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The thing about living in the Burial Mounds that really gets to Wei Wuxian isn’t the turnips, or the howling winds, or the lack of comfortable bedding.
It’s the mind-numbing boredom .
He helps farm. He goes to the stream to carry back water for everyone. He hangs up freshly cleaned robes. He gathers wood for the fires and repairing the buildings. It becomes a monotonous routine, only disrupted when there’s food to sell and he gets to go to town. And here’s one of the unfortunate realities of being Wei Wuxian: monotony is a death sentence.
(He would know. He fell into the Burial Mounds; death is a familiar feeling to him.)
Luckily, days spent kneeling in the Jiang ancestral hall with nothing to do but stare at the wall mean he’s got an imagination as wide as Lotus Pier and a creative streak to match, so in a desperate attempt to keep himself from going crazy, he turns to invention.
Compasses. Flags. Talismans. Songs. Anything that he can put both his mind and hands to work on. More than once, he nearly blows himself up—which is a double threat, because every time it happens, Wen Qing lectures him for an hour—but it’s worth it.
Of course, as with everything Wei Wuxian does, it escalates. And it begins with him thinking about the Tortoise of Slaughter.
More accurately, it starts with him thinking about Lan Wangji, and how many turnips he’d eat if it meant he could talk to him again. And then he remembers how it felt to fight side-by-side with the Lan Wangji, which leads to remembering the fight with the Tortoise of Slaughter, which leads to remembering the feeling of Lan Wangji’s thoughts inside his head, which leads to thinking about how cool that spell is, which leads to thinking—what if he can take that further ?
Four piles of parchment and a week later, he’s got a theory. An interesting and incredibly hard to prove theory, but being disowned by the Jiangs doesn’t mean he’s forgotten their values. Attempt the impossible, right?
There’s only one problem.
“The goal is to use it with corpses and ghosts, to try and find out what happened to them, obviously,” Wei Wuxian says, prodding his cheek with his writing brush. “But practicing it with you could be dangerous. Might destabilize your spiritual energy too much, set you off again.”
Next to him, Wen Ning gently pulls the brush from his hand and flips it so the ink-covered bristles aren’t hitting his cheek, and then says, “Is there another way to practice it?”
“I could use it on a living person,” he muses, leaning back on his hands. “Doubt anyone would be willing to do it, though.” Uncle Four could be swayed, maybe, but he’s not sure he wants to do that. If this goes wrong, it’s not like blowing things up in his den. He wouldn’t be the only one who gets hurt.
“I would,” Wen Qing says from behind them, starling Wen Ning and making Wei Wuxian fall over.
Groaning, he sits up. “ Aiya , Wen Qing, what did I say about sneaking up on me?”
“I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you. You just weren’t paying attention,” she says smugly, taking a seat in front of them, unfairly graceful. Even in her tattered farmer’s robes, she still has all the poise of a noble.
“We were talking ,” he pouts, crossing his arms over his chest. “Not fair.”
“Fair is for children playing games.” She takes a moment to check over Wen Ning, plucking a few stray bits of straw from his hair, before turning back to Wei Wuxian. “I meant what I said. I’ll help you test your theory.”
The brush slips out of his fingers and into his lap. He blinks a few times. “Ah, Wen Qing, I don’t think that’s a good idea—”
“Why not?”
It’s like trying to stare down steel. A nervous laugh bubbles out of his throat. “It might be dangerous.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Living here is dangerous.”
“Point taken,” he says, nodding. “But this is more of the ‘fracture your mind and spiritual energy irreparably’ kind of dangerous. Why would you want to help, anyways?”
She pauses for a moment, staring down at her folded hands in her lap, before saying, “Being able to see someone’s memories sounds like a useful ability, particularly for doctors. If we could access a patient’s mind and see exactly what happened to them, it may be easier to treat them.”
No one points out the obvious: the likelihood that this method will ever spread beyond this place, ever get to be used by other doctors in other sects, is nearly non-existent. Objects are one thing; cultivation techniques are another. Still, Wei Wuxian takes her explanation in stride. He still has doubts, of course, but the thrill of getting to push boundaries is enough to fill in the gaps.
“Are you sure? If something goes wrong, you don’t get to come back and haunt me,” he says, grinning but still somewhat serious.
There’s only a second of hesitation before she nods, sharp and determined. “What do I have to do?”
