😆 Finally reached one of the posts dedicated to my fanfic involving a character from Mo Dao Zu Shi! 😆
I have been obsessed with Mo Dao Zu Shi since watching the live-action adaptation in 2022. 🥰 (I have since read the original novel twice. Also read the first five volumes of the comic adaptation...which is not quite through volume one of the novel... 😅)
Anyway. What can I say about Jiang Cheng before needing a spoiler tag? (Since it's hard to talk about him without spoiling the plot of the original work...)
Well, to start with, basics. Jiang Cheng is his birth name (and almost the only name used in canon, as the omniscient narrator always refers to him that way), while his courtesy name is Jiang Wanyin, and his soubriquet is Sandu Shengshou...though I don't think anyone in canon ever used it. Maybe the omniscient narrator used it in his first scene in the novel, but otherwise...it's pretty much only to be seen in the glossary at the back that tells you who the characters are, what their names are, and what their names mean. As to his personality, he can be quite blunt and brash, and has a decided sarcastic side. He probably thinks he's pretty cagey and subtle, but actually you can read everything he's thinking just by looking at his face. (Especially in the live-action adaptation! His face is marvelously expressive.) He's devoted to his family, but also quite proud, and wants to make sure both his reputation and the reputation of his clan are spotless. Definitely a spoiled young master, but also a hard worker, at least as far as bettering himself (or avenging his family) goes. Starts turning into his mother in his later years, though... 😰
His father, Jiang Fengmian, is the leader of the Jiang Clan, a cultivation clan based in the idyllic Lotus Pier, just outside Yunmeng. ("Cultivation" in this meaning is...uh...hard to explain. It's a magical practice rooted in Daoism. So a reductionist way to look at a cultivation clan is a magical martial arts school with a certain amount of baked-in nepotism, given the importance of inheritance along bloodlines.) His mother, Yu Ziyuan (known as Yu-furen), is a powerful and often terrifying force of nature. And not shy of unleashing her terror on all those around her, including her own son.
However, her son is not the lead of Mo Dao Zu Shi. The lead is Wei Wuxian, an orphan brought to Lotus Pier by Jiang Fengmian when the boy was about eight or nine years old. (There was massive past history there, something of a dual love triangle (or maybe it's a love quadrangle?) involving Jiang Fengmian, Yu Ziyuan, and Wei Wuxian's parents...) Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng are only a few months apart in age, with Wei Wuxian being slightly older. Though Jiang Cheng's angelic elder sister, Jiang Yanli, adopted Wei Wuxian as her new brother immediately, there were a few rough spots between him and Jiang Cheng before he, too, accepted the newcomer as his brother. Not that he can ever admit that he genuinely views Wei Wuxian as his brother. (Jiang Cheng is something of a tsundere where Wei Wuxian is concerned, tbh. It's kind of adorable.)
Illustration of Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli from the back cover of volume 4 of the official English translation of the novel
As they got older and started training in cultivation, Wei Wuxian became Jiang Fengmian's first/eldest disciple, and Jiang Cheng the second, setting the tone for their training overall. (Technically, Jiang Yanli is his actual first and eldest disciple, but she's barely trained in cultivation so she somehow "doesn't count"...or it's just because she's a girl. 😣) No matter how hard Jiang Cheng works and trains (and that's very hard!) he always comes up second to Wei Wuxian, because Wei Wuxian is just that good. To make matters worse, he's naturally just that good, and often slacks off on his practicing, but still outperforms Jiang Cheng in everything. And they're both very competitive, always trying to outdo each other. And when Jiang Cheng inevitably fails to come out on top, his mother lets him have it for not working hard enough, because she hates Wei Wuxian and refuses to believe that her son could really be less talented than he is.
When I described that much of Jiang Cheng's backstory to my brother, his response was that I was describing the origin story for a super-villain. (He even described a Bond villain whose origin story was remarkably similar, in fact!) But the thing is that Jiang Cheng is not a villain. He is antagonistic to Wei Wuxian for a large chunk of the story (larger in the novel than in the live-action adaptation), but not because of the simple jealousy that their childhood naturally inspired in him, but for a very different, more direct, and more understandable reason. Though that's in the later portion of the story, and not where I prefer to focus. (And, even in that late portion of the story, he's still on the "good" side of the equation, and assists the heroic side in the final confrontation.)
However, I prefer the earlier portions of the story (earlier chronologically, that is) when the Lotus Pier trio are still a happy trio and most of the tragic deaths haven't happened yet. (And yes, there are so many tragic deaths. Mo Dao Zu Shi absolutely a story that will make you ugly cry. Over and over again. But at least most of the tears are over long before the finale, so you don't end on a sour note like a certain other cdrama I watched, which I will not talk about here.)
The Lotus Pier trio when they're still very young
But I'm not supposed to just be talking about characters I like: my April A-to-Z theme is "characters I have written about," after all! So that means I need to discuss how I've written about Jiang Cheng, and that means I'll need to discuss spoilers for the original story, so if you don't already know the story of Mo Dao Zu Shi (title translated into English for the novel as The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, and The Untamed for the live-action drama) then stop reading here. (Unless you're positive you'll never want to read/watch it. Then you can do as you please.)
While I have tons of fanfics I want to write for MDZS, I've only completed a small handful of fics, two medium-length ones, one long one, one super-long one, and three or four short ones. One of the medium-length ones is the one set in the 1980s that I mentioned in the post about Curt Wild, but there wasn't really anything noteworthy regarding Jiang Cheng there. Likewise, the short ones don't have much about him at all, being largely focused on Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji. The long one...he's present at multiple points in the story, but there's not much of note about his character there; not much that deviates from how I described him above, nor even sheds further light on him as a character.
So that means I'll be focusing on just two of the fics. The medium-length "To Walk This Earth With You Again" and the untitled, currently unedited super-long one. We'll start with the shorter one, obviously. 😅 But before that, I have to talk about the darker turns that the original story takes. Or rather, I feel the need to spell out certain key turns of the plot, in case anyone is reading this just out of curiosity about how I handle the character, and hasn't read/watched the original story. (Feel free to skip the next paragraph if you already know the story.)
