requested by @hildahuffle, a special shoutout for making me laugh with this commentary: wow this is a minor character I do not care about but also hes like, really cute
No wonder Da-ge decided to decorate his gates with that head .
I need more demonic cultivator Sizhui I need more dark Sizhui I need more Sizhui in Wen reds and Wei blacks I need Sizhui who never had amnesia and always remembered his family and quietly festered with resentment for years I need Sizhui raised by Wen Ning or Wei Ying I need Sizhui raised by a Lan Wangji who has been quietly plotting revenge all this time I need a Sizhui who is still good and true and genuine and struggles between his love and his rage I need a Sizhui who went back to the burial mounds following some half-remembered impulse and ended up finding all of Wei Ying’s old notes and research where it had been tucked away so thoroughly hidden that only someone who knew where it was already would ever discover it I need a Sizhui who at first only brought the research back to Cloud Recesses because he wanted to remember his Xiang-gege better but then one day the Junior Quartet gets dragged into more bullshit clan politics because the cycle of violence and bloodshed just never seems to fucking stop and Sizhui looks at his friends huddled together trying to be brave for each other even though they’re just kids, they’re just fucking KIDS and none of them deserve this and he remembers when his family was slaughtered while he was too young and weak to do anything and he decides “no, not again. Not ever again.” I need a Sizhui who promises them it’s going to be okay, he’s going to buy them a chance to escape, and as soon as the path is clear they need to run as far away from this place as they can, okay? Run, and don’t look back. I need a Sizhui who pulls an old, worn black flute, covered in little baby tooth marks, out of his sleeve, and decides to show these people just how much like his father he can be.
Just some Nie brothers doing brother things. I made a timelapse vid of the entire end-to-end process. It’s long and I’ll probably never do anything that comprehensive again, but it was an interesting exercise.
Got to pondering (with @cerusee, who else) about how a Dark Power Yunmeng Trio might break down.
Not unlike how I theorized that Mo Xuanyu, Xue Yang and Su Minshan all specialized in different branches of demonic cultivation when working under Jin Guangyao – I think the three sibs might pick slightly different areas of Demonic Cultivation to specialize in. (Su Minshan did curses and evil music; Xue Yang loved evil artifacts and various different stripes of corpses; Mo Xuanyu was the only one who was actually good with talismans and spells, with the three of them just about making up one Wei Wuxian.) Here’s what I might propose:
Jiang Cheng takes up the evil sword, doesn’t have to reshape it to be anything else, he just kicks ass with evil sword now. He can release thunderous waves of destructive energy from it.
Jiang Yanli manages the undead creatures. She offers them the compassion that no one else has in their death, and they will follow her and obey her to the ends of the world. Picture Jiang Yanli advancing on the battlefield in a sedan chair carried by corpses, fluting away on her dizi as she goes. (We don’t know that Jiang Yanli can play flute – but heck, we didn’t know that Wei Wuxian could play flute either until post-Burial Mounds. Maybe Jiang Yanli has similarly un-showcased musical talents.)
Wei Wuxian, of course, invents new evil spells and devices, as well as supporting both of his siblings’ demonic cultivating tools. In this go-around JC has the evil sword and JYL has the flute, so… well, he’s always got his talismans!
JC to WWX: “bro. the fact that you don’t think you need a weapon is fucking stupid. if you stand up on a cliff casting your evil spells long enough, sooner or later someone’s just gonna fly up and stab you"
WWX to JC: “some of us don’t need brute WEAPONS when we have FINESSE, shidi”
JC: *uses the evil sword to set off a shock wave that collapses the cliff under wwx* “how’s that for finesse”
We have now spent a good portion of the afternoon speculating how all three sibs end up in the Burial Mounds learning demonic cultivation together and I tell you it is JUICY. Peak Yunmeng Sibling round robin self-sacrifice (the self-sacrifice doesn’t make anything better. In fact, it just makes everything worse! Because that’s the Yunmeng Sibling vibe).
The core transfer fails, obviously.
There was only a fifty percent chance that it would succeed. It didn’t succeed. Jiang Cheng wakes up, flat on his back, on a mountain, listening to Wei Wuxian begging Wen Qing to just make it work some how! anyway. Nothing Wen Qing says sounds promising.
All Jiang Cheng is sure of is that he’s the same today that he was yesterday, but that now, Wei Wuxian is just as broken as he is.
It doesn’t take very long at all, before it all comes out: what Wei Wuxian tried to do, how Wen Qing helped him. (They tried! But they failed.) Jiang Cheng wants to run away off this mountain by himself, but when he tries to get up, he falls on his back again.
Jiang Cheng thinks leave me alone. He thinks this for about fifteen minutes. Then he gets up and he starts arguing with Wei Wuxian about how dareyou!How dare you! He gets incredibly mad. How dare you!
Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian are still arguing when Wen Chao and his posse catch up with them on the mountain top.