Wei Wuxian half-crawls, half-walks around the table to her side, scrambling to sit cross-legged in front of her. From Chen Qing, he pulls the beaded tassel off and tosses it to Wen Ning, who’s glancing wide-eyed between the two of them.
“All you have to do,” he explains, “is give me your hands, and try to focus on a memory. Something with both of us, maybe, so it’ll be easier to access—oh! The first time we talked, focus on that. And Wen Ning here will be our anchor, shaking the beads after a minute or two to pull us out.”
“What if you don’t wake up?” Wen Ning asks, holding the tassel like it’s something precious.
“Then, uh, give us a shake.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
“Then we’re probably on our way to becoming demons,” he says far too cheerily. “And you should probably grab a sword.”
Wen Ning stares at him, horrified, but Wen Qing just shakes her head. “It won’t come to that, A-Ning. This will work.”
The way she says it, so sure, so confident in him , makes something in his chest ache. Wei Wuxian breathes through it, ignores the slight burning behind his eyes, and holds his hands out.
Wen Qing takes a deep breath, and then she slips her hands into his. Closing his eyes, he focuses on the connection there, the spiritual energy he can feel thrumming through her. Reaching his consciousness to hers isn’t easy, at first, but once they connect it’s like falling, the world disappearing from beneath them, air and space rushing past them, the only solid sensation the feeling of her hands resting in his—
The memory blurs and shifts into place. Sunlight, tall trees, a rocky path, the sound of a stream nearby. It falls in and out of focus, again and again, until he can find it within himself to keep it still. He goes to step forward, but it’s no use; he has no form here. He is merely an observer.
Just when he thinks they’ve failed, he spots Wen Qing coming down the path. Her dark red and black robes are tied perfectly in place, her headpiece not a centimeter off. In her hands, she fiddles with a silver needle, and Wei Wuxian—he remembers this. A few moments later, he—a younger him, dressed in white Lan robes, his smile still bright, no shadows under his eyes—comes walking down the other path and grins when he sees Wen Qing.
He strains to hear what the younger him is saying, but the connection isn’t strong enough, the memory blurred by too much time for both of them. Something younger him says makes Wen Qing scoff, and she starts walking again, but he follows, and then—
The world shifts again, somewhere similar—still in the back hill, but by the waterfall instead. Younger him stands behind a younger Wen Ning, skin still flushed with life, no black veins running up his neck. He’s aiming an arrow, and Wen Qing stands on the other side of the lake, watching, before calling out to him. Wen Ning flails and lets the arrow loose, heading right for her, but younger Wei Wuxian knocks it out of the way with a talisman, leaving Wen Ning looking sheepishly apologetic.
His connection with Wen Qing surges as the corners of her mouth turn up, even while she’s sighing, and he remembers his own side of that memory, how friendly and innocent Wen Ning had seemed, how nice it had felt to help him and—
The sunlight vanishes. It’s replaced instead by torrents of rain and the darkness of a night without the moon or stars to see by. They’re standing in mud, him and Wen Qing, but the mud is not just mud; it is bodies, piles of them, their rotting stench discernible even in the rain, their blood visible in streaks through the water. Between the instability of this mental space and the cover of night, he cannot make out either of their faces as he watches, but he can hear Wen Qing’s desperate shouts for her brother: “ A-Ning! ” over and over, like a dying animal letting loose its last cries.
This place is too close, too deeply carved into his mind to forget even if he tried to. It’s all too easy to slip into his own memory instead, and suddenly he is both in his head and out of it, walking towards Wen Qing and watching himself do so at the same time. He kneels down next to her, takes in Wen Ning’s long paled skin, the blood around his mouth, the flag sticking out of his stomach. There’s anger between the two of them, but more palpable is the sorrow and the fear that comes from staring down at someone they couldn’t save—
—and then the rain changes into clouds of black fog, so dense he can barely see through it. There are trees again, but they’re bare and gray, sticking out like bones in a graveyard instead of a forest. Screams are coming from everywhere—the fog, the trees, the ground. They echo in his head, blocking out all thought, leaving no room for anything else.
He’s running. The branches of the trees grab at his face and neck like gnarled fingers, leaving scratches and welts in their wake. Hanging from his hand is the sword, and it takes everything he has not to drop it. Every step makes the cut on his stomach shift and stretch. Something warm and wet runs down his side, but he can’t check it.