In MDZS, there is a brutal war called the Sunshot Campaign (in which all the other cultivation clans get together to defeat the powerful Wen Clan, which had been tyrannizing the rest of them, and had wiped out Lotus Pier, killing the entire clan except the young trio pictured above), and in the course of that war, Wei Wuxian developed a form of "demonic" cultivation (which I think I read somewhere is actually only called demonic in the title of the novel, and actually called like "ghostly" or something in the text itself), which is essentially necromancy. This makes him powerful but also somewhat hated, and is reflecting badly on the Jiang Clan (which is already in a pretty pitiful state, consisting entirely of new recruits that Jiang Cheng worked hard to find back when the war was starting) The situation becomes more and more uncomfortable until eventually Wei Wuxian breaks away from the rest of the cultivation world in order to save(?) Wen Ning (a friend of his who risked his life to defy his own clan and protect both Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng in the days immediately following the massacre of Lotus Pier) and some other survivors of the Wen Clan who he found being horribly abused by the Jin Clan. After about a year of nothing further happening, Wei Wuxian is invited to a celebration in honor of Jiang Yanli's son (by Jin Zixuan, heir to the Jin Clan) turning one month old. He's excited to be able to see his sister again, and goes happily, not knowing that a trap has been laid out for him by several particularly horrible members of the Jin Clan. Jin Zixuan shows up to try to prevent the violence, but he arrives too late, as the violence has already started, and so he ends up dead. This leads to Wei Wuxian being considered the enemy of the world, and--to cut out all but the most crucial details--when Jiang Yanli shows up in the midst of a battle between Wei Wuxian (and all the ghosts and fierce corpses he can summon up) and all the clans, she's wounded. Jiang Cheng catches her before she can fall, of course, and she's lying there in her brother's arms, with a worried Wei Wuxian beside them, when she sees someone about to kill Wei Wuxian. Her own heartbreak at the death of her husband is momentarily stifled by her maternal/sororal affection for her brother-in-all-but-blood, so she pushes Wei Wuxian aside, only to receive the blow herself and die. This, of course, is the reason for Jiang Cheng's antagonistic attitude towards Wei Wuxian for the rest of the story; not only did he get Jiang Yanli killed (and both of them have quite the sister complex about her) but by her death she had seemed to have "chosen" Wei Wuxian over Jiang Cheng, her actual brother, giving him all the more reason to be consumed by hate. About three months later, Jiang Cheng leads the second battle of an entire army against Wei Wuxian, and that time the army wins, though opinions are divided as to how Wei Wuxian died. (Wei Wuxian claimed spiritual backlash from his own techniques tore him to pieces, and Jiang Cheng claimed to have killed him himself. There's no ruling from the narrator on that, though, so we have to just pick one of them as telling the truth.) Now, the way the story goes in MDZS is that Wei Wuxian's death is the starting point, and then the narrative goes immediately to his resurrection thirteen years later (sixteen years later in the live-action version) as the unhappy Mo Xuanyu sacrifices his own soul to offer up his body to Wei Wuxian as a new vessel in which to live again. And then from there, Wei Wuxian has to solve a murder and expose an evil mastermind, in the process repairing much (though not all) of the bad reputation his own actions had given him, and while it would be a lie to say that he repairs his relationship with Jiang Cheng, the final two big sequences of the story do reveal to Jiang Cheng that Wei Wuxian was not quite as responsible for the tragic events as he had seemed to be, and there is a certain amount of closure there. Like, they're not quite brothers again (well, to Jiang Cheng, anyway; Wei Wuxian's feelings for him had never changed) but there's hope that they eventually can repair their relationship, at least enough to be friends, if not properly brothers.
Okay, so that's the original story. In "To Walk This Earth With You Again," I posited an alternate and fairly grim version of events, specifically a version in which Wei Wuxian was not revived in Mo Xuanyu's body, and thus everything he accomplished after being revived never happened. So the fic started in modern times: he had been reincarnated in the normal manner, but for whatever reason still remembered that life long ago as Wei Wuxian. (And is in fact going by the name Wei Ying, which was Wei Wuxian's birth name.) After joining an online group for those who remember previous lives, he's directed to a temple dedicated to the deified Lan Wangji (birth name Lan Zhan). Wei Ying goes to the temple, and soon after meets the deified Lan Wangji in person, who immediately recognizes him as Wei Wuxian. They both go back to Wei Ying's hotel room so they can talk in private, and Wei Ying asks about what happened to everyone he used to know...
“So, were any of our friends still around when you ascended?”
There was something decidedly droll about the way Lan Zhan looked at him in response to his question. “I did not have friends,” he said. “Not after Wei Ying died.”
Those words punched him in the feels so hard that Wei Ying felt the urge to clutch his chest in mock-agony. (Or very real angst.) “Mutual acquaintances, then,” he amended his earlier statement. “Aside from a-Yuan.”
“Hm.” Lan Zhan shut his eyes for a moment or two. “Only my brother.”
That hit him so hard that Wei Ying had to sit down. “Really?”
Lan Zhan nodded.
“How…how old were you when you ascended?” He certainly didn’t look a day older than he had when Wei Wuxian died, but maybe that was just divinity giving him his youth back?
“About sixty.”
That made it slightly better, but not much! “And no one was still around? Not even Jiang Cheng?”
Lan Zhan shook his head.
“What…what happened to him?”
“The Jiang sect claimed it was a lethal qi deviation.” A slight smile, almost a smirk, accompanying a shaking of his head.
“What was it really, if it wasn’t a qi deviation?”
“His heart gave out.”
“A heart attack. Yeah. That tracks. With his temper, his blood pressure must have been off the charts.” Wei Ying sighed sadly. “How old was he when it happened?”
“Not yet fifty.” Lan Zhan frowned. “He had grown obsessed with your imminent reappearance.”
“He…he really hated me that much…?”
“In his later years, his rage was more at your audacity in remaining dead.”
“I don’t even know if I should be flattered, horrified, or insulted.” He was deeply hurt, though; he knew that much! After they had been as close as if they were real brothers…
(A-Yuan refers to Wen Yuan, one of the Wens that Wei Wuxian was trying to protect. (The prefix "a-" in front of a single character name is an affectionate form of address for those you're close to. (Or a dismissive one if it's in front of the family name of a servant.)) He was a child of about 2-3 years at the time of Wei Wuxian's death...and the sole survivor of those Wens. Lan Wangji had adopted him and raised him in the Lan Clan. Um, okay, technically in canon it's not 100% clear if he officially adopted the boy, but...probably.) Much of the point of this AU was "I wonder how much worse events could have gone without Wei Wuxian to clean up everyone else's messes?"
Um.
Yeah.
I mean, technically, they probably could have gone a lot worse than what I wrote in that fic, but I did kill off most of the remaining cast, many of them fairly ignominiously. (Not sure if dying of heart failure in his late forties is better or worse than the "murdered on the road by people trying to avenge someone whose death was not even his fault" fate that I gave the actual villain of the original work.)
Anyway, one of the chapters of the fic is a direct flashback to a particularly involved sequence of events as everything devolved into a horrible morass, because Lan Wangji is not the sort of person you can have narrate a long story, because he's too terse.
At one point in that flashback, Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng are on their way to wipe out an army of walking corpses, which the whole cultivation world (except Lan Wangji) believes to be the work of a revived Wei Wuxian. They're flying along on their swords (yes, that's something they can do in canon) when they spot the army of corpses...
“Can you destroy them with your guqin from up here?” Jiang Wanyin asked.
“Mn.”
“Well? What are you waiting for?” Jiang Wanyin demanded, when Lan Wangji did not prepare his guqin for an attack.
“We should follow them to whoever is controlling them.”
“We know who’s controlling them,” Jiang Wanyin snarled.
“I can’t believe he was that determined to blame me. When did I ever go in for indiscriminate violence?” Wei Ying moaned.
“We do not,” Lan Wangji reminded him. “You suspect. You do not know.”
“I do know.”
“You sound very like him when you sulk.”
Wei Ying laughed so hard he almost fell off his seat on the bed. “I wish I could have seen the look on his face when you said that!”
“It was very sour.”
I'll probably talk about the conflict that followed later in the month, but I do want to share this moment...
After some time, Jiang Wanyin evidently couldn’t take any more of listening to that. “Which is it?” he demanded. “Do you hate him or are you in love with him?!”
Wei Ying laughed. “That sounds like Jiang Cheng all right.” It sounded so like him that it made Wei Ying’s heart hurt.
“What is wrong?” Lan Zhan asked, after a considerable silence.
“I…” Wei Ying paused a moment, trying to decide if he should explain. “I’m okay.”
Lan Zhan just looked at him, clearly unconvinced.
“It’s just…Jiang Cheng asked me a question a lot like that once. About…about you.”
