#wen chao
The Untamed Memes: Episode 4 (2/2)
Spoilers for future episodes(well like the whole thing )
Came across the template and couldn’t resist The Urge on this nice Saturday. It’s whoever-sees-it’s turn to sort LSZ, LZY into the lines.
We would say… Wen Chao and Wang LingJiao*
*if they weren’t pseudo-ancient-Chinese, hence WLJ could better solidify her position at WC’s side by bearing him a son. Actually curious how in a half year they had together she didn’t end up knocked up. …And what had happened to WC’s official wife during Sunshot Campaign
Relentless - chapter 11 - ao3
After about three sticks of incense, Lan Qiren did end up kicking Wen Ruohan out of his classroom.
The Wen boys were completely frazzled by their father’s presence, incapable of focusing on their studies no matter how often Lan Qiren reminded them to pay attention, and they infected even Lan Qiren’s nephews with their restlessness. Sadly, even ejecting Wen Ruohan from the classroom did not remedy their distractedness, but rather only changed its focus.
“He just left,” Wen Xu said blankly. “You told him to go, and he just – left.”
“He was being a distraction,” Lan Qiren said. “Though you will all need to learn how to perform in front of him eventually. You can’t just fall to pieces anytime you notice him watching.”
“Yes, but…he just left. He wanted to stay, you could seethat he wanted to stay, but he just…didn’t.”
“He doesn’t normally do that,” Wen Ning volunteered. “If he wants to watch, he stays to watch.”
“Not if shufu tells him to go,” Lan Xichen said, and Lan Qiren could hear the pride in his voice.
“Wasn’t he really angry earlier?” Wen Chao asked, looking side to side to his peers for confirmation. “I sawhim. He was really angry. And now he’s not angry. How?”
They all look at Lan Qiren, who coughed.
“Adult matters,” he said dismissively. “We had a minor disagreement, and resolved it between us. It is nothing to concern yourself with it.”
Stares all around.
Lan Qiren ignored it. “Now, who wants to recite the next rule? Or shall I impose punishment?”
It took some doing, but eventually he got them in line, although the rest of the lesson continued to drag torturously long for all of them. After class was done, he dismissed them, and found to his surprise that it was Lan Xichen who lingered – he would have expected the Wen boys to try to bombard him with more questions, although it didn’t really surprise him that they opted to rush off to gossip amongst themselves instead, sweeping a confused Lan Wangji and Wen Ning in their wake.
“Do you have a question?” he asked his eldest nephew, who looked concerned. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s about Sect Leader Wen,” Lan Xichen said. “Shufu…are you all right?”
Lan Qiren blinked. “I’m quite well, Xichen. Why do you ask?”
Lan Xichen shuffled his feet. “When we went in for dinner, he mentioned – well, he mentioned Father.”
Lan Xichen had always been the dutiful, obedient, amiable one of his nephews.
He was also stunningly perceptive.
Lan Qiren sighed. Lan Xichen was ten years old. He was not as old as Wen Xu, but he was still old enough to understand things that Lan Wangji, at seven, did not yet wholly comprehend.
“He did,” he agreed cautiously. “He had heard some things that were…perhaps not untrue, but highly misleading, and he wished to question me on the subject.”
He tried to tread carefully, unsure of what element of that most highly sensitive of subjects Lan Xichen was concerned about. Was he perhaps concerned that Wen Ruohan had defamed his father? Was he worried that the knowledge of what had happened in the past generation had leaked out, such that the shame of their family would become known and haunt him in the future? Did he fear mistreatment, or simply worry for his father’s loss of face, or –
“Did he hurt your feelings?” Lan Xichen asked, very seriously, and Lan Qiren felt a stab of emotion right in the chest. “I know shufu regrets many things about what happened back then, and has suffered greatly as a result of it. I hope Sect Leader Wen did not cause you distress with his questions.”
Lan Qiren’s heart hurt in all the best of ways.
Truly, he thought, all the pains of the past were redeemed by the existence of his wonderful nephews.
“I am well, Xichen,” he said again, feeling a little helpless. He had tried very hard to hide how much he disliked He Kexin from his nephews – to this day, he thought that perhaps Lan Wangji, who had inherited Lan Qiren’s inability to understand people, still did not know. But Lan Xichen was as sharp as his father had been in such matters, skilled in reading things out of the smallest signs, and there was no hiding it from him. He knew that Lan Qiren had been trapped in the Cloud Recesses by his father’s selfishness and, later, his own birth; he knew that Lan Qiren’s life had not been what he would have wanted if he’d had the freedom to choose. There was a chance he might even know that Lan Qiren and his father were not and had never been on good terms.
