Chapter Text
(New Moon Symbol ≊ New Moon)
Contrary to popular expectation, the entrance to the underworld is actually quite lovely – when Wei Wuxian had finally found it, thirteen years ago, he’d almost dismissed it as another false lead. Certainly no one in their right mind would look at the clear, gentle stream flowing through the base of Mount Tai and think ah yes, this is the river that leads to the Yellow Springs[1]. He had only investigated further when he sensed that there truly was something off about the river: a chill to its waters that belied the last heat wave of the summer, the lack of tadpoles or fish or any living creature, and no map that could accurately pinpoint where, exactly, it was flowing to.
Wei Wuxian leaves his horse behind in the inn, and walks to the bend in the river he’s accustomed to entering from. The water is biting, and his feet go numb within a minute. He withdraws a small knife meant for peeling fruit from within his sleeve, and makes a small cut on his right index finger. He peels back his outer robes, and traces the talisman on his inner robe, right on top of his heart. He bends down to rinse his finger and the knife in the water, and watches the small spirals of blood curl and disappear, carried downstream.
He closes his eyes. This is the year I find him, he thinks, and starts walking. He is determined to ignore the fact that he has already had the same thought for twelve years in a row.
It’s slow going with his eyes closed, and having to feel every step forward, the hems of his robes soaked heavy and dragging around his calves. The smooth pebbles of the river bed underneath his feet must be carefully navigated. Every year, the distance he needs to walk changes, kept track of by the number of turns in the river he senses walking through.
The first year, it had taken him a full twenty-one bends in the river. Last year, he had counted turning around only seven bends of the river before he had suddenly sensed other figures around him, and opened his eyes to see himself standing in the middle of a throng of pale, grey figures shuffling through a dilapidated gate.
This year -- the thirteenth year since Lan Wangji had vanished in a flash of gold light, leaving behind only a shattered glass vial and a disciple bleeding out into the bamboo mats of the Jingshi, his life seeping out of him from the slash Bichen had left across his neck -- Wei Wuxian is very lucky. He counts only three bends – left, left, right – before the sound of a thousand shuffling footsteps fade in around him.
He opens his eyes and sees the now-familiar sign looming in the distance: a dusty, worn-down wood panel with Ghost Gate written on it in rough, thick brush strokes. The red paint lacquered onto the wood has long cracked, and beginning to flake and chip off. In the last thirteen years, Wei Wuxian has watched the lower right corner of the sign go from a dull, flaky red to completely exposing the rough wood underneath. A bored looking guard sits at a table in front of the gate, checking each figure off as they approach, then waving them through the gate.
Wei Wuxian joins the line of people slowly streaming in towards the gate. The spirits here because they had truly lived out the span of their mortal life can’t place what, exactly, is strange about Wei Wuxian, but they give him a wide berth nevertheless. Thus, Wei Wuxian very quickly moves up to the front of the queue.
“Name, age, and cause of death?” the guard drawls out, gaze locked on the scroll of names in front of him. He idly scratches at a spot on his neck, not even bothering to look up at Wei Wuxian.
Wei Wuxian smiles.
“You won’t find me on that list,” he says.
At the sound of his voice, the guard looks up, then grins at the sight of Wei Wuxian.
“Ah, Young Master Wei, I was sorry to hear you’d failed again last year.”
Wei Wuxian can only shrug back at the guard. He doubts the guard is truly feeling sorry; after all, the first year he’d attempted to walk through the Gate of Hell with a soul that had yet to truly die, Wei Wuxian had had to make a deal of burning a truly outrageous amount of paper money and leaving out monthly offerings for the guards that supervised it. Every additional year Wei Wuxian must return is an additional year they can enjoy his offerings.
“Well, we continue to appreciate your patronage,” the guard says. “Seventh brother said to thank you for the lychee this year, in particular.”
“I’ll remember that,” Wei Wuxian says, and is waved forward by the guard.
“Good luck this year!” the guard shouts after him, startling the old man that had stepped up after Wei Wuxian into dropping his cane.
