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1
Wei Wuxian’s fist trembled. How dare he – worthless peacock – my shijie..!
But before he could throw a punch, he saw a swirl of white – Lan Wangji, sweeping forward with a face like a graveyard, and Nie Huaisang cringing in his shadow – and suddenly he realized that he didn’t need to punch Jin Zixuan.
Speaking of others behind their backs is forbidden.
Sneering without reason is forbidden.
Arrogance is forbidden.
Do not be haughty and complacent.
Do not praise yourself and slander others.
Do not make assumptions about others.
Do not insult people.
Do not take your words lightly.
Wei Wuxian grinned with teeth. “Hey, Lan Zhan!” he sang out, and Jin Zixuan blanched. “Perfect timing!”
Later, after he’d laughed himself sick at Jin Zixuan’s punishment – humiliatingly perfect – and making his appreciation very clear to Lan Wangji, he went to go find Nie Huaisang.
“When did you go get Lan Zhan?” he asked, honestly curious. He hadn’t known he was going to get into a fight until he was there and it was happening, but Nie Huaisang, of all people, had apparently figured out what was going to happen before it happened and took steps to fix it.
“The second they started talking about girls,” Nie Huaisang said promptly. “It’s fairly obvious that Jin Zixuan is resentful of his parents managing his life and he’s lashing out at everything, including specifically your shijie, so a nasty comment was inevitable.”
Wei Wuxian blinked, derailed from his original line of questioning. “He – what? Wait, that’s why he’s so rude about my shijie?”
“Of course,” Nie Huaisang said, blinking back at him. “What did you think? That he just didn’t like her? He’s barely even met her.”
Wei Wuxian hadn’t thought about that way, but it made a certain amount of sense. “When did you get so good at reading people?” he asked, bemused. “I didn’t…uh…”
“Think I have any skills?”
Wei Wuxian coughed.
“I don’t!” Nie Huaisang beamed, clearly very proud of it. “But I do have a lot of expensive hobbies, and that means I need pocket money.”
Wei Wuxian wasn’t sure he understood the connection, and said as much.
Nie Huaisang laughed at him. “The Nie sect believes in self-sufficiency,” he explained. “My brother gives me a certain amount of money to spend, sure, but we’re not the Jin sect; I can’t just buy everything that I lay my eyes on and send the bill back home – my brother would break my legs! I’m expected to find a way to increase the money I get until it’s enough to cover both my needs and wants, necessities and luxuries both, and if I can’t, then I have to do without luxuries.”
Nie Huaisang has never, not once, in the entire few months Wei Wuxian spent in his company, done without luxuries.
“So,” Wei Wuxian said, feeling oddly unnerved and unsure why, “you learned how to read people because you want to act like…a merchant?”
Nie Huaisang lightly tapped his head with his fan, rolling his eyes at him. “Stop being such a landed gentry young master, Wei-xiong. There’s nothing wrong with trade! How much of your sect’s money comes from merchants interested in keeping their trade routes free of resentful energy?”
Wei Wuxian wrinkled his nose a little. “That’s cheapening it a bit, don’t you think? As cultivators, it’s our duty to stand up as heroes, to defend the innocent and defeat evil, to purify –”
“Right, right. Remind me again how the Jiang sect pays for all that pretty purple?”
“Well…I mean…”
Technically, yes, there were all the dye sellers and the fabric merchants, but…
Nie Huaisang was laughing at him.
“Don’t worry about it, Wei-xiong,” he said, wiping his eyes. “You stick to doing your own thing. If you ever need to sell anything, come to me.”
“Of course,” Wei Wuxian said, privately thinking to himself that he’d rather farm for crops than become a seller hawking his goods in the marketplace. “Hey, wait, what is it that you sell, anyway?”
Nie Huaisang sniggered and refused to tell him.
2
It was porn.
Also barbeque and liquor, although in that case Nie Huaisang mostly played the middleman between the vendors of Caiyi Town and the students stuck eating Lan vegetables.
Sometimes he could even be convinced to tug on his contacts for other things, too.
“You’re a true friend,” Wei Wuxian said, clutching the bottle of chili sauce to his chest. “A true and wonderful friend.”