A slight shiver ran through Lan Zhan’s body. “How did you respond?”
“That’s…”
“When was it?”
“Just a few months after he came back from Cloud Recesses when we were boys.” Wei Ying laughed uncomfortably. “I guess I was still talking about you a lot.” Constantly, if his dream-memories were accurate. It was understandable that Jiang Cheng was annoyed by it. “As to how I answered him, I pretty much laughed the question off, really. At that point in my life, I didn’t hate anyone other than Jin Zixuan.” Not that he would have…well, no, at that point in his life, he probably would have wanted to kill him, given how freshly he had broken off his engagement to Jiang Yanli. Of course, at that time Wei Wuxian had been so young and inexperienced that he didn’t yet understand what it truly meant to take a life. “And the idea of loving anyone except as family hadn’t really occurred to me. Not…” Not the way it had occurred to him in this life at about the same age…
“Hm.”
And despite that exchange, it still took very blunt actions on Lan Wangji's part to make Wei Ying understand how he felt. I could go into that, but that's for another day's post. 😉 I just wanted to share the bit about Jiang Cheng both getting it and not getting it regarding Wei Wuxian's instant obsession with "Lan Zhan."
Anyway, that fic was supposed to end with the fourth chapter, with the romantic happy ending between Wei Ying and Lan Wangji after a thousand years. Only then I got an idea for a fifth chapter, when a tiny reincarnated Jiang Cheng shows up, some time after Wei Ying has published a web novel based on his memories of his life as Wei Wuxian. (Okay, not "tiny" exactly, being about eleven. But you get the idea.) Who of course immediately punches Wei Ying in the face. 😰 They get in a big argument...
Wei Ying did his best to suppress a grimace. “It’s honestly the truth, Jiang Cheng. I’ll do whatever it takes to prove it, if you can find a way.”
“You can die and take it to the King of Hell, see if he judges you to be the liar you are,” the child replied with a smirk. Oddly, he said ‘King of Hell’ in English…
“If I did, you’d never know the outcome, unless you died with me.”
“I guess not,” the boy admitted. “But I’m willing to suffer not seeing the confirmation that I’m right.”
“Well, I’m not willing to die again so soon, so you’ll have to settle for something else.”
“Nothing else will satisfy me! I’ll kill you over and over again until your soul is so shattered that it can never come back! I won’t ever let you hurt my family again!”
“I would have gladly died for any one of them!” Wei Ying shouted right back at him. “Even your mother!”
Jiang Cheng’s reincarnation crossed his arms peevishly. “You would not,” he insisted. “I’m not sure even I would have been willing to die for my mother.”
Wei Ying coughed to keep himself from laughing. “Okay, it would have depended on the circumstances,” he admitted. “But when the Wen army showed up…I would have gladly let them drag me off to kill me if it meant everyone else at Lotus Pier was safe.”
“Oh, but I thought you liked the Wens. You traded my sister’s life for theirs, after all.”
“Don’t try to get cute with me, you self-absorbed little rat!” Wei Ying shouted. “No one killed more Wens than I did during the Sunshot Campaign, and you know that perfectly well! And I would have died a thousand times before I allowed any harm come to shijie! But she didn’t give me that option! You were there—you saw what happened!”
The boy started trembling harder, tears flowing freely down his face. “I couldn’t stop her,” he said, his voice shaking even more than his body. “I couldn’t close my hands around her in time to keep her from—I should have flown off with her the minute she was injured!”
“Yes, you should have!” Wei Ying snapped. “So why didn’t you?!”
“I…I don’t know.” Choking sobs began to overpower his voice. “But it’s not…it’s not…I didn’t…it was still your fault!”
There's something very freeing about writing an adult who is a child again: it's easy to believe them saying things they would never say as an adult, admitting to thoughts and feelings that as adults we lock up inside ourselves, but that children, with very different brain chemistry directing their behavior, are more likely to blurt out.
In this case, that brain chemistry is especially different, because Jiang Cheng reincarnated into a female body, though that was only revealed after the scene quoted above. (Meaning not only that Wei Ying is unsure what pronouns to use in discussing Jiang Cheng 2.0, but actually so am I. Because basically there was a little goof-up in the reincarnation department, and Jiang Cheng's memories came through so strongly so early on that they wiped out almost all sense of self that had been developing, so Jiang Cheng 2.0 basically views that little girl's body as merely borrowed, in much the same way that Wei Wuxian regards Mo Xuanyu's body in canon: "it's the body I'm living in, but it's not actually my body," in other words. Which means that Jiang Cheng 2.0 doesn't really know how to self-identify, gender-wise.) Anyway, in the end, the fight is settled, and after a few months, Wei Ying invites Jiang Cheng 2.0 into the online chat group for people who remember previous lives. And I had so much fun with that! (Though getting it to display right on AO3 is slightly nightmarish...)
Heh, sorry about all that. I couldn't resist...
Anyway. I should probably move on now...
So, while I was in the process of getting that fic posted to AO3, I was also in the process of writing--well, trying to write--a visual novel for a game jam. It was a very ambitious one, and I had gotten together several artists to work on the character designs. And it was stressing me out for a lot of reasons, and definitely one of those reasons is that I'm not good at working with other people. Anyway, I started having heart palpitations.
And, since I was in the process of posting a fic where a character I like died the humiliating death (humiliating for a warrior like him, anyway) of a heart attack when he was roughly my age, some doofy part of me was like "okay, so Jiang Cheng is mad at me for killing him off like that and has cursed me to have heart troubles, too, but if I promise to write my next fic about him then he'll probably leave off tormenting me." So, I publicly made that promise. (Interestingly, in looking over some of my Velvet Goldmine fics, I saw that I had blamed a really bad cold on giving Curt Wild a cold in one of my fics. I guess my brain just operates that way...?) Of course, making the promise did not put a stop to the heart palpitations, because duh. I ended up dropping out of the game jam, since the stress of working on it was definitely a major factor in the heart palpitation equation. (Sadly, my doctors couldn't actually find anything wrong with my heart, so I've just sort of been floundering about blindly trying to figure out how to make them stop. Seems to have to do with not getting enough sleep and my posture in my (former) preferred computer-use position...but it's probably first and foremost because I don't get exercise. That's harder to deal with, though...) That gave me lots and lots of time to work on the fic I promised to Jiang Cheng, and...wow, is it a good thing I had so much free time!
The fic (currently titled "Jiang Cheng fic in need of a title.docx") is 494k words long, and took me a full eleven months to write. Editing it is officially going to be a nightmare. But it's an alternate universe fic diverging from the canon of the live-action adaptation, so before I can even think of editing it, I want to rewatch the entire show (rather than just the portions that actually still happen) before I start editing it, and that'll take a while, what with it being 50 episodes long. Also I don't want to even think of editing it until I've actually gotten The Martial Maenads released. That's the big one. I won't start rewatching the show until that's gone live on itch.io.