(New Moon Symbol ≊ New Moon)
Lan Sizhui had been a toddler still, when his father had vanished. As such, he doesn’t have many memories of him. If he stretches his memory as far back as it will go, he can at best remember two characteristics: the color white, and faint notes plucked from a guqin.
(He isn’t even sure if these are truly his memories, or if they are simply what he’s managed to most concretely deduce from his dad’s aversion to the color white, and the sad curve of his mouth whenever he listens to Lan Sizhui practice on his guqin.)
His father was a Lan. He knows this because he is named Lan Sizhui, instead of Wei, and he lives with his dad, Wei Wuxian, inside the Gusu Lans’ Cloud Recesses. For a long time, he hadn’t even known his father’s name – he was a forbidden subject of discussion, and asking after him made his dad’s face go sharp and brittle, so Lan Sizhui learns very quickly to stop inquiring.
When he had grown older, and learned to read, he had eventually been able to garner from flipping through scrolls of Gusu Lan history that his father was most likely named Lan Wangji. He’d copied the characters down on a strip of paper, his brush strokes still messy and clumsy, and rolled the strip up and tucked it inside the front flap of his robes, close to his heart.
When he had gone with this new knowledge burning bright inside of him to Lan Xichen, who he now knows he should call dajiu because he is the older brother of his father, Lan Xichen had smiled at him gently, and placed a warm hand on his shoulder, and asked him in the saddest tone Lan Sizhui had ever heard to refrain from investigating further.
Lan Sizhui had always been a curious child. But he also had always been a perceptive child. He sees the terrible sadness and pain veiled behind the blanket ban on any mention of Lan Wangji within the walls of the Cloud Recesses. He stops investigating.
His lack of knowledge with regards to his father, Lan Wangji, is made up for the absolute flood of knowledge he gets about his dad, Wei Wuxian.
He learns that Wei Wuxian constantly receives visits and gifts from other sect leaders asking for his advice or his help or his talismans. He learns that they remain in the Cloud Recesses because Wei Wuxian’s parents had been rogue cultivators, and he had no sect of his own. He learns that once upon a time, there existed a fifth sect of power, who grew in their greed and ambition and called themselves descendants of the sun. He learns that just as they reached the height of their tyranny, Wei Wuxian, a rogue cultivator with no sect affiliation, had somehow been able to step forward with three arrows that shot down the sun: one into the heart of Wen Ruohan, and one for each of his sons.
(He never learns that he used to be named Wen.)
The facts of Lan Sizhui’s life are such: he strives to improve his cultivation, he leads younger disciples on night hunts, he plays his guqin where he knows his dad won’t hear him, and drinks tea with his uncle and eats dinner with his dad (always breaking the ‘silence while eating’ rule) and he never would have known there was something missing were it not for the way his dad moves through life like he’s waiting for someone else to join him by his side.
And every year, the surest signal of autumn is this: his dad’s month-long departure from Cloud Recesses. Officially, he goes to check up on the villages that lay on the outskirts of the Gusu Lan territory. Unofficially, Lan Sizhui waits with his breath held in the hopes that on the day of Mid-Autumn, a day meant for reunions, he would see two figures return to Cloud Recesses, one in black, one in white.
In the twelve years since his father’s disappearance, Lan Sizhui’s hopes have never materialized, and he eventually stops asking the kitchens for mooncakes for three.
This year, the thirteenth year, Lan Sizhui is sixteen, and his cultivation has become acclaimed, and he is sure he can handle traveling by sword with an additional person next to him. The day prior to Wei Wuxian's departure, he asks to accompany him on the journey.
Wei Wuxian had smiled, had drawn him into a hug.
“I don’t doubt you can carry us both on Suibian, and travel much faster than I alone,” Wei Wuxian had said into his hair. (He used to be able to rest his chin on the top of Lan Sizhui’s head, but now they are almost at eye-level with each other.) “But this is not a journey meant for two.”
(New Moon Symbol ≊ New Moon)
Wei Wuxian’s time is limited to how long he can go without eating or drinking – the spirits of the dead do not need sustenance, after all, and the pale imitations of food and drink that are in the underworld can hardly sustain him. So far, the longest he’s been able to push himself has been six days.
