AN: Those of you who're already familiar with Tomoe's backstory probably have a pretty good idea of what's coming up.
Content warnings for this chapter: (book) canon-typical violence, primarily blood and description of mostly-lethal injuries. Also includes references to Wei Wuxian's experiences in the Burial Mounds and the immediate aftermath of the fall of Lotus Pier.
The Unclean Realm hosted the bulk of commanders for the ongoing war, partially because Qinghe Nie's sect leader was still the highest-ranked of them and partly due to proximity to Qishan. The smaller sects who joined the campaign paid attention to power and influence, and with Lanling Jin's sect leader still avoiding full commitment, and two of the other great sects effectively led by people shoved into the role after the deaths of all who came before, there wasn't much argument about it. Overall, this meant the landlocked and relatively militaristic Qinghe Nie were playing host to everyone.
Including walking wounded.
The field hospital stretched across two courtyards, with healers receiving new patients from sunrise to sunset and back again. While the bulk of the sects' numbers were comprised of cultivators, rich families brought a secondary army of supporters along. Healers were the most valued of them, but hundreds of people worked in every arena from washing and repairing robes to cooking to drawing talismans for later use. Shinta explained this even when they took breaks during the flight to Qinghe, whispering to her as the cultivators around them stretched their stiff joints in preparation for the next leg of the journey.
Tomoe spent her first day among the army recovering from airsickness, of all things. She avoided the field hospital by tucking herself away into the Jiang sect's quarters and not moving until sunset. Nausea and humiliation were the kind of combination that made her temper unfit for existing civilly near anyone, so she stayed well out of the way of the day's events.
Her only visitor was Shinta, who spoke in a low murmur while attending to her.
Shinta, who knew field medicine only through experience and not study, mostly fetched and carried when it was his turn to help over the last month or so. He learned from healers where he could—mostly while patients groaned barely an arm's reach away—and put himself to work while the various clan heads talked strategy. Short a noble bloodline and wealth, Shinta was not invited to those meetings. He heard about what was decided later.
Through the power of his earnestness, perhaps, this gave Shinta access to medicine Tomoe's pride never allowed her to request.
Aside from his worth as a pair of hands when the healers needed them, stitching torn clothes back together, and following Jiang Wanyin on every other strike against the Wen periphery, Shinta mostly just tried to stay busy. When he couldn't search for Tomoe and was excluded from any cultivator exercises that required a golden core, it was enough to work until he slept like a stone at night.
Continuing such practices meant on the second dawn in Qinghe, Tomoe left their shared quarters without waking him.
The Jiang sect was happy enough to lend her a bow and enough arrows to practice, though it took Tomoe almost the entire walk across the compound to rehearse the sentences she wanted. Fang Shufen even went so far as to escort Tomoe to the archery field personally, though the sun barely peeked over the mountains.
"Shout if you need anything," Fang Shufen told her before bustling away.
Tomoe put on her bracers and chest guard, made sure she'd tied all of her hair into a controllable knot, and began her first practice session with any ranged weapon in years.
It showed.
Kyūdō was possibly the least forgiving of any weapon discipline Tomoe ever practiced. There was no recourse or trick to assist those who neglected their skills.
Draw with the breath.
Worse, the bow in her hands wasn't a yumi at all. All of the Jiang bows varied a little in their construction, but were all composites of wood, buffalo horn, and animal sinew under all the ornamental carvings, and they were the same length above and below the handle. Yumi were almost half again as long on the top, forcing the wielder into an entirely different draw technique. Tomoe's muscle memory kept leading her astray.
Release with the breath.
The dozen missed shots and twice as many failures to strike a single dyed ring was all she had to show for her efforts.
She used to be a good archer. Not the best in the family—that had been a contest confined to her second-oldest brother Takahiro and her cousin Toshiro—but she'd started so much later. Anyone, Tomoe thought, could've become the best mounted archer in the family with the decade of seniority they had over her. Tomoe merely had the disadvantage of being born as the last child of her generation, while still judged by that standard.
Muscles along her shoulders, back, and chest all protested at being forced back into proper condition over the hours she spent under the Qinghe morning mist. Her fingers stung from the shot that grazed her left hand, though she'd barely drawn halfway to the bow's limit. The red mark on her thumb wouldn't fade quickly.
Thwip.
Even so, archery was meditative. The skills she practiced more consistently—such as kenjutsu, stealth, etiquette, housekeeping, and board games—either confronted her with a less-tangible goal or were uncomfortable to practice in Qinghe. A painted ring taunted her immediately and presented a measurable metric for success. She either shot accurately or failed.