“You still have to pay,” Nie Huaisang said, his eyes curving up behind his fan. “No discounts.”
“A ruthless, vicious, cut-throat friend…”
“I lend you the porn for free, don’t I?
“Wonderful! Wonderful friend!”
3
No matter what Jiang Cheng said, Wei Wuxian was trying to keep his head down during their time at the indoctrination camp. He was taking this whole thing very seriously: he wasn’t making a fuss (too much), he wasn’t being insulting (too much), he wasn’t even socializing (too much).
Lan Wangji didn’t count, anyway; after what had happened to him, he needed someone bothering him.
But Wei Wuxian was being good and keeping back from the rest!
Well, he was, except then he saw Nie Huaisang and just had to go over to say hello. It was only polite, and had nothing to do with the fact that during the months he spent at the Cloud Recesses, he’d learned that Nie Huaisang could sell anyone on anything.
“I don’t suppose you have contacts that will sell you barbeque here,” Wei Wuxian said as a greeting, because the food they’d received was frankly disgusting in a way that made him wistful for the Lan sect like it had been a gourmet restaurant.
“Well,” Nie Huaisang hedged, and Wei Wuxian’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t get too excited, it’s not barbeque…”
It was meat, though, chunks of that had probably been roasted as skewers at one point, and Wei Wuxian didn’t even care that it was cold as he scarfed it down, immediately feeling ten times better than he’d been before.
“Where?” he asked. “How?”
“There’ll be a surprise inspection tomorrow morning,” Nie Huaisang said instead. “Keep your head down, they’re looking to make an example out of somebody.”
“How do you know that?”
Nie Huaisang shrugged. “I brought art.”
“To the indoctrination camp?”
“Wen soldiers get lonely and bored too, Wei-xiong.”
“You’re trading for information using porn?”
“Don’t be silly. I’m trading porn for meat, and getting the information while we’re chatting. A large number of the Wen sect cultivators used to be their own sects, you know, before they were absorbed, and not all of them are happy about what’s going on here. You just have to figure out who the loyalists are, avoid them, and focus on the rest, and it’s easy.”
“I still can’t believe you brought porn to the Wen sect,” Wei Wuxian said, shaking his head. “What’ll you do if your brother finds out?”
“You’re joking, right? He helped me pack it.”
Wei Wuxian will never understand the Nie sect.
4
Wei Wuxian stared wordlessly at his bowl.
There was a single slice of radish in it.
“Is this a joke?” he asked Wen Qing, because it might be, and she glared at him, meaning that no, it was not. “Don’t we have anything else?”
“With what money, Wen-gongzi? Do you think it comes from thin air?”
“I had a friend once who could make it come out of thin air,” he grumbled, looking down at his bowl. He’d practiced inedia, he didn’t need it, except for the fact that he really, really did. Not having a golden core made things hard. “He could’ve sold fish to fishermen, except he mostly just sold porn.”
Wen Qing rolled her eyes at him. “Wonderful story, Wei-gongzi. Positively heartwarming. But unless your old erotic art dealer is going to come to Yiling to help us sell some radishes, I don’t care.”
Naturally, that was impossible. Wei Wuxian was a villain now, his name blackened, the whole cultivation world against him –
Actually, as far as he could tell, the Nie sect didn’t seem to give a damn about him one way or another. From all the stories Nie Huaisang had told about his brother and from everything he’d seen in the war, Nie Mingjue wasn’t the sort of person to let evil sit around on a mountain while he was busy with other things – if he objected, he’d be there the next day with his saber, ready to put him in his place.
He hadn’t, obviously.
His hatred of the Wen sect was pretty well-known, but he’d taken no action at all to invade Yiling and demand that Wei Wuxian hand them over, and Wei Wuxian was mostly sure that it wasn’t because he was scared of what Wei Wuxian could do with the Stygian Tiger Seal.
…it was probably just the hunger getting to him and making him think crazy things. Not caring enough to go against him was pretty far from supporting him, after all.
But, hey, he wouldn’t be risking anything if he just wrote a tiny little letter asking Nie Huaisang for some advice on selling things, right?
I never thought I’d see the day my Wei-xiong finally became a merchant, the return letter said. I’ll be there in three days. I expect to see liquor.