Anyway, since Jiang Cheng is the main character of that fic, there's obviously way too much about him in it to allow for any kind of summing up of his material here. But I did want to talk about some key character moments. Though first I should explain where it diverges from the canonical story, since it's from a very different spot than the previous fic I was just discussing! It starts soon after the fall of Lotus Pier, and the two biggest differences that direct all the changes from that point onwards are that Wen Ning and his sister Wen Qing defect from the Wen Clan and join the Jiang Clan soon after the fic starts, and Wei Wuxian never develops his power to control the dead (though he gets some other unique abilities to make up for that). Having Wen Qing join up was important, and also the reason I wanted to use the live-action drama's canon: in The Untamed, the rest of the cast meet the Wen siblings much earlier, and Jiang Cheng develops a huge crush on Wen Qing, which meant that he actually wants to save her life (her death is a horrible gut-punch moment in the drama (or it was to me, anyway)) whereas working with the novel's canon it's pretty much always going to be Wei Wuxian's idea to save her, and I wanted most or even all of the life-saving to be the will of the lead of the fic, not something he's doing grudgingly. And Wen Qing is pretty much at the top of my list of "characters who died tragically that I want to save in fanfic."
So, mostly, I want to share some moments that I feel like really highlight Jiang Cheng's character (read: moments I really feel like I actually did a good job expressing his character) or show some of the growth he experiences due to the altered chain of events. This first scene is a little bit of both of those. For context, this is still pretty early on (relatively speaking); after accepting Wen Qing and Wen Ning as his companions (they don't officially join his clan until after this scene) Jiang Cheng also reluctantly agrees to Wen Qing's request/demand that he rescue the people of Fojiao Town on Mount Dafan. (One of the other changes made to the live-action version is that the Wen refugees that Wei Wuxian shelters in the later portion of the flashback are all from the same subclan as Wen Qing and Wen Ning, and they're all introduced during a new subplot dealing with the pieces of the "Yin Iron." This Yin Iron is very clunky and I had to really struggle to find a way to pin it down and not make it quite so arbitrary as it was in the show. But anyway since that was already the case, I figured "why not run with it" and had a small sequence where they rescue those particular Wens before the war this time.) With so many refugees in tow, he turns to the Lan Clan for help, taking them all to the Lan Clan's home at Cloud Recesses so he can leave behind the non-combatants there. The morning after they arrive, Lan Qiren (uncle to Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen (who is the leader of the Lan Clan at this point in the story)) calls Jiang Cheng to a morning meeting with him to discuss the situation over breakfast. (Despite that the Lan Clan has rules about eating in silence... 😅) This moment seemed like the best one to call out as Jiang Cheng being suddenly slapped in the face with the fact that he's actually grown and changed.
They ate in silence for some time, until Lan Qiren suddenly spoke again. “I should like to know more about these refugees you have brought. I was told they are Wens.”
“Yes, I’m sorry to say they are,” Jiang Cheng admitted. “I…there is part of me that wishes I had turned my back on them for that reason. And yet, having traveled this far with them…” He frowned down at his food. “The Wen Clan of Dafan is entirely different from the Wen Clan of Qishan, the monsters who murdered my parents and our sect. The villagers I accompanied here are mostly without cultivation, and what little they know pertains only to growing herbs and preparing them into medicines.”
“So, you trust them?”
The question jarred Jiang Cheng so much that his chopsticks slipped from his fingers. Trust? A Wen? And yet… “I suppose, in a way, I do.” Hadn’t he risked his life for them already, and fought battles to protect them? Hadn’t he helped the elderly mount horses and wagons, then helped them down again at the end of a day’s journey? Hadn’t he had that little boy fall asleep on his lap numerous times aboard the boat? “Though I suppose my parents won’t forgive me for saying so.”
“Does that trust extend to Wen Qionglin and Wen Qing?”
“It started with them.” Jiang Cheng recovered his chopsticks and brushed the food off them. “After the attack on Lotus Pier, if Wen Qionglin hadn’t been there, I…I would be a corpse now, Wei Wuxian probably would have been killed trying to rescue me, and I don’t know what would have happened to my sister. He risked his life to save us, and Wen Qing took on just as much risk to heal my wounds and let me rest under her care. If we couldn’t trust them, they would have handed us over to Wen Chao’s forces straight away.”
Oh, uh, Wen Qionglin is Wen Ning's courtesy name (again, rarely used in canon), and Wen Chao is the second son of Wen Ruohan, leader of the Wen Clan, and he's more or less the "face of the enemy" where the Wen Clan is concerned; in the novel, Wen Ruohan is a threat never really seen (except in one sequence where Wei Wuxian sees someone else's memories of the war), whereas Wen Chao runs the "indoctrination camp" where the Wen Clan took hundreds of other clans' disciples as hostages and nearly gets everyone killed, and he (and his mistress, Wang Lingjiao) led the attack that wiped out Lotus Pier. (He is also Wen Ning and Wen Qing's cousin of some variety. Their exact relationship to the other members of the main family of the Wen Clan is unclear in canon, but I think it was said somewhere that Wen Ruohan was a cousin of one of their parents? I know at one point in the drama Wen Ning refers to Wen Ruohan as "Wen-shushu", which technically means "uncle", but "shushu" is also just a polite-but-friendly way to refer to any man of the older generation, and does not require a blood relationship. (Wei Wuxian refers to Jiang Fengmian as "Jiang-shushu" for example, though there's actually a lot of baggage to unpack in that, which I may talk about later this month...))
Anyway, that moment was an eye-opener for Jiang Cheng because of just how deeply and instantly he hated the very idea of the Wen Clan in canon, seeing them as the epitome of evil from the moment they killed his parents. (Made for a painful scene in the drama, because when he sees Wen Qing tending to him in his weakened state after he's rescued from Wen Chao's men, his first reaction is to be pleased by the sight of the girl he's crushing on, and then he notices the Wen Clan flames embroidered on her sleeve and flips out, horrified by the reminder that she's "the enemy" now. In the novel that violent reaction on his part doesn't mean anything to either of them, because it's the first time they meet.) And his hatred of the Wen Clan only grew from there (especially after Wei Wuxian started sheltering some of them and...) of course, so even this early on in the fic, his character has undergone some growth he never really got in canon. But hopefully in a way that feels natural. (We'll see if I think so when I go back to start editing that monstrosity...)
I also tried to deal with the heavy pain he was going through in these early days after the fall of Lotus Pier. (In canon, even in the drama, we skip over the first three months after Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian are separated shortly after the fall of Lotus Pier. While I still had Wei Wuxian disappear for three months (for a different reason and in a different way, though!) since this was Jiang Cheng's fic, the story obviously kept going through those three months.) Which was really awkward to write about, but I hope I managed to make it at least vaguely believable.
What was he supposed to be thinking right now? What was he supposed to be feeling?
They were headed towards Lanling, where all the other survivors of the Wen attacks were gathering. At long last, he was taking his first steps towards proper revenge against Wen Ruohan and his dogs. The first steps toward slaughtering Wen Chao like the beast he was—the first steps towards [doing something really disgusting to his corpse], as rumor had it Nie Mingjue had done with Wen Chao’s elder brother.
So why wasn’t Jiang Cheng swelling with pride and purpose?
If he was honest with himself, he wanted to cry more than anything else.
This was the most important voyage of his life so far—maybe the most important one he would ever take.
Why was he having to take it so alone?
His parents were dead. His sister was hopefully at his destination. Wei Wuxian was…only the gods could know where he was right now! Hopefully he was hard at work getting a new golden core and convincing Baoshan-sanren to tell him how the Yin Iron’s powers could be neutralized, rather than just off fooling around with Lan Wangji. But no matter where he was, he wasn’t in the one place he belonged: riding beside Jiang Cheng and supporting him, as he had always promised he would.
Clenching his hands around the reins, Jiang Cheng tried to remind himself that of course he wasn’t truly alone. Lan Xichen was riding beside him, Wen Qing was right behind them, and they were accompanied by dozens of Lan Clan cultivators.