Thwip.
Maybe Tomoe needed to go back to basics with this skill. Reteach herself from nothing at all, or teach someone else. The days spent guiding Shinta through her kenjutsu techniques forced her to think about the movements in a more granular fashion, improving her own skills as he developed into a sparring partner. Perhaps she needed competition, too.
Most of the Jiang cultivators outpaced her. Tomoe had emptied her quiver several times and earned no bullseyes to show for it. Who would even view this as a competition?
Thwip.
"There you are, Wuya-jie," called a familiar voice.
While she turned and bowed to acknowledge Wei Wuxian as he arrived, her mind weighed the numbers and concluded that her work here was a disappointment. In her distraction, it took her a moment to remember which arm orientation to use, and grimaced internally when she realized she'd placed the wrong hand forward for a martial bow anyway. It was always difficult to remember which of the etiquette lessons was correct and which was an implied death threat.
Going by the gleam in Wei Wuxian's eye, it was difficult to tell if he caught the mistake or just found her archery failures amusing. Once again, he walked without any weapon other than his flute, his wits, and the occasional wisp of shadowy energy that crept along behind him. No walking corpses today, it seemed. It was just the aura of a gravetender that served as his escort.
"Wei-gongzi," Tomoe rasped, after an entire morning of barely speaking.
"Shixiong," Wei Wuxian suggested, with a grin that failed to cover his fatigue. His qi felt like sludge at the bottom of a river. "Or maybe Wei-xiong?"
"What. Do you. Want," Tomoe bit out, picking and choosing her words like a shogi player placing tiles.
"Nothing so serious, so you can stop scowling." Wei Wuxian swayed on his feet, his hair and his flute's tassel swinging cheerfully in the morning light. "I just wanted to talk to you about a few things while there aren't any curious ears around. No Lan Zhan or Jiang Cheng, or any Wuya-ge with the big sad eyes like he's been sporting since we landed. I'm glad you're feeling better, by the way, though I could've delivered my well-wishes yesterday if you'd taken any visitors."
Tomoe bit back a sigh, because Wei Wuxian still spoke entirely too fast for her to build a sentence while listening to his. She waited until he paused to take a breath, then ordered, "Talk."
He didn't start immediately, because Wei Wuxian wove his way around even his peers when he spoke. Instead, Wei Wuxian sat on a nearby bench—normally used for observers and instructors of the Nie sect's archers—slouching as though he'd never been taught to sit properly in his life. He tucked one leg over the other and leaned forward, twirling Chenqing in his fingers.
"Wuya-jie, you don't care about my…" He wiggled the flute again. "Alternative path. I was wondering why that was."
As a statement, it required no response.
Fighting the urge to roll her eyes at the thought of yet another day of being Wei Wuxian's near-silent counsel—or echo chamber—for whatever strange thought came to mind, Tomoe lifted her bow again and turned toward the target.
Draw with the breath.
"I'm sure your ears are just as sharp even if your face is turned away."
Still not a question. Tomoe kept her gaze trained forward.
Release with the breath.
The arrow slammed into the third ring, a hair's breadth closer than her best shot beforehand.
"Then I'll just keep going, shall I?" Without waiting for a response that would be slow off the mark regardless, he went on, "The reason you're not worried about my cultivation path is because yours is half a step into the dark already."
Tomoe turned that term—"yin" when it hit her ears—over in her mind for twice as long as the rest of Wei Wuxian's excessive explanation. Or accusation, perhaps. As clever as Wei Wuxian thought he was, he made assumptions frequently while speaking with most people. Here, he assumed Tomoe knew the slightest idea what qi usage formed a basis for cultivation. As someone who never intended to form a golden core and wouldn't know where to start, Tomoe likely understood less than a third of such technicalities when they were explained.
In this case, it was less a language issue—though that was still present—and more a gap in education in esoteric topics. Tomoe would have had the same problem if asked how to train people to kill bakemono back home.
"First, liberate; second, suppress; third, eliminate," Wei Wuxian rattled off, as though that sufficed as an explanation. "If you listen to any orthodox cultivator, those are the only ways to deal with resentful spirits and their energy. But your dao does only one of those things at all, and a fourth much, much better."
Draw.
Release.
"Explain," Tomoe said, trying to suit the word to the whole of the question she couldn't quite form. She lowered her bow to a resting position and turned her face toward Wei Wuxian, even dropping her shoulders to indicate a fraction less hostility in her statement.
