Chapter Text
Sometimes, Fen Meng couldn’t help thinking she sprouted entirely formed at the very entrance of the Cang Qiong Mountain Sect, ready to follow the many, many children ready to attempt to gain the attention of an Immortal Master.
She knew it was wrong, obviously, but her fellow Disciples – be them sharing her dormitory or not – wistfully mentioned bits and pieces of an existence before coming to An Ding Peak. Father and mother, a farm or a workshop, the sweet scent of wildflowers or the taste of garbage in their mouth, there would be something.
Fen Meng’s first proper memory was of her tiny feet, smaller than she was today, so small she could have easily worn these dainty shoes sewn for noble ladies with their toes broken in a fit of aesthetic insanity, padding on the stone steps leading to the great terraced space on which the second part of the entrance exam would be held. How did she manage to pull such a feat, when more than a few boys and girls so much more older, thirteen and fourteen and well-fed, crumpled and admitted defeat, she had no idea.
Her second memory was a shadow falling upon her tiny hands busy scratching at the dirt with a pointy pebble she picked off the ground, because the soil was hard on the tip of her fingers and the pebble meant she wouldn’t hurt her nails and palms. The shadow was projected by a man, round-cheeked and wearing clean brown robes and looking at her with something hindsight would allow her to peg as worry.
« Hey, baby » he quietly greeted her. « Can you show me your pebble ? »
She remembered pouting, her brows furrowed beneath her bangs, the sweaty hair plastered to the pale skin of her forehead. She remembered the way he smiled, slow and gentle, as he plucked a soft-looking purse from his brown sleeve and opened it, and the rich perfume of nuts cookies spilling in the air.
« I just want to see, alright ? If you let me, you can take a cookie. »
She remembered happily chewing on two cookies while he sat down besides her, and now she knew he was actually looking at her, taking the measure of her, instead of marveling at the pebble.
« What’s your name, baby ? »
A soft cough to not choke on the crumbs sliding down her throat, she had blinked and licked her lips as she wrestled with her brain, before stumbling upon the answer.
« Meng’er is Meng’er. »
A deep sigh.
« I see. Can you tell me how you came here ? »
« Walk. »
« Just you ? What about your mama, or baba ? »
She remembered shrugging, not a whit upset over the sheer lack of responsible grown up to watch her behaviour. She remembered him sighing again and offering her another cookie.
Her trust thus bought by the sweet treats, she remembered how she she leaned in his arms when he gently lifted her in his arms before going back to the platform on which half a dozen grown ups in fancy garments were standing. She remembered the sound of a female voice above her head while she was blissfully gnawing on the corner of her cookie and in hindsight she could identify as Qi-shigu, worrying about such a young girl stranded at the sect’s gates on the very day of the Disciple selection yet unable to take her in because there was no place on Xian Su Peak for yet another girl, especially a very young child with much different needs from the usual crop of lasses delivered to the purple-clad fairy’s door all year round.
Fen Meng sometimes wondered how Qi-shigu reacted when the physical she got a few days after being officially registered as part of An Ding Peak established she wasn’t a three-years-old toddler but an extremely dainty six-years-old. At this point in time, a transfer would have been too much paperwork and in spite of not being a catastrophic three years old, twice this number of years spent breathing under the Heavens wasn’t that much better, Qi-shigu was trained to deal with girls who had already presented and were on the verge of worrying about marriage and infamy rather than soft toys and cuddles.
So Fen Meng remained on An Ding Peak, surrounded by many, many other children to play with her and learn with her, some of them younger yet she remained the smallest of her generation by a bewildering and annoying whim of Fate, some of them senior because they had been accepted by the Sect before her and vanishing one day because they weren’t interested in cultivating immortality and glory or staying because they wanted to further their studies or network, some of them nasty and some of them nice.
All of them able to speak about a life before Cang Qiong and An Ding Peak. All of them remembering a family before Shizun, or if they had been too young or wished not to linger because it was too painful and harsh, to point at the map and indicate where they came from.
Fen Meng wasn’t like that, her life starting at the very first step of the great stone stairs leading towards the Twelve Peaks’ majestic tops, Shizun the only parent she could name no matter how much he sputtered and blushed and turned away every time she slipped and called him a-Die until she fully stopped one day, named after the paint heartily coating the dormitory in which she had been brought and never left – that was Traditional to identify the An Ding Disciples by the colour of their specific dormitories unless they wished for their proper family name to be retained but since most of them were farmer brats and street urchins and orphans too poor to own the clothes on their back it was so uncommon as to be startling when it happened, leaving An Ding Peak home to a whole rainbow of kids and teens and teachers and Hallmasters, each colour their own little compound yet united in their work for the Sect’s greater prosperity and their undying devotion to Shizun, the man called Shang Qinghua.
Fen Meng wasn’t bothered by this absence of a previous recorded existence. Maybe if she had been unhappy on An Ding Peak, she would have lost herself in fruitless what-ifs and ponderings, but at the end of the line, it wouldn’t have been very useful to wallow in the shadows that never came into being. She was content on the Logistics Peak, even if that was a very exhausting task indeed to try and balance the budget with eleven Peaks splurging on a whim or constantly wrecking something barely repaired, and in spite of being an accountant she still needed to go and pull her weight on night hunts to uphold the Peak’s good name and face no matter how unfond she was of hacking things with a sword or blowing monsters to pieces with a talisman because what if something went wrong on this expedition ?
Her life could be hard on her nerves sometimes but she deemed it had more positives than negatives, all considered. It was good, and she was good, and she wanted for it to remain good.
For this goal, there was very few she wouldn’t be ready to do, no matter how loudly she screamed inside.