One wrong step, and he trips, just barely managing to put his arms out and catch himself. It sends a jolt of pain flashing from his wrists to his elbows, but even as he cries out, he scrambles back to his feet, tightening his grip on the sword.
Before he can take off again, a child’s voice comes out of the fog. “ Wei-gongzi .”
He can’t look. He has to look. Slowly, not sure if it’s really his own choice to do so, he turns his head, and chokes back a sob.
The child wears purple Jiang sect robes, the belt adorned with a simple lotus. His skin is gray and lifeless, his eyes a blank white. There’s crusted blood around his mouth, matted in his hair, staining his clothes. But even so far from life, Wei Wuxian knows him. He remembers the child’s complaints as he had to go collect the kites. He remembers the brightness of his smile, the warmth of his laughter. He remembers looking over the corpses of his sect, seeing the child among them, and feeling his heart wither inside his chest.
A dirt streaked hand reaches out from the robes, towards him. “ Wei-gongzi— ”
The connection shatters.
“Wei-gongzi! Wei-gongzi!”
Blinking, Wei Wuxian sits up. There’s an ache in his skull so painful that it makes him groan. After a moment, Wen Ning comes into focus, wide-eyed and panicked.
“What happened?” He rubs at his temple, trying to make sense of what just happened.
“I tried to wake you both up with the beads after a minute, like you said, but it didn’t work. Then I tried shaking you, but—but you just passed out,” Wen Ning says, still hovering. Behind him, Wen Qing sits, robes rumpled and hair falling in pieces around her face. Tears streak down her cheeks as she stares at—at him.
“Wei Wuxian,” she says, voice hoarse, and everything clicks into place.
“I’m sorry,” he says, words going raspy in his throat. “I’m—I’m so sorry, I didn’t know it would go both ways, I thought—I’m sorry.”
Ignoring the fact that he’s trembling like a child caught in a blizzard, he pushes himself to his feet and grabs the tassel from Wen Ning’s hands, clutching it to his chest along with his flute. There’s a tight feeling in his chest that says run , and he’s inclined to listen.
“Wei Wuxian—” she says again, but he can’t .
(All the gaps in his memory, all the faces that have slipped out of his mind, all the names that he can never recall, and yet those three months refuse to be erased. They lurk in his dreams, in the shadows, in the voices that cry out to him between the notes of his melodies. He will not, can not, invite them to stay by acknowledging them.)
“I’m sorry,” he says, and then he turns and stumbles deeper into the cave, ignoring both the voices calling after him.
He manages to avoid Wen Qing for three days after that. He goes to town by himself to sell some of their turnips; he spends the rest of his time during the day helping Uncle Four hunt, now that the surrounding area is starting to get wildlife again; he retires early every night to his den, waving off the worry by saying he’s just tired. No one doubts it because it’s not a lie—as much as Wei Wuxian grins and laughs, it doesn’t hide the shadows under his eyes.
But because he is who he is, his luck inevitably runs out. Uncle Four tells him they have enough meat, and when Wei Wuxian turns to go back to his den, Wen Qing appears.
“Do you have time to talk?” she asks in that tone that is less asking and more, I already know the answer is yes so don’t try to lie to me . He’s familiar with it, having grown up under Madam Yu.
Which, of course, doesn’t stop him from trying to lie. “Nope, very busy, I need to go help—uh, over there.” He gestures at a random spot in the camp and waves as he starts to walk away, but she catches him by the arm and starts dragging him towards the caverns. “Hey! Wen Qing!”
“I’m sure whatever it is can wait,” she says, flashing a smirk over her shoulder. “Unless, of course, it’s the laundry, in which case feel free to go.”
It’s a brief consideration, but then he remembers how much work it is to get all of the stains and dirt out of little A-Yuan’s robes and pouts, not putting up a fight as she leads him away from everyone else.
As soon as they’re inside, Wen Qing turns to face him, holding herself with a certain determination, and says, “Wei Wuxian,” and he closes his eyes, preparing himself for the barrage of questions to come.
And then she continues, and he almost wishes he’d been drinking water just so he could spit it out. “We should try again. If I focus on memories without you in them, I think it may go better.”
He blinks. Once, twice, and then three times for good measure. “What?”
“It may be easier for you to close your side of the connection off if you don’t share the memories that—”
“No, no, I got that,” he says, laughing with a bit of unease. “But what makes you think I’m going to do that again?”