Lan Qiren didn’t know where to begin to explain the complicated web of resentment and debt and, yes, even love between himself and his brother. He wished he could, if only to make things easier and more understandable for himself, much less Lan Xichen.
“I thank you for your concern,” he added. “But Sect Leader Wen is not…it was only a misunderstanding.”
Lan Xichen nodded. “And you like him.”
“And I – Xichen!”
Lan Xichen beamed at him. “You do, don’t you? I knew it!” Then his smile faded. “But you can’t marry him and move to the Nightless City, shufu, you can’t. What would Wangji and I do without you?”
“I’m not leaving you under any circumstances,” Lan Qiren said firmly. “Do not be concerned.”
Lan Xichen looked relieved, and Lan Qiren reached out to press his shoulder, feeling a little relieved himself by the clarity that this conversation had given him. Even if he liked Wen Ruohan – and he still couldn’t believe entirely that he did, what was he thinking, he’d been right in his original analysis, the man was a completely ass, a self-aggrandizing megalomaniacal tyrant with a penchant for torture and for pestering Lan Qiren into a rage – even if he did, his nephews, and sect, came first in his heart. He might be enjoying his stay here as a temporary vacation, but that was all it was, and all it ever could be: temporary.
He could never leave his nephews behind, and that meant he could not leave his sect behind. That much had not changed.
Wen Ruohan would simply have to understand.
So decided and determined, Lan Qiren returned at last to his usual calm. He saw Lan Xichen out, his nephew now in a better mood and asking all sorts of inappropriate questions with a twinkle in his eye that suggested he was doing it just to see his uncle splutter incoherently, and he himself headed back to his room, intent on meditating and considering the issue at greater length, as Wen Ruohan had suggested. Regardless of the final outcome, Lan Qiren wanted to be prepared for whatever ridiculous arguments Wen Ruohan would undoubtedly end up putting to him – ah, perhaps he ought to have phrased that thought differently, because he was quite certain that there was a great deal Wen Ruohan would like to put to him–
Lan Qiren was thoroughly distracted as he made his way to his room, his body making its way there almost wholly on instinct, and perhaps that was a good thing.
All throughout his childhood, his brother had scathingly remarked on how Lan Qiren was far too deep in his own head to be a good swordsman, and Lan Qiren still to this day believed him, no matter how much he had later been praised for his beautiful style and flowing sword forms. That he had become competent at the sword because of the need to teach it to his nephews was not anything especially admirable to his mind, nothing at all like his brother’s heavens-sent genius; rather, in his view, it was only that he had found ways to compensate for his innate lack of ability, a testament to necessity. In combat he had a terrible tendency, namely that he always took an extra half-moment to think before he acted, no matter what he did, and while that trait served him well enough in duels where he had a chance to prepare, he had no doubt that the minute delay would have caused him trouble in a real field of battle, whether some desperate night-hunt gone wrong or a real fight – he’d never had the chance to test it out, of course.
And yet perhaps Lan Qiren had in fact finally managed to grind some small amount of fighter’s instinct down into his bones, because when he pushed open the door to his room, he did not stop to think at all before he was throwing himself sideways to avoid the onrushing blast.
“ – shufu! Shufu!”
Lan Qiren stared up at the ceiling.
His ears were ringing wildly, and he was lying on the ground, which seemed wrong. He was briefly unsure what had happened – had Lan Yueheng blown up another furnace? No, that was wrong; Lan Yueheng had long ago learned that he wasn’t allowed to play around with alchemy in the common areas of the Cloud Recesses, but only in his safe and triply secured laboratory, built further in the mountain ranges where the explosions wouldn’t trouble anyone.
Also, and Lan Qiren took an extra moment to recall this, he himself was not currently in the Cloud Recesses, but rather in the Nightless City, where Lan Yueheng had no reason to be, and also Lan Yueheng had no idea where he was at the moment.
“Shufu!”
Lan Qiren sat up just in time to be hit dead on by two small bodies, both reaching out to grab him and hold him as tightly as their little hands could manage – being as they were Lans, that was in fact actually very tight – and although he nearly fell back, he managed not to, forcing his spine back to stiffness.