But…it wasn’t the same. How could it be?
The feeling of belonging he used to have was gone, cut down along with everyone at Lotus Pier. Even once he assembled new followers to replace everyone who was gone, how could he ever feel like he belonged with them the way he had with everyone who had been there for his whole life?
The very thought of those new followers, whoever they would turn out to be, trying to take the place of the family he had lost made his eyes sting.
I would say that "Pride and Purpose" would make a good title for the fic, only then people would probably expect it to have some kind of connection to Pride and Prejudice, which it totally does not. (Though transplanting these characters into a Regency setting could be fun, I must say. I actually have something on my back-burner of possible future works that's along those lines...)
Anyway, later in that ride to Lanling (well, not much later, really), Jiang Cheng finds himself getting emotional, and rides off to be alone, ending up at a stream, where he's dismounted and is washing his face when Wen Qing catches up to him. Their conversation turns to the subject of Wei Wuxian...
Jiang Cheng glanced over his shoulder at her. “Do you know the last thing my mother said to him?” he asked, looking back down at his rippling reflection in the stream.
“I gathered it was to order him to protect you,” Wen Qing answered, her voice sounding closer to him.
“It was to tell him how much she hated him. To curse him for bringing the Wen Clan’s fury down on our home.” He shut his eyes, not wanting to see himself looking back up at him. “I should hate him, shouldn’t I? My parents are dead because of what he did in that cave. Almost everyone I ever knew…all gone because he had to play hero. So why am I so[expletive]ing worried about him?!” The words came out almost as a wail.
“Because he’s your brother,” she said, setting a gentle hand on his shoulder, though it was immediately withdrawn as he shuddered at the contact. “You have so little family left, and yet one of them has struck off in a weakened state, with only one ally at his side to protect him. Of course you’re worried about him.” Wen Qing knelt beside him, and offered him a handkerchief. “But you’re wrong about one thing.”
“What am I wrong about?” he asked suspiciously.
“Lotus Pier wasn’t attacked because he took Wen Chao hostage,” she said firmly. “As soon as that fight broke out, every one of the clans involved was marked for death. And if it hadn’t broken out, if everyone had stood aside and allowed that little harlot to have that unfortunate girl bled as bait for the yao beast, then what? Wen Chao still would have fled like a coward, with Wen Zhuliu dragging me out with a grip that left bruises for weeks, leaving all of you trapped in the cave, and when Wen Chao went back later and found you were gone and the monster was dead, he would have put out the same order to exterminate all the escapees’ clans; the only difference would have been that girl being dead.” She frowned. “Even if Wen Chao had never heard the rumors of an unparalleled yao beast lurking in a cave in Mount Muxi and he hadn’t dragged anyone on any Night Hunts more than half a day’s walk away, then what? Do you think that anyone who knew about the Yin Iron would have been allowed to leave? Wen Chao had already demanded countless times that I provide him with drugs to force people to truthfully confess hidden secrets. When I explained that there were no such drugs, he started looking for experts in torture.”
Jiang Cheng’s blood ran cold at the thought.
“I don’t know whether he would have started with Lan Wangji or Wei Wuxian, but both of them would have been tortured to death as Wen Chao tried desperately to find some proof that they had gotten their hands on the piece of Yin Iron that Xue Yang had claimed was in the hands of the Chang Clan of Yueyang. And when they died without telling him anything, you and Nie Huaisang would have been next. And when you both died without telling him where to find that last piece of Yin Iron, every disciple at that camp who came from the Jiang or Nie Clans would have met the same fate. And when that was done, he would have set out for Lotus Pier next, only he wouldn’t have simply killed them: each and every person there would have been tortured to death, too, just in case one of them knew something.”
Jiang Cheng’s hands curled into fists so tight that his palms ached from the pressure of his fingernails against them. “What is wrong with him—with the whole[expletive]ing Wen Clan?! What kind of hole festers in them that they want to stuff it full with so much pain and suffering?! Are they even human?”
Wen Qing looked away from his face with a pained expression. “Of course they’re human. Nothing inhuman could ever be as cruel as a human. The only thing that approaches human cruelty is that of former humans like ghosts. Yao beasts and such…they’re just trying to live their lives; the fact that they have to slaughter humans to do so is no more cruel than it is when a tiger eats some lesser animal.” After a long pause, she held out the handkerchief towards him again. “Here, dry your face. You don’t want to look like that when the others catch up to us.”
Awkwardly, he accepted it, and started wiping the moisture off. “How did you turn out so agreeably normal after being raised in that pit of vipers?” he asked.
“I remembered my father and the beliefs of my true clan,” she answered. “I remembered that our place was to heal, not to hurt. But I also knew that I was responsible for my brother’s safety. That’s why I never dared to speak out against xiandu’s actions. I had to treat him with respect and obey his commands, or my brother and I would suffer.” Wen Qing smiled morosely. “Though the scale is different, the principle is the same as what you were saying earlier. You had to stand by and do nothing whenever Wei Wuxian was punished, and you couldn’t speak too affectionately towards him, or you feared your mother would make both you and him suffer.”
Oh, "xiandu" is Wen Ruohan's title; he's not just the leader of the Wen Clan, but of the entire cultivation world. The official translation of the novel sometimes uses "Chief Cultivator" and sometimes uses "Cultivation Chief" for it, and I really don't much like either of those, so I elected to just use the original. (I believe the Netflix subtitles...well, they're inconsistent about titles (like translating "shufu" (a more formal term for "uncle") as things like "grand master" and "clan leader" instead of, you know, "uncle." If they're so inconsistent about such a simple and unequivocal title, obviously they're gonna get weird with something like "xiandu." Though I think something along the lines of "Chief Cultivator" was used there, too.)
Anyway, this next scene is mostly just one I wanted to include because I love having the opportunity to have these moments between Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, where they're really acting at their most like actual brothers, quarreling but with a loving warmth. (Zewu-jun is Lan Xichen's sobriquet. And the day before this happened, Jiang Cheng walked in on Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji kissing...though of course Wei Wuxian 'explained' that it was actually an "energy transfer"...)
Eventually, Wei Wuxian lowered his dizi, and let out a string of words that he absolutely should not have been saying in front of the leader of another clan, particularly not the Lan Clan. Lan Xichen approached him before he could raise his instrument and begin playing again.
At the sound of footsteps behind him, Wei Wuxian spun around, holding his dizi in front of him as though it was a sword, but he lowered it again immediately, his eyes widening. “Zewu-jun?!” Hastily, he bowed, cupping his hand around his dizi rather than getting his sword off his belt like a proper man ought to. “I’m sorry—I didn’t realize you were there!”
“It is quite all right, Wei-gongzi.”
“No, it isn’t,” Jiang Cheng said, walking up beside him. “You don’t have to be so nice to him, Zewu-jun. He’s a grown man and knows better than to use language like that.”
“Yeah, because you never swear,” Wei Wuxian said, rolling his eyes.[snipping long convo that's partially about Lan Xichen looking for his brother]Lan Xichen said farewell, and left the two of them alone.
Jiang Cheng would have gone with him, except that Wei Wuxian gripped his arm quite hard and didn’t let go until Lan Xichen had exited the isolated courtyard. “What is it now?” Jiang Cheng asked.
“You didn’t…you didn’t tell him what you saw yesterday, did you?” Wei Wuxian asked in a hushed voice, as if he was afraid Lan Xichen would overhear him.