She frowns. “You haven’t perfected it yet. Clearly.”
“Yeah, because I’m not planning on using it. Ever,” he says, confused as to why this is the question Wen Qing is asking. The answer should be obvious. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Why?” she presses on, the crease in her forehead deepening. “Because it didn’t go the way you thought it would, and you accidentally showed me one of your memories? Did you stop working on the compass when the first one didn’t work? Did you throw away your cloth when the first flag only attracted moths?”
“This isn’t a bit of metal or fabric,” he hisses, stepping forward. “This is our minds we’re talking about. If it goes wrong again, I could end up killing one or both of us.”
Even as he gets closer, nearly in her face, Wen Qing doesn’t back down, squaring her shoulders. “You’re not afraid of that. You’re afraid that I’ll see more of the things you’re trying so hard to bury.”
He reels back, suddenly deflating. She’s right; she always is, but he—he’d hoped she wouldn’t bring it up. Somehow, shining a light on those shadows, bringing them out into the open air, makes everything worse. Desperate to hide them away again, he says, “Why do you care, anyways? What does it matter to you if this works or not?”
At that, she breaks eye contact, her anger and determination melting into something more complicated, harder to read. After a few moments of staring at the ground, she swallows, and asks quietly, “Do you know why I agreed to do the procedure on you?”
His heart skips a beat. The two of them—they don’t talk about this. It hadn’t been a formal agreement, considering when he left that mountain, he hadn’t really believed he’d see either her or Wen Ning again, but it was an unspoken thing between them all the same. Still, he finds it within himself to nod. “Because I demanded that you do it.”
Wen Qing scoffs. “Do you really believe you’re that charismatic? No. I did it because I realized you were right.”
“What?” He looks up, eyebrows practically meeting his hairline.
“Not about Jiang Cheng,” she rushes to say. “I don’t know whether or not he’d have survived being—mediocre. Maybe he would’ve, if we’d given him the chance. But I knew you were right that you would. I’ve known you for awhile now, and you’re reckless and stupid sometimes, but Wei Wuxian, you—you’re creative, and clever, too. You survive the things no one else can. Even without the golden core.”
The next breath he lets out is far too shaky. “Wen Qing—”
“You are trapped here, because of us,” she says, finally looking up at him. Her eyes are shiny, her expression tight. “But you can still make things. Good things, things that can help people. If this will help, then you should be allowed to pursue it.”
“I’m not trapped,” he says, scrubbing at his face. “I chose to be here. I’m not trapped.”
“Still.” It’s not admitting he’s right; it’s choosing not to argue about it. Wen Qing steps forward, reaching out to gently wipe away a tear he missed. “You should develop your technique. You—you deserve to.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.” It’s not just about the technique itself, and they both know it. The things that Wei Wuxian doesn’t talk about are buried for a reason, and what Wen Qing saw—that was just a glimpse of it.
She smiles. “I can handle it. Besides, it’s not like all of my memories are...pleasant.”
The image of Wen Qing in the streets of Lanling, clutching a tattered robe around her, half-starved, comes to mind. Wei Wuxian nods. “Then...I guess we can try again, and see what happens.” He takes a deep breath, trying to steady himself. “Can you—can you get Wen Ning? We still need someone to anchor us.”
“Of course.”
It’s not as bad as the first, but it still doesn’t go well.
The first memory Wen Qing shares is of her watching Wen Ning practice his archery. He must be only eight or nine here, with her only a few years older. As he draws the arrow and aims at the target, Granny Wen, minus a few gray hairs, comes up to Wen Qing’s side and watches. It’s peaceful, for a moment, and then the memory shifts to her pulling Granny Wen down a sandy road, surrounded by huddled crying people and cultivators dressed in golden Jin robes, shouting at them to get moving. She’s trying, but Granny Wen is injured and can’t keep up.
The overseer’s whip raises in the air, but when it descends, its brown leather becomes sparks of purple electricity as Madam Yu cracks Zidian against his back, Wang Lingjiao watching over them with a wicked smile, again and again and—
When they come out of it, both Wen Qing and Wei Wuxian are breathing heavily, leaning against one another, her forehead resting on his shoulder. After a minute, she pulls back, giving his hands one last squeeze before dropping them entirely.
Wen Ning looks between the two of them, knuckles white around the tassel. “Did it...work?”