“Xichen? Wangji?” he asked, puzzled. “What are you doing here?”
They were speaking, but he could not hear them properly. They were speaking too quietly for him to hear now that they were no longer shouting; his ears were still ringing from the echoes of the explosion, and he could only hear them very distantly.
“Hold a moment,” he told them, and sketched out the talisman to restore balance to the ear. Normally he didn’t need such a thing, given that the arrays on his robes included a stabilizer – the Lan sect focused on musical cultivation, and ensuring clarity of hearing even under situations of great stress was naturally a matter of utmost importance to them – but he’d picked up this particular talisman long ago. Around the same time Lan Yueheng had been struggling to learn to keep his experiments away from the living quarters, in fact. “There. Try again now. Why are you here?”
“There was an explosion,” Lan Xichen said, clearly not for the first time. “We came at once!”
“This is the adults’ quarters. You’re not allowed in here,” Lan Qiren said, feeling irrationally upset. “You both know better than that.”
“But there was an explosion!”
“I am aware of that,” Lan Qiren said irritably. “But rules are still rules. If you were to break a rule every time there was an explosion, we wouldn’t be able to have any alchemy at all. How’d you get here so quickly, anyway?!”
His nephews blinked at him, confused by the question, and right around then Lan Qiren suddenly stopped being angry and started being scared.
He reached out and pulled his nephews into his arms. He’d been scared all along, he realized, only he hadn’t understood it – there were servants running in with buckets of water in their hands, disciples trying to stamp out the flames that were trying to spread along the tapestries and ceiling beams using whatever was to hand, but it was quite clear that they had only just arrived.
If they, the adult servants who were presumably in various places in the living quarters already, had only just arrived, then how come his nephews, who were much smaller and meant to be much further away, were already here?
If they had arrived any earlier – if he hadn’t jumped to the side so quickly –
At best, they would have been there just in time to see him die. At worst, they might have – they could have – if they hadn’t been Lans, required to mind their pace no matter what the circumstances, if they’d run forward like any other child would have, if he hadn’t impressed the rule so deeply into their mind that they minded it unconsciously…if they’d made their way to his side, if they had been beside him when the explosion had gone off –
“Shufu? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Lan Qiren said, still holding both his nephews tightly. Probably too tightly. He forced himself to relax his grip a little, and to keep his voice steady. He had never been so glad for the natural tonelessness of his speaking voice. “All is well. I am merely shaken from the aftereffects of the blast.”
His nephews took their cues from him, calming down and turning to regard the servants rushing around with expressions of interest rather than fear.
“What happened?” Lan Wangji asked, serious as ever. “Is it like Uncle Yueheng?”
“No, it can’t be,” Lan Xichen objected. “Uncle Yueheng only blows up furnaces in the alchemist’s area.”
“That is a relatively recent innovation,” Lan Qiren put in, voice dry. His hands were still shaking, he noticed, and he tried to ensure his nephews didn’t see. His mind was still racing, trying to work out what had just happened. It seemed impossible, an explosion in the middle of the Nightless City – an explosion that had started from his room–
Lan Qiren felt cold. The magnitude of the explosion had not been small. If he had to guess at the cause, he would assume that a battle talisman had been placed behind the door, such that it would activate as soon as he pushed it open, his own spiritual energy acting as the fuel for the trap. Such things were not uncommon in actual war, although it had been years since there had been anything greater than a skirmish between sects – the Nie sect’s conquest of the north had been largely completed by Lao Nie in his splendid youth, and the territories of the other Great Sects were already mostly settled. Even the Wen sect largely continued to expand through absorbing other sects through politicking and intimidation rather than outright battle, and the few times they did take up arms the entire thing was usually over before anyone could complain.
This was aimed at him.
Someone was trying to kill him.
Relentless - chapter 8 - ao3
Freed of an obligation to make ready an immediate escape, Lan Qiren set about forming a daily routine for himself: morning training for himself, followed by morning training with his nephews, and then breakfast, followed by classes with the Wen boys once they crawled out of their beds. That took up the better part of the day, including lunch, and in the afternoon he allowed all the boys to go off their own way until dinner, for which they were now joined by Wen Ruohan on a near daily basis even if the ‘official’ dinners were set to remain at their usual cadence, and then evening study followed by free time once more until bed.