Jiang Cheng laughed. “Do you honestly think I would ever admit to anyone that I had seen that?”
Wei Wuxian let out a relieved sigh. “When he expected Lan Zhan to be with me, I guess I panicked,” he said, with a nervous laugh.
“I’m glad you have the decency to be ashamed of it, at least.”
“I’m not ashamed! I just don’t want Zewu-jun to decide I’m corrupting his brother and kill me or something.”
Jiang Cheng chuckled. “He’s not Lan Qiren.”
Wei Wuxian laughed, too. “Thank the gods for that!”
“Of course, since you are corrupting his brother…”
“Hey!” Wei Wuxian took a clumsy swing at him that Jiang Cheng dodged easily, laughing.
“And you’re getting careless in a fight, too! The shame your ancestors must be feeling to see—” Jiang Cheng’s words were cut off with a whump as Wei Wuxian tackled him.
By the time the guards came in to see what all the noise was about, they were both thoroughly covered in dirt from wrestling on the ground, and Jiang Cheng’s eyes were watering from laughing so much. The guards probably left thinking they were both quite mad, but it was the lightest Jiang Cheng had felt in months, so he didn’t even care what they thought.
So...this is a really long quote, but the "clueless spoiled master" moment at the end doesn't hit as well without plenty of context. Though even so, it still needs more context. In the novel, the Sunshot Campaign was two years long, but we only get told about bits and pieces of it. In the drama, it was only four months long, and we miss the first three of those months entirely, then skip over most of the final month, too, so what's shown in the drama is barely more than a couple of skirmishes. Even though I'm working with the drama's canon, I decided to try and make the Sunshot Campaign a little more like what was in the novel, while also following the drama's process of staying chronological and trying not to skip over too much that's crucial to the central character...but I'm really bad at writing wars and fighting, so in the end I made it about a year long, and we spend a lot of time in the meetings planning for the battles only to skip over the battles themselves with light summaries. 😅 Anyway, one of the towns that the Jiang Clan is in charge of liberating from the Wen Clan is called Kuizhou, and they were particularly struggling to take the town, to the extent that Jiang Yanli decided to do something rash and went to go get the lay of the land on the ground while Wei Wuxian was spying on the place from the air. (I wanted to give her something more to do than just sit around and worry, y'know?) While there, she ended up befriending a bunch of the homeless orphans in town, and so after the battle is finally won, she suddenly springs it on her brother that she wants to take all of said homeless children into the Jiang Clan as new disciples for Jiang Cheng. He is, uh, not pleased. To say the least. But he had a lifetime (well, 18 or 19 years) of being trained to obey his mother in all things, so he's sort of conditioned to obey women, plus his sister complex, so he can't just say "no." In trying to find a way not to take in the orphans, he asks Wen Qing for her advice. (And this is late enough that she and Jiang Yanli are developing a very sisterly relationship, to the point of calling each other a-Li and a-Qing. Oh, and the Fojiao refugees I mentioned earlier are now at Lotus Pier instead of Cloud Recesses, because the front lines of the war have moved far enough that it's safe at Lotus Pier. Ah, this may be the first one to have "-gongzi" come up. It's an honorific...kind of meaning "young master" and kind of not...? Let's just leave it at "a polite form of address for a young man of the wealthy/upper class." Its female equivalent is "-guniang." Oh, and "jiejie" as you might guess is "big sister." Wei Wuxian uses "shijie," which is "elder sect sister" and he is technically "shixiong" to Jiang Cheng, which is to say "elder sect brother," a term not used between them except when one of them (typically Wei Wuxian) wants to be annoying or pendantic about something.)
“Right now, I need help to prevent those children from overrunning Lotus Pier.”
“They would hardly overrun it,” Wen Qing claimed. “Don’t underestimate the ability of an older woman to keep children in line.”
A woman like Mother could easily frighten ten times as many children into submission, no matter how unruly they were. (Even Wei Wuxian had never dared directly disobey her.) But those Fojiao refugees were entirely too kindly to ever keep so many untrained little urchins well-behaved. “Then you won’t help convince my sister to find them homes here?”
“I don’t think a-Li is going to allow anyone to change her mind. If she wasn’t fully as stubborn as you are, this wouldn’t have even come up, now would it?”
The uncomfortable truth of that statement almost made Jiang Cheng overlook the insult in it. “You think I’m stubborn?”
Surprisingly, Wen Qing laughed instead of apologizing. “You’re renowned for it, Jiang-gongzi,” she said. “But in a man, stubbornness can be a virtue.”
This was going nowhere. Nowhere good, at least. “If you won’t help me, then I need to find someone who will,” he said, turning to leave.
“Wait.”
Jiang Cheng turned to look at her again, but maintained his silence, merely watching her beautiful face expectantly.
“I don’t want to get involved directly and risk my friendship with a-Li, but I’ll give you some advice that should at least help reduce the number of children willing to make the trip to Lotus Pier.”
“I’m listening.”
And listen he did. Unfortunately, it was a fairly good plan. It probably wouldn’t get rid of all of them, but Jiang Cheng guessed it would drive off at least half of the noisy little things. The only downside to the plan was that he would have no choice but to accept those who weren’t frightened off. Still, as long as their numbers were greatly reduced, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. If those Fojiao women really did have at least some ability to keep children from running rampant.
Jiang Cheng joined jiejie as she was finally sitting down to take her own meal—allowing Wei Wuxian to herd the children outside to do gods-only-knew-what—and laid out the compromise before her. She didn’t object in the slightest, surprisingly, insisting that of course they would all want to join the Jiang Clan. Her confidence was jarring, but Jiang Cheng tried not to let it bother him.
Instead, he went outside and found that Wei Wuxian was in the process of making kites for the boys to play with. “Is this a good use of your time?” Jiang Cheng asked, frowning at him.
“Someone’s got to keep them occupied until they’re ready to go to Lotus Pier,” Wei Wuxian said, smiling. “Besides, we just won a huge victory! A few days off to rest is a good idea, or we’ll all burn out. You need to relax more, Jiang Cheng.”
“I need to speak to these children.”
Wei Wuxian raised a curious eyebrow. “Oh, this I gotta hear,” he said.
That could be a problem. “Fine, but only if you keep quiet,” Jiang Cheng said. “And I don’t mean ‘quiet for you.’ I mean actually keeping your mouth shut.”
“Want me to ask Lan Zhan to cast the Silence spell on me?” Wei Wuxian laughed.
“That’s an excellent idea.”
The look of shock on Wei Wuxian’s face was priceless, and it was hard for Jiang Cheng to keep from laughing at it. “Don’t laugh at me,” Wei Wuxian said poutily.
“I didn’t.”
“You did,” Wei Wuxian insisted, then looked at the boys. “See how mean he is to his shixiong?” he said. “Laughing at me and then lying about it!”
The ragged little things all laughed, too, but Jiang Cheng wasn’t sure if they were laughing at him or at Wei Wuxian. “Are you going to go get Lan Wangji, or must I do it?”
“What, you were serious about that?”
Jiang Cheng nodded, making Wei Wuxian sigh. Then he set aside the kite he was working on and wandered off, eventually returning with his lover, who simply stared at Jiang Cheng with a cold, somehow threatening gaze despite his blank expression. Uncomfortably, Jiang Cheng explained why he wanted Wei Wuxian forcibly silenced.
“Mn.” A slight hand gesture, and Wei Wuxian’s grin vanished as his lips were fastened together by the Silence spell.