Just next to Wei Wuxian's knee, Tomoe's outermost lilac robe sat on the bench under the sheathed Yukishiro. She'd removed both due to the accumulation of sweat between her shoulder blades and her katana's relative uselessness in this exercise. One of Wei Wuxian's half-visible shadows shuffled toward Yukishiro as she watched, only to quail and disappear under her glare. Whatever strange power he carried could keep its coils to itself.
"Your dao here," Wei Wuxian said, pointing at Yukishiro, "is steeped in the regret and resentment of every ordinary person you've killed with it. Dozens, at least." Wei Wuxian met her eyes squarely. "Cultivators have soul-calming ceremonies so they don't leave ghosts behind, but many of these people weren't cultivators. Until I saw Wu Tao's dao in action, I thought it might be normal for Dongying. But is it?"
Tomoe stared at Yukishiro without taking her actual attention off Wei Wuxian, trying to put enough words together to respond. Enough time passed that Wei Wuxian started to fidget, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, and had twirled Chenqing another ten times.
Finally, she said haltingly, "Didi is gentle." The only way to remove a weakness was to train to compensate, but this was worse than any slump she'd experienced with the gentler arts. The tone was probably wrong despite her best efforts, too, but Wei Wuxian was almost used to her tongue tripping up by now. He'd had enough time to adapt. If he didn't, it reinforced the need for practice. "Revenge is…mine. Only."
Wei Wuxian's "carefree" fiddling with Chenqing developed a hitch, almost sending the flute to the ground. Someone less perceptive than Tomoe wouldn't have caught the hesitation at all and assumed he was just careless.
"So, you're using human resentment and leftover emotions of your victims to fuel your sword. How does that make you any different from me?" Wei Wuxian mused. He crossed his arms, flute tucked between them.
Tomoe met Wei Wuxian's eyes squarely, tilting her head slowly to one side as the staring contest continued.
"Nothing to say?"
Tomoe crossed the distance between them, leaning forward slightly as she came to a stop. She could only loom like this when he was sitting down, but Wei Wuxian met her gaze with a grin. The grin dropped when Tomoe plucked Yukishiro from the bench, still in its sheath, and Wei Wuxian's expression shifted toward consideration.
"Wuya-jie?"
Holding the blade by the sheath, she channeled her spiritual energy into the blade with enough force to trigger the blade's attention. Focusing her qi carefully, she rested her thumb against the tsuba and made as though to draw it left-handed. Yukishiro trembled against her fingers with agitation, roused as though for combat.
Then she dropped Yukishiro into Wei Wuxian's hands.
"Ask," Tomoe said, and turned back to the archery range. "Easier to call spirits."
She'd already fired her first shot by the time Wei Wuxian bowed his head over Yukishiro, contemplative. She blocked out whatever he wanted to say; until he made his bid to talk to Yukishiro, further conversation would be a waste of breath.
Draw with the breath.
Wei Wuxian blinked up at Wuya-jie, more surprised than confused. While she was one of the more reticent people he'd ever met, barring Lan Wangji, the worst of her reluctance to speak or share anything about herself was always something he'd assumed came down to her lack of education. Lack of a clever tongue. Giving her Suibian would never have occurred to him—even if he didn't leave it in his rooms for being a painful reminder—and yet she'd dropped the dao in his lap as though it meant nothing.
That was…not how a cultivator thought.
"I'm not sure that a dao can store the answers to as many questions as I can think of," Wei Wuxian told her. Unless the blade was harboring something that could. He tucked Chenqing into his sash so he could use both hands. "Or if it can, I wonder if it stole all of yours. Sword spirits aren't traditionally vast wells of knowledge."
Wuya-jie didn't even look his way.
"What secrets are you hiding?" Wei Wuxian asked the blade in his lap, watching it shake faintly as though caught in an earthquake. It couldn't be from Wei Wuxian—his hands were steady entirely through force of will that hadn't failed him yet—but it appeared the spirit was unhappy to be wielded by anyone but its owner. If it wasn't, perhaps Wuya-jie's emotions were running higher than expected; Wei Wuxian remembered seeing Nie Mingjue's Baxia jolt and surge when his temper flared, a long time ago. "If you're anything like your mistress, you won't give up a single one without a fight. What do you say?"
The dao trembled. The trace of qi left in its form by Wuya-jie's hand faded quickly, though not because the sword consumed it. Instead, it was as though she'd primed the blade like a seed before planting season began, preparing it for new growth.
Or a new visitor.
Wei Wuxian placed one hand on the hilt and the other against the sheath, as though to draw it. The blade stilled in his hands, while the signature black wisps of resentful energy wafted