The entire thing felt disturbingly like a vacation.
Teaching was of course a pleasure in and of itself, Lan Qiren wouldn’t have fought so hard to preserve his right to do it otherwise, and his students were delightful. His nephews, of course, never gave Lan Qiren cause for complaint, and the others were progressing very nicely.
Wen Xu, for instance, was picking things up rapidly, his endless hunger for praise transmuting itself into something that was very nearly indistinguishable from a passion for learning – he was even finding some areas of learning that he seemed to genuinely enjoy for their own sake, rather than merely learning for the purpose of completing an examination. Indeed, Lan Qiren had quickly figured out that those areas that he had been competent in before were the ones he’d actually enjoyed or found came naturally to him, since those were the only ones where he’d bothered to pay attention beyond the initial lectures, knowing that his mother would protect him from any stronger urging to pay attention. To keep his interest, once Lan Qiren had helped Wen Xu with the basics he’d been lacking, he introduced him to more advanced levels of learning for those subjects he seemed to enjoy – to the joy of actually being able to speak on a subject as an expert, and to be listened to and respected for his view.
In this endeavor Lan Qiren was aided by Wen Ruohan, however inadvertently. In his irritatingly effective efforts to be charming, Wen Ruohan had taken to showing of the breadth and depth of his knowledge on any given subject. He had figured out quickly that Lan Qiren was a consummate teacher, unable to resist boasting about his students when there was something worth saying, and moreover that the surest way to lure him into a conversation was to pull one of the boys in as well. He could do it with any of them, but once Wen Xu actually had something worth saying, he naturally inclined towards him; rather unsurprisingly, Wen Ruohan enjoyed talking about cultivation more than he did rabbits. And with his father, both his role model and his goal, leading the way, Wen Xu was all too eager to follow.
Yes, Lan Qiren was very satisfied with Wen Xu. The boy remained anxious in any number of ways, overly immature and young-acting for his age, but the worst of it seemed to be relieved by the imposition of a reliable structure, strict but fair and, most importantly, predictable. He no longer grew upset at Lan Qiren’s restrictions or his punishments, increasingly rare – Lan Qiren had cajoled a story out of Wen Ruohan about one of the times he himself had been punished by his teachers in his youth, a genuinely funny retelling of a disastrous attempt to use an array to hide his younger brother’s illicit adoption of a pair of goats that had been foiled on account of the goats turning out to be a breeding pair, and after that it seemed that Wen Xu would put up with anything with his head held high.
If his mother still disapproved, then at least she didn’t make a fuss where Lan Qiren could hear it.
For his part, Wen Chao’s literacy had improved dramatically, and while he would never be a scholar, he would at least be able to interact with his peers and future subordinates without embarrassing himself. Without that weight bearing down upon him, he lost something of the chip on his shoulder and became significantly friendlier; Lan Qiren had even seen him willingly and without compulsion invite Wen Ning and Lan Wangji to join him in various activities, and he even convinced the stablemaster to give Wen Ning a pony of his own.
Wen Ning, in turn, had started (very slowly) pulling himself out of the wallpaper and into something resembling an actual human boy. He was still inclined against speaking, especially given how he tended towards stuttering any time he was nervous, which was often, but he was more present, somehow more vivid, as if the color in him had been filled in – he was no longer so afraid all the time, and he was willing to go and do things on his own initiative, rather than always waiting to be instructed by others. He liked to stay close with Lan Wangji, but Lan Wangji had no patience for a mute and personality-less shadow, sternly insisting on his participation, and there were soon positive results. Eventually Wen Ning was even lured into agreeing, or possibly even suggesting, that they go after class to play, where before he had always immediately returned home to wait for his sister – something Lan Qiren only learned when Wen Qing showed up at his door looking panicked and convinced that Wen Ning had been abducted by force.
(The irony was not lost on Lan Qiren.)
He managed to calm her down with an explanation, and then was promptly forced into retreat when she burst into relieved tears – it seemed that Lan Wangji was Wen Ning’s first and only friend, and furthermore that Wen Qing had been deeply concerned about her younger brother’s inability to form connections with others.
