once again saying ridiculous things in the classrooms of Cloud Recesses. And since her death meant that he could not argue with her except by going to Yiling and playing Inquiry (assuming she had not already reincarnated, which was unlikely anyway), he cannot win this argument.
“Come on then, Wei Wuxian.” He takes a deep breath and centers himself, consciously laying the book back on the table softly. “You say you have not come up with a method to avoid the backlash inherent in the resentment you proposed to control. Let us talk that through. What would be your first step, and why?”