“Not the way I wanted it to,” Wei Wuxian says, and then glances up at Wen Qing. “Not yet, anyways.”
It’s a small, exhausted thing, but she still smiles.
Over the next few weeks, they continue practicing at least once, sometimes two or three times a day. It’s exhausting, and the process takes a lot out of him and Wen Qing. The sessions often end with one or both of them in some kind of panicked or distant state, their memories still playing out across the back of their eyelids. They don’t talk about it. They just sit in the silence together, trying to forget whatever horror they’ve accidentally made fresh again.
Sometimes the shadows of those three months manage to slip through. Those are always the shortest ones, because as soon as the familiar sunless landscape of the Burial Mounds comes into focus, Wei Wuxian yanks his mind out of Wen Qing’s as fast as he possibly can. He can’t stop the glimpses from getting across, though—the screams that followed him through the dark, the blood-stained faces the spirits presented themselves with, the soul-deep pain of having no core to protect himself against the cold thrashing of resentful energy.
She doesn’t mention it, not ever, but those are the nights when Wen Qing turns a blind eye to how much he’s drinking, and he wakes up in the morning tucked into his bed with no memory of how he got there.
(And he does the same for her, when he wakes up panting in the middle of the night, the echoes of nightmares that aren’t his still ringing in his ears. He doesn’t mention it either, but he does make sure, on those days, to pick extra fruit for her, to hand her the warmest blanket, to tell A-Yuan to give her a hug.)
Still, the more they do it, the easier it is for Wei Wuxian to close off his mind and keep control of the connection, and the easier it is for Wen Qing to focus on more positive memories. Eventually they get to a point where their sessions are spent mostly in random, quiet moments from Wen Qing’s childhood, ones where she’s learning medicine or playing with her brother. And there are rarely any glimpses of Wei Wuxian’s past anymore.
Today, though, the memory Wen Qing shares is of her sitting in a garden. She’s only thirteen or fourteen here, her usually ornate robes replaced with simple ones. The sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, and her arms are streaked with soil, but there’s an open, bright look on her face, nothing like the tight concern she so often adorns now.
Next to her, helping her tend to the flowers, is another girl around the same age, with plain brown robes. Carefully, she pulls a small red flower off the bush and, with a shy smile, hands it to Wen Qing. In response, Wen Qing tucks the flower behind her ear and smiles back, her cheeks a light but noticeable shade of pink.
This time, when the memory shifts to one of Wei Wuxian’s, it isn’t an accident but an offering in return: an image of him standing in the middle of a marketplace. Confetti of all different colors rains down from the sky, but his eyes are only on Lan Wangji, studying the way the other boy looks up, the smooth planes of his face, the curve of his lips as they part just slightly in wonder.
Beautiful , he remembers thinking. This is what beautiful means.
Coming out of the connection is like waking up after a night of only good dreams. Wei Wuxian blinks the last bits of sunlight out of his eyes, adjusting to the dimness of the cave once more as Wen Qing draws her hands back.
“Is everything okay?” Wen Ning asks. It’s harder to tell these days, with the stiffness of his facial expressions, but it’s obvious he’s been worried the past few weeks. He’s fiddling with the beaded tassel in his hands, looking over both of them like they might have been injured.
“Yes, A-Ning,” Wen Qing says, gently taking the tassel and giving it to Wei Wuxian before smoothing back her brother’s hair. “I think—I think it worked.”
Wei Wuxian nods. “Now all we have to do is find a spirit to test it on. Maybe I can go out and find—”
Her head snaps around so fast, he swears he can hear the cracking. “Absolutely not .”
“ Aiya , Wen Qing, calm down,” he says, laughing. “Just kidding. No need to go looking for trouble, it’ll probably find me first.”
She rolls her eyes and opens her mouth, probably to deliver some cutting retort, but Wen Ning starts talking before she can reply. “Wei-gongzi, what’re you going to call it?”
“Call what?”
“The technique.”
He pauses, biting the inside of his cheek for a minute. All of this time spent practicing, and not once had he considered that he’d have to name it. The other things he’s invented have been pretty easy; Compass of Evil was obvious. But this…
Glancing up at Wen Qing, he thinks of a single red flower. Of extra fruit. Of the barest recollection of someone pulling a blanket over him. Of the way even now, they look at each other with a new understanding, a new knowledge of the other’s mind.
“Empathy,” Wei Wuxian says. “It’s called Empathy.”