(“This is what the fearless Teacher Lan is afraid of?” Wen Ruohan sniggered when he heard of it, but he also went to speak with Wen Qing, somehow managing to make her both less upset and less afraid – Lan Qiren wasn’t sure how, given Wen Ruohan’s usual approach of terrifying everything in his path – and Lan Qiren found himself momentarily feeling relieved at the presence of someone he could rely upon. A strange thought, given how they’d ended up where they were now.)
Still, no matter how he enjoyed it, even teaching could not fill all of Lan Qiren’s time.
His own free time seemed almost alarmingly empty without sect business to attend to – he really did hope they’d found someone talented to manage it in his absence – and he was able to fill it instead with the things he truly did enjoy: musical composition and practice, quiet contemplation of ethical dilemmas and the Lan sect rules, reading.
For that last, he took advantage of Wen Ruohan’s offer to continue to utilize his private library. The atmosphere there was unsurprisingly ideal, as befit a sect leader’s privileges, and while, as he’d suspected, there was another, larger library elsewhere in the Nightless City, Lan Qiren preferred the smaller space where he could be certain to avoid the unwanted company of others. Now that his ‘relationship’ with Wen Ruohan had been mentioned so often as to become ‘common knowledge’, the courtiers of the Nightless City had oozed out of the shadows, eager to try to drop words into Lan Qiren’s ears in the hope that he would repeat them to Wen Ruohan, and there was no dissuading them, only evading. The library, forbidden to the majority as it was, worked well for that.
The books themselves remained an unmitigated pleasure. Eclectic as Wen Ruohan’s taste was, Lan Qiren could be certain of the quality of anything that happened to be in there – even the lighter fare, the novels and such, was entertaining without being cloying or clichéd. Lan Qiren did not take Wen Ruohan up on any of his offers to review the spring books (and certainly not, as Wen Ruohan had implied, together), but he had little doubt that they were undoubtedly of equally fine make.
And then there was the library itself.
Lan Qiren couldn’t quite suppress his curiosity about it, or rather, about its previous location and owner. He developed a habit of running his fingers along the inside of the bookshelf that he happened to be frequenting at the time, and as often as not he would find some more words scattered in there, just as random and unpredictable as before. Even the emotional content could not be predicted. He found Stop reading right before bedtime you know it only makes your eyes hurt in one place with death is the only true release from misery right beside it, and immortality is a lie for fools and madmen right beside what is it about mirror cakes with roses that makes you completely unable to stop eating them?
By now Lan Qiren was fairly sure he knew who the previous owner was.
Being sect leader, acting or otherwise, had given him access to all sorts of secrets, the sorts of dark histories and hidden skeletons that every sect had. Every sect, and the Great Sects most of all, pretended to be gentlemen, civilized and genteel, and in some cases they genuinely sought to live up to the principles they professed…and yet politics was politics, and could not be avoided. There was no Great Sect that lacked for spies and informants, and while Lan Qiren didn’t dare trouble the ones his own sect had planted long ago – if he’d been trying to escape, perhaps he would have called upon them, but he wasn’t doing that now and there was no point in risking another person’s life unnecessarily – he still knew things most people did not. And once he seriously settled himself down to think on the subject, it was only a matter of forming a suspicion, and then taking steps to confirm that it was true.
He’d thought long and hard on it, but in the end concluded that between the age of the engravings, the stylized script, the intimacy of the words, and Wen Ruohan’s reaction to having the words spat out at him…
Clearly, the previous resident of that dark and windowless room could be none other than his first wife – his original first wife, not the current one.
Wen Ruohan was an ancient monster of the first grade, over a century old, but no one could possibly have known in his youth that he would eventually reach such peaks. As such, he, like all young men, had eventually found his way towards matrimony, establishing a wife and having sons as any good son would do to please his ancestors. Of course, Wen Ruohan’s first wife, and indeed the entirety of his first family, had lived and died before Lan Qiren had ever been born, so he had no personal knowledge of any of them, and neither were there too many people willing to talk about them. Wen Ruohan had long ago declared the entire subject under strict taboo in the Nightless City, and he wasn’t too picky about enforcing his taboo outside of his home, either – the only times Lan Qiren had ever heard mention of that first family were in the prelude to stories about how Wen Ruohan had cruelly demolished sects that dared defy him by mentioning it. As a result, Lan Qiren did not even know the unfortunate Madame Wen’s name, nor the name of the two sons and a daughter she had borne for Wen Ruohan.
All he knew were the occasional rumor, and he didn’t put much stock in those, either.