Wei Wuxian took Wen Ning down the mountain and stood on his shoulders in order to emancipate a jar from the local tavern, but by the time Nie Huaisang arrived, there was, in fact, liquor.
Even Wen Qing – who had opposed the entire outing once she had heard about it upon their return – suddenly thought it was a perfectly reasonable sort of theft when Nie Huaisang offered to trade a giant crate full of meat for it.
“We had some leftovers from a boar hunt,” Nie Huaisang said mournfully, accepting the liquor and a bowl of radishes. “I need variety, Wei-gongzi, it’s terrible. You have to help me get rid of it; I can’t stand to look at it any longer.”
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Wei Wuxian reminded him in between glorious bites of pork. He was going to be a very good friend and do his best to ensure that Nie Huaisang’s request was fulfilled, even if it meant taking seconds and possibly thirds. “I asked for advice, not a visit.”
“You can’t expect me to put my good name on what could be inferior goods,” Nie Huaisang sniffed.
“Your good name? The one known for porn, you mean?”
Nie Huaisang rolled his eyes at him. “So show me what you have to sell.”
“It’s mostly just the radishes,” Wei Wuxian said. “I tried to tell Wen Qing that we should plant potatoes, but –”
“Forget the radishes,” Nie Huaisang said. “What’s this I hear about you designing a compass that pinpoints resentful energy?”
“Oh, that?” Wei Wuxian said, blinking. “Yeah, I made one of those – the Burial Mounds is the biggest source of resentful energy around, and it’s easier to have a compass that points home instead of north, you know? But what does that have to do with selling radishes?”
“Wei-xiong, you’re hopeless. Leave it all to me, and you’ll have your sect up and running in no time.”
“Yeah, that would be – wait, sect? What sect?”
“Actually,” Nie Huaisang said, tapping his fan against his cheek. He was just plain old ignoring Wei Wuxian now, which, hey! “I take it back – before you leave everything to me, show me what other ideas you’ve been cooking up. What about those talismans you used during the war? The spirit-drawing ones?”
“Spirit summoning,” Wei Wuxian corrected.
“Yes, those. Have you improved on those at all?”
“Uh, I mean, I guess…”
“Good. Show me everything.”
5
“So I have a sect now,” Wei Wuxian told Lan Wangji, who had come to visit. “We sell things to support it. Apparently.”
Lan Wangji nodded, apparently already aware of this. “The clan elders have agreed that using your flags to draw fierce corpses and other creatures away from areas with innocent human lives is an acceptable use.”
“Even the Lan sect?” Wei Wuxian marveled. “No wonder we’re making so much money.”
Then he sighed.
Lan Wangji looked questioningly at him.
“Well, I have a sect now,” Wei Wuxian said. “Everyone’s expecting me to – you know. Form the core of the sect.”
“Marry,” Lan Wangji concluded. Possibly advised? No, that didn’t sound like he was urging him to go ahead, which made a total of one person. “You do not have to if you do not wish. You already have an heir.”
“A-Yuan’s too young to be a proper heir,” Wei Wuxian objected, though he was secretly gleeful that people were generally accepting him as one. “And obviously I can’t just pick anyone; how will I know if they’re a spy? Or if they’ll secretly dislike A-Yuan?” He sighed again. “The worst part is, I think Nie Huaisang is plotting against me, too.”
“Plotting?”
“Yeah! He’s encouraging people to ask me about marriage, when clearly it’s better for me to stay off the market…what about you, Lan Zhan? Are you planning on marrying?”
“No,” Lan Wangji said.
“We’ll be a bunch of old bachelors, then,” Wei Wuxian said. “You should come more often, A-Yuan loves you…hey! I have a great idea! Why don’t we get married? Then no one will bother us ever again!”
“Mm,” Lan Wangji said.
“Mm? What does that mean?”
“It means I will need to send Nie Huaisang his payment in the morning,” Lan Wangji said, and moved to sit next to Wei Wuxian.
“Payment? You bought something from him? What did you want to –”
Lan Wangji silenced him pretty effectively, no spell necessary, and by the time Wei Wuxian retained enough ability to think through what exactly the purchase must have been, he’d already been converted to thinking that it was a very intelligent purchase to make.
Nie Huaisang really could sell anything.