If he had the cultivation of his youth, he could have gone for weeks and weeks, Wei Wuxian thinks bitterly, before he reminds himself that if he’d still had his cultivation, he wouldn’t have known how to invent the sort of talismans that let him cross over into the underworld in the first place.
He’s never told anyone where he goes, but he thinks Lan Xichen has his suspicions.
“What are you hoping to do?” Lan Xichen had asked him on the third year, as he prepared his horse’s saddle for the journey to Mount Tai.
“To get the truth,” Wei Wuxian had replied, but that had not been the true answer. He had not thought it wise to tell Lan Xichen he planned on bringing his younger brother back to him, even from the jaws of death.
“There’s nothing mortals can do to reverse the will of Heaven,” Lan Xichen had warned him.
But Wei Wuxian had not been deterred. He had never put much stock in the will of Heaven, after all.
Wei Wuxian follows Yellow Springs Road, the main road leading out from the gate. Smaller roads fork off of it, leading to each of the ten courts of the underworld. It had taken him twelve years, but the past year he had finally finished searching through the last of the courts. Lord Xue of the tenth court had been the kindest of them, perhaps because his jurisdiction was sending souls forward for reincarnation, rather than punishment. He had told Wei Wuxian what he wanted to know without any fuss – that no soul named Lan Wangji had passed through his court. It was possible, he had conceded, that the spirit had gotten lost and slipped through the cracks of their bureaucracy, and had crossed Helplessness Bridge without being properly processed.
That had been on the sixth day, and Wei Wuxian’s thirst had been a dull fire in his throat, his vision beginning to go spotty with darkness; he had been unable to go any further.
This year, he’s walking with a clear purpose. If Lan Wangji’s soul had truly already crossed into his next life, there was one last thing he could do. The Stone of Three Lives on the bank of the Forgetfulness River records every soul that crosses, and the details of their past life, current life, and next life. Wei Wuxian only has to make it across Helplessness Bridge, past Lady Meng[2], to read it.
His footsteps speed up, until he reaches the fork in the road leading back from Lord Xue’s tenth court. A steady line of spirits is streaming from the fork in the road, back onto the main road, presumably heading towards the bridge.
Wei Wuxian falls into line with them, and follows the steadily advancing crowd towards the long, dark stretch of Forgetfulness River. The water is as still as a pane of dark glass, and emanating a none too pleasant smell. The smell doesn’t seem to deter the spirits marching determinedly across the thin bridge over the river lit by dim lights and shrouded by mist.
The souls around him seem serene, content to wait their turn in the long line stretching forwards. Wei Wuxian supposes that makes sense – for them to reach this stage, they must have already been scrubbed clean through the previous nine courts of punishment. Wei Wuxian has been through no such absolution, and has no such patience. He pushes forwards as fast as he can without causing too much of a commotion.
When he reaches what appears to be the end of the main road, coming out in front of the river, he sees that the slow progression of spirits is making its way up the bridge.
At the highest point of the bridge stands Lady Meng, in robes of dull green. She has a large, steaming pot in front of her out of which she’s ladling a clear, fragrant broth into small wooden bowls and handing it out to every spirit that passes in front of her. They drink, and return the bowl to her hand, and that is when they are able to cross to the other side of the bridge.
Wei Wuxian comes to a halt in front of her, and takes the bowl of soup from her out of reflex, but doesn’t drink.
“You are not here for my soup,” says Lady Meng, voice soft and puzzled. She has a kind and ageless face, and her movements are graceful as she holds up a hand to stave off the spirits behind Wei Wuxian, who have begun muttering with slight discontent and impatience at the delay.
“No, my lady,” Wei Wuxian responds, and returns the bowl of soup to her hands.
“You’re a strange one,” Lady Meng observes. “There have been others like you, who come to me before their time on earth is done, and ask for my soup so they may find peace. If that is not what you wish for, why have you come?”
“I only seek to cross to the other side of the bridge so I may read from the Stone of Three Lives,” says Wei Wuxian.
“You are seeking truth?” asks Lady Meng.
“No,” says Wei Wuxian. “I am seeking a soul.”
(Crescent Moon )