“Good. Now…” Jiang Cheng turned to look at the children, who were all staring at Lan Wangji with discomfort, and maybe a little fear. “Before things go any further, I need you children to understand what my sister is actually offering you. I’m sure you’ve all heard overblown stories of the fantastic powers that cultivators gain.”
Half the children immediately began spouting tales they had heard, ranging from realities like flying on swords and fighting evil beasts to impossibilities like controlling time itself and turning the heavens inside out.
“Some of the tales are true,” Jiang Cheng said, glaring at them to shut them up, “and some of them are not. But what those stories don’t include is just how much work we have to go through in order to gain the ability to perform those acts.”
Wei Wuxian nodded vigorously.
“Life as a disciple in a cultivation clan is not the life of an idle young master,” Jiang Cheng went on, “but a life of rigorous work and considerable study. No one may begin the training without first knowing how to read and write, as well as having studied the Dao extensively.”
“I can read a little,” the eldest boy said. “My parents ran a shop before they died, and my father was teaching me so I could take over for him someday. Only then they died young, and everyone claimed he had owed them money, and I’d been too little to prove he hadn’t…”
“Then you can explain to these other boys just how difficult it is to learn,” Jiang Cheng said sternly.
The boy shrugged. “Not as hard as finding food when you don’t have parents or money.”
Again, Wei Wuxian nodded firmly.
“Even those who are able to learn enough to begin the training still have a life of hard work ahead of them,” Jiang Cheng continued, ignoring them. “The physical training is rigorous, and many never progress past the most basic abilities. Fewer than half of those who study cultivation ever gain the ability to fly on a sword, for example.”
Wei Wuxian tried to object to that, and Lan Wangji made a scornful noise. Jiang Cheng was honestly a little surprised that he hadn’t made some remark about the Lan Clan’s success rate being far better than that. His taciturn nature was for once proving beneficial. Of course, in any of the Five Great Clans, the percentage who failed to reach that level of cultivation was actually much lower than among the lesser clans. Among Father’s disciples, jiejie was the only one over the age of fifteen who had never learned to fly. But these children didn’t need to know that—especially since their own rate, if they were to try to learn, would undoubtedly be far below the normal average.
“Those who join the Jiang Clan as disciples can expect to spend hours every day practicing their sword skills, further hours on general physical training, meditation and study. Those who break the rules are expected to clean, carry supplies, or face other punishments.” Jiang Cheng couldn’t repress a cold grin. “Though our rules aren’t as oppressive as some other clans’ rules,” he added, casting a sideways glance at Lan Wangji, who didn’t seem to care in the least about the dig at his own clan’s insane number of rules, despite Wei Wuxian trying as hard as he could to laugh while his mouth was stuck shut.
The homeless orphans, however, were simply watching Jiang Cheng with a breathless energy that he couldn’t quite figure out. Were they already alarmed about what they would find if they journeyed to Lotus Pier, or did they still need more to dissuade them? They were certainly listening to him devotedly, at least, no matter what they were actually thinking.
“On top of that, as you are already aware, the cultivation world is currently embroiled in a war. For centuries, the Wen Clan has had dominance over the entire cultivation world, and that uncontested power has allowed them to become tyrannical and cruel. This war we’re fighting was sparked off by the Wen Clan coming to Lotus Pier and slaughtering everyone they found there,” Jiang Cheng said, his chest filling with rage that made his voice shake. “With our victory here, we’ve reduced their territory considerably, but the tides of war are unpredictable. Every life within Lotus Pier will remain in jeopardy until the Wen Clan is destroyed for good, especially since Wei Wuxian and I personally slew one of Wen Ruohan’s sons in Yiling and one of his brothers in the battle here. If he comes for Lotus Pier again, it will be to avenge them; if that happens, not one person will be spared, and Lotus Pier itself will likely be burned to the ground. Anyone who sets foot within its boundary is setting their life at hazard.”
Again, Wei Wuxian tried to object, and even shook Lan Wangji’s shoulder, pointing at his mouth, clearly begging to have the Silence spell lifted. Thankfully, Lan Wangji did not oblige him.
“Those who don’t want to risk their lives or spend years learning to read only to engage in harsh physical training have only to say so,” Jiang Cheng said, smiling at the urchins. “My sister will find you homes with the locals here, so you won’t have to go back to living in the streets. You could have actual families and normal lives on the local farms, or in the shops, or wherever else there’s a home to be found.”
Wei Wuxian glared at him, crossing his arms peevishly. Of course he was far less pleased with this plan than jiejie had been, knowing from personal experience how much more attractive a normal life would sound to these children. But it was too late now!
“So, those of you who wish to remain here and let my sister find you a normal family to take you in, simply speak up now, and we’ll handle all the arrangements,” Jiang Cheng said, in the friendliest voice he could muster.
To his shock and horror, though the children looked around at each other curiously, not one opened his mouth.
“There’s no shame in it,” Jiang Cheng said, wondering how he could have failed to convince them. “My sister won’t be insulted that you—”
“You don’t understand, gongzi,” the eldest said. He seemed to be the leader of this little clan of street urchins. “I’m sure you think you’ve described a hard life, but it sounds like paradise compared to what we’ve had to live through.”
Wei Wuxian nodded.
“Like I said before, we’re happy to work hard if it means we’ll get to live in a house and have food to eat,” the orphan went on. “And we’d never get that here. I know you think your sister could find us homes, and I’m sure she’d think she had found some, but as soon as your war makes you all move on from this town, as soon as there’s no shadow of a cultivator looking over us, we’d be abused and overworked and underfed. You don’t know what it’s like on the bottom, gongzi. Most of us have had to steal when we couldn’t find scraps, and sometimes we get caught at it. And that means any time anything goes missing, we’re blamed, even if we had nothing to do with it. That wouldn’t change just because families claimed they were gonna take us in. It’d just make it worse, because there’d be no one watching to see what happened to us, and we wouldn’t be able to turn to each other for help.”
[snipping long additional discussion]
Wei Wuxian smiled at the boys. “And you don’t have to worry about the Wen Clan coming for Lotus Pier. It’s not likely to happen.”
“We don’t know that,” Jiang Cheng said coldly.
“The Wen Clan’s territory is about a third of what it used to be. How could Wen Ruohan spare troops for an attack designed to punish two people?”
“If he destroyed Lotus Pier, it would demoralize our entire army,” Jiang Cheng reminded him.
“Or it would give us even more motivation to fight,” Wei Wuxian countered. “The massacre of Lotus Pier was the initial spark that set off the Sunshot Campaign in the first place, after all.”
“That’s true,” Jiang Cheng admitted.
“Doesn’t really matter anyway,” the eldest orphan said. “Our lives were already at risk from your war. The Wens always pushed the people of this town around, but it’s gotten worse since the war between the cultivators started. There’s no one in this town willing to stand up to them, and even if there were, there’s no one who’d stand up to them for us. We have to keep listening to the gossip about the war, because every time the Wens lose, they like to take it out on the common folk. And when they pick on one of us, their victim usually ends up dead, so if we don’t know what’s happened in the war, we won’t know when to hide from them.” He shook his head. “Being in a place where they can only kill us in a battle setting, where it would just be a quick and merciful sword through the chest instead of being beaten to death…who wouldn’t prefer that?”
The other children all nodded.
Jiang Cheng was at a loss for words. Had he really miscalculated so badly? How could that be? How could jiejie have been right that these boys would honestly prefer the hard life of studying cultivation over a simple farm life?