The rumors claimed that Wen Ruohan had married his wife for power and that he had later divorced her in a fit of temper – some stories claimed it was because she had taken a lover, others had claimed that the lover was allowed and the fatal sin something else – and that somewhere along the line Wen Ruohan had gone further than that, proceeding to slaughter all of his first family, wife and children alike. There, too, the stories diverged, some claiming (implausibly) that he had discovered that they were bastard cuckoos, one and all, and others saying that he’d acted in preemptory self-defense, eradicating all connection to his first wife’s maternal family that might have reason to seek revenge on him for the divorce. The most outré of all the rumors Lan Qiren had heard was from one of the oldest elders in the Cloud Recesses, an honored grandmaster called Lan Jinyan, a sleepy old man of great antiquity who had lost most of his reason at least a decade back and yet consistently refused to shuffle off to his next life – he was nominally a teacher, though his ‘classes’ were primarily educational only in learning how to care for the elderly, and were regarded more as a chore than anything else – and that had been nothing more than an offhand comment, squeezed in between any number of other nonsensical statement, about that ‘unfortunate accident in the Wen sect however many years back’ with a tone suggestive of some sort of explosion or natural disaster.
Lan Qiren had dismissed it the way he (and everyone else) dismissed most of the things the old teacher said, but he thought back on it now and wondered if maybe it had been some sort of terrible accident. The inscriptions he’d seen spoke of intimacy and fondness, the sort of familiarity that came from a married life and maybe even real love of a sort – tone was impossible to tell from engravings, but the frankness of the words, the idea of calling someone ‘my heart’ to their face like that, made his ears go red. He still barely acknowledged the fact that he’d said it himself in a fit of temper, wielding it as a weapon – how embarrassing!
Of course, his old teacher had also asked Lan Qiren once how ‘that poor boy Wen Ruoyu’ was doing, and yet other times referred vaguely to ‘Wen Ruoxi’, ‘Wen Ruojing’, ‘Wen Ruofeng’, and ‘Wen Ruohong’, among several others, so unless Wen Ruohan had had a truly startling number of acknowledged and now-deceased brothers and sisters, the old man was probably just confused.
Though, on second thought, it occurred to Lan Qiren that he didn’t know if Wen Ruohan had had a large family. It seemed implausible, both given the tendency of cultivators not to have many children and how much of a loner Wen Ruohan was now, and of course the absence of any reference to any such siblings whatsoever in the Nightless City, but who knew? Perhaps Wen Ruohan had declared his siblings taboo in the same way he’d done for his family, casting off any connections with the mortal world in his quest for godhood.
Lan Qiren couldn’t quite contain his curiosity. He checked Wen Ruohan’s private library without success – perhaps unsurprisingly, Wen Ruohan knew everything he needed to know about the subject – and eventually, out of lack of other options, decided to go over to the main library in search of a genealogical history of the Wen sect. Everyone knew about Wen Mao, of course, and a few of the more notable Wen sect leaders over time, but Wen Ruohan himself had lived for such a long time that his immediate ancestors, unlike those of the other sects, were no longer within living memory…rather embarrassing, actually, come to think of it. It was something he shouldknow.
The library would have something for him. Of course, he’d been avoiding the place, knowing how people would invariably come to mob him, especially after they’d determined that it was one of the few places he willingly went that wasn’t protected space like his classroom or his personal rooms; the couriers of the Nightless City were as persistent as a pestilence, and just as irritating. But he wouldn’t need to go for very long – just long enough to get the record, then back.
No one need even know he was there. Surely, he told himself, there would be no problem in just going quickly to check…
Forget gusu rules, I only know hanguag jun’s rules
yey don’t worry when ciao we won’t even dare to touch you guys (even if I lob you both till the moon and back)
I love when giulio
if anyone is interested I leave below my commission sheet
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Somnophilia - page 07
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ZhuChao Sticker Design
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Somnophilia - page 06
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Paying patrons are up to two pages ahead than my public posts. The newest page will be posted on patreon on the second to last day of each month. Public accounts will update 4 days later. Of course public posts will be censored. So if you want to read the uncensored comic and always be two pages ahead of my public schedule, you can become a patron for only 1€ (+VAT) here.
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Somnophilia - page 05
I’m behind schedule again. Sorry about that. Life keeps me very busy atm.
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Somnophilia - page 04
I’m behind schedule again. Sorry about that
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XueChao Sticker Design
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“Somnophilia” - Page 03
I’m behind schedule again. Sorry about that
Paying patrons are two pages ahead than my public posts. The newest page will be posted on patreon on the second to last day of each month. Public accounts will update 4 days later. Of course public posts will be censored. So if you want to read the uncensored comic and always be two pages ahead of my public schedule, you can become a patron for only 1€ (+VAT) here.
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Happy Lunar Year of the
2022 is the year, where I give into my urge to draw more bottom heavy Wen Chao! ♂️
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“Somnophilia” - Page 02
A bit later than scheduled (my bad), but here is finally the next page.
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“Somnophilia” - page 00 & 01
I started a new monthly reward project over on patreon. Paying patrons will get to see the next two pages on Dec. 17th and 29th respectively. From then on, I post one page every second to last day of each month. On my public accounts, I’ll post one page per month, always on the 2nd of each month. Of course public posts will be censored. So if you want to read the uncensored comic and always be two pages ahead of my public schedule, you can become a patron for only 1€ (+VAT) here.
I also got a special commission sale going on until Dec. 31st 2021.
Don’t like, don’t interact.(°u°)b // Please don’t steal and/or repost.
The Yiling Laozu and the Yiling Wei Sect were called to war three months after the Sunshot Campaign started, but in truth, Wei Wuxian joined the efforts against QishanWen quite early
It all started during the last trip to move the Wen siblings to the Burial Mounds when he and Meng Yao happened to pass close to a certain cave that reeked of resentful energy; of course, as the grandmaster of the Demonic Cultivation, the young Wei Wuxian had to investigate. It was good that he had trained every person that came to live in the Burial Mounds to withstand and protect themselves from the resentful energy, or Meng Yao would’ve passed out when they reached the underground lake
“A turtle” Meng Yao deadpans seeing the monstrous creature that thrashes around trying to break Wei Wuxian’s shield
“Ah!” the 14-year-old kid realizes “Popo talked us about this! The ancient turtle… uh… the Xuanwu!” Meng Yao remembers the story about the semi-divine turtle, the Xuanwu of slaughter
“Great… now what?” he crosses his arms, he has his own sword forged by Wei Wuxian and himself, but if a thousand cultivators couldn’t kill this thing, what makes anyone think that two kids can? they can’t. At least not with spiritual energy
Wei Wuxian considers it for a moment, the Xuanwu has a lot of resentful energy, but it is not the most he can feel inside the cave. One perk of being adopted by the Burial Mounds as a whole (after almost dying 2 times but who is counting?), is that the ghosts and the fallen gods taught him to use both spiritual and resentful energy, so he mastered both paths when he was 8 (those two almost deaths don’t count!!), so he does what he knows best
In another world, he would’ve wondered if it was possible to use the victims against the executioner, in this one he does exactly that. ‘There’s not much love for the semi-divine turtle here’ he thinks as he raises the ghosts of centuries of victims against the creature, effectively killing it. In doing that, he also discovers a black sword, full to the brim of resentment
“You think Subian will feel replaced?” he jokes as he tries the sword, he can feel the thrumming of energy, and distantly he can hear the screams, though it’s nothing like the Burial Mounds back when he first entered. Meng Yao takes a look without getting too close
“I think Chengqin will feel threatened” he counters, and sure enough the dizi is letting a small tendril of dark energy out in displeasure. Wei Ying chuckles
“Aw it’s okay” he pats the precious flute that he so painfully carved day after day so many years ago “I still have to purify and tame this one, will see if it can be used later”
After taking one tooth as a trophy and some other parts for experimentation, Wei Wuxian and Meng Yao seal and hide the cave, writing purifying symbols in the wards to ensure the cleansing and rest of all the poor victims of the demonic turtle
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Three years later, Wen Chao drags the heirs all over the mountain, trying to find the mysterious prey some say there’s on the mountain but without success. When the unsuspecting heir tries to enter a warded cave for the fifth time, the backlash is so strong Wen Zhuliu has to take him in arms to rush back to the city to a healer, of course, the hostages heirs take this chance to escape.
Nobody knows who or what put such an impressive ward in a normal-looking cave, but nobody asks, they focus on getting back to their respective sects safely
One month later, the Jiang Sect is saved from full destruction by remarkably similar wards
