Wen Ning and Wen Qing give themselves up to the Jin Sect.
Xue Yang is apprenticing in demonic cultivation in the Burial Mounds; Wen Qing is trying to keep Wei Wuxian's body and soul together; Wei Wuxian is pretending that everything is all right when it clearly isn't. They all need to blow off a little steam.
Jin Guangyao's most loyal companion helps him relax after a stressful day.
"What's wrong, Jiang Cheng?" he asks suddenly, looking up from his bowl.
Jiang Cheng just meets his gaze, not even lifting an arm to convey, Where do you want me to start?
"You've been... staring at me, this whole evening, shidi," Wei Wuxian adds, more slowly. The colour in his cheeks didn't fade after the bath, and now, with the food and candles, the room's got stuffy and he's even pinker than before. It should look healthy but it only highlights the shadows under his eyes, so deep they look like grooves in the skin.
"No, I haven't," he says automatically, and shoves a meatball in his mouth.
Jiang Cheng meets up with Wei Wuxian after Baoshan Sanren restores his golden core, just as they planned. After this, surely things are going to go right, right?
Xue Yang was left for dead by the side of the road to a nowhere town—only when he was rescued did he realise he'd been dropped into the perfect revenge against his nemesis, Xiao Xingchen. Everything was going perfectly... until another exile from the Jin Sect wandered down that same road.
Canon divergence with Mo Xuanyu in Yi City, written for the Songxuexiao Exchange 2020.
Seven drabbles written for MXTXGenWeek2020.
1. Character Study: Outsider POV (Xue Yang and Jin Guangyao)
2. Worldbuilding: Ghosts and Hauntings (Wei Wuxian in the Burial Mounds)
3. Friendship: Oaths and Promises (Yue Qingyuan and Shen Qingqiu)
4. Family (Liu Mingyan and Liu Qingge)
5. War (Jiang Yanli and Nie Huaisang)
6. Humour (Xue Yang and Su Minshan)
7. Trope Subversion: Arranged Marriage (Wen Ruohan, Meng Yao and Wen Qing)
Lan Yi had a long time to think, while she was trapped in Cold Pond Cave suppressing the Yin Iron: about her relationship with her clan and her sect, about power, and about her lost lover, Baoshan Sanren.
Xue Yang is sewing. In the indecisive light of a single candle, the seam he's reinforcing wavers back and forth, merging with his fingertips until the stab of the needle separates them suddenly out: the thing that bleeds and hurts, and the thing that lets the sharp point pass through and through it, apathetic.
A character study of Xue Yang and his sewing skills, through the years in Yi City.
Two months after the night hunt at Phoenix Mountain, Lan Wangji visits Yunmeng to try, once again, to convince Wei Wuxian to come back to Gusu with him. Wei Wuxian is getting drunk with resentful energy for company, and would rather mess around with the esteemed Hanguang-jun than confront literally anything in his life.
Neither one of them expected their meeting to go like this.