Wei Wuxian nudged him in the ribs. “See what a fine, brave set of new disciples you’ve gotten?” he said, his voice overflowing with glee.
And yes, Jiang Cheng is actually so clueless that he thinks the training in what is essentially magical martial arts is harder than farming in a world without machinery and chemical fertilizers.
Another thing that's a core tenet of his character in canon is how--as I mentioned before--no matter what he does, he always comes up second to Wei Wuxian. This even applied to their social life: there is, according to the omniscient narrator, a list ranking all the eligible bachelors of the cultivation world, based on their skills, their looks, their personality and their social status. You might think that Jiang Cheng did well on that list, coming in #5 out of every young man in his generation...but Wei Wuxian came in #4, despite that unlike Jiang Cheng's peerless parents, Wei Wuxian's parents are a wandering cultivator of unknown (but probably lower class) origin and a literal servant. This was only made worse in canon when Wei Wuxian came up with a whole new method of fighting in the war, and Jiang Cheng could only fight like everyone else. (Of course, given that that new method involved grave-robbing and other such unsavory practices, it won him just as much hate and fear among his allies as among his enemies.)
Even though I really beefed up Jiang Cheng's successes in the war--to the extent of even letting him be the one to finish off Wen Ruohan (though this was to prevent Wen Ruohan's canonical killer from being accepted into the Jin Clan, leading to all sorts of problems I didn't want to have to deal with)--I didn't want to rob him of such a central part of his character....so he's still constantly frustrated by people being more impressed by Wei Wuxian than by him. As in this scene, where the clan leaders gathered to feast following a Night Hunt competition suddenly start debating whether or not they need a new xiandu, and if so who could take up the mantle. (Mostly the names below don't matter, but I do need to point out that Hanguang-jun is the sobriquet of Lan Wangji. And that Ouyang Buqu is kind of half an original creation of mine and half a canon character: in the present of the novel, he's the unnamed leader of the Ouyang Clan, and his primary role in the novel is expressed in the form of being verbally bullied by Jiang Cheng. 😅 Because the Ouyang Clan is small and has minimal power or influence, and happens to be based very near Lotus Pier, so...)
Soon enough, the debate moved on to discussing who had done the most for the Sunshot Campaign, an argument that still left little room to decide a clear victor between Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen, since Lan Xichen’s informant within the Wen Clan had given him knowledge and insight that preserved their forces on the battlefield time and again. That was probably why many soon gave up on trying to decide between them, and instead starting wondering who was next best after them.
Naturally, the first name anyone produced was Hanguang-jun.
Of course.
Who else?
Jiang Cheng was starting to wish he had never heard of Lan Wangji, and would never hear his name again. (Fat chance of that! Even before he had turned cut-sleeve, it had seemed like every other word out of Wei Wuxian’s mouth was “Lan Zhan!”)
“If we’re debating who was most vital in the Sunshot Campaign, I don’t think it proper we’ve gone so long without mentioning Jiang Wanyin,” Ouyang Buqu suddenly said. “Didn’t he personally defeat Wen Ruohan? And I myself saw many of his feats in ordinary battles. We would have lost the southern front over and over again without the Jiang Clan.”
Feeling so many eyes suddenly turn on him, Jiang Cheng wasn’t sure what he should say or do. Should he look proud or flattered or—?
Jiejie set a hand on his, and smiled at him warmly when he looked over at her, even as other voices joined in to agree with Ouyang Buqu.
But Jiang Cheng’s moment couldn’t last, could it?
“Speaking of the Jiang Clan, Wei-gongzi was quite the vital player, too,” one of the Nie men said. “He saved my brother’s life after he was half turned to a puppet by the Wen Clan.”
Even more voices chimed in to agree to how great and wonderful Wei Wuxian was, despite his lower status. They sounded so much more eager than they had when they were praising Jiang Cheng. And so much more honest. Jiejie tightened her grip on his hand, as if to console him.
“Please, gentlemen, let us set debate aside,” Jin Guangshan said, his composure visibly cracked. “Let us feast, and celebrate our victories in the Hunt!”
Thankfully, the debate fell silent, with only private conversations breaking the silence, but Jiang Cheng’s mood was worse than ever. He couldn’t taste his food, and his wine tasted like vinegar.
His feelings of inadequacy where Wei Wuxian is concerned eventually get called out by Wen Qing as ridiculous...and honestly, someone needed to give him this speech (or one like it) in canon before things could get as out-of-hand as they got...
“I don’t like the way you phrased that question, though, Jiang-gongzi,” Wen Qing went on, her tone going from warm and touched to almost lecturing in its severity. “This fixation you have on Wei Wuxian is unhealthy.”
“Fixation? I don’t have a—”
“Jiang-gongzi, I’ve seen you around him far too many times; don’t bother trying to deceive me. You’re obsessed with proving yourself better than he is, and hate yourself every time you fail to do so. It’s childish, beneath the dignity of your station, and frankly could lead you to madness.”
“You’re exaggerating every—”
“Honestly, it’s absurd! Why should you care if he can do something better than you can? What could it possibly matter? There are only a handful of men in the world who are more skilled than you are at what you do; whether or not Wei Wuxian is one of them is entirely meaningless. The two of you are like towering mountains bickering about which is taller, all the while unware of the countless tiny hills at your feet.”
Jiang Cheng’s face was so hot that he feared it would spontaneously ignite, but he still tried—desperately and unsuccessfully—to say something in response.
“Who do you think is going to judge you if it should turn out that Wei Wuxian might be better at you than something? Do you imagine that Chifeng-zun will turn his face away if he hears a rumor that Wei Wuxian is better at swordplay than you are? Do you think Zewu-jun will refuse further dealings with you if word reaches his ear that Wei Wuxian can fire an arrow further than you can?” Wen Qing frowned at him. “Part of being a proper adult is understanding that you can’t be the best at everything—and that you don’t need to be. Accept that some people will always outshine you. You need to focus on the things you do best. The things you can outstrip all others at. Maybe it’s true that your shixiong is a little better than you are at fighting, or coming up with clever tricks. So what? He’ll never be as good as you are at running this clan, or dealing with the other leaders. [deleted a broken line that did not work and I cannot manage to figure out a good replacement but it needs something] There’s no point in worrying about it, and fretting about how others perceive the two of you—together or independently of each other—is equally fruitless. Focus on the fights that you can and should win. Don’t waste your time on the fights that are meaningless.”
Jiang Cheng tried desperately to come up with something to say to her in response, but could think of nothing. As much as he wished to deny her words, he couldn’t: she was right, in every respect. That she was giving him advice he wasn’t sure he was capable of following was bad enough, but the fact that she had so easily perceived his innermost heart was almost frightening.
Or was it?
He stayed standing in the road outside Lotus Pier long after Wen Qing went inside, pondering everything that she had said, and what the deeper meanings might be.
Wasn’t that what Mother had always said he needed in a wife? Someone who could guide him when he needed it, and cover up his mistakes with dedicated grace? On top of that, Wen Qing was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and could be so gentle and loving…
Jiang Cheng nodded to himself, his decision made.
No matter what the other clans had to say about it, he needed to find a way to make Wen Qing return his feelings and agree to be his wife.
The only question was how…
I...that one gets me every time. I don't always feel like I've represented the character well, but having his point-of-view talking about his "solid, impenetrable front of staid perfection" where everyone else just has to look at him and see a broken mess of a man struggling along in a massive muddle of chaotic feelings....that just is Jiang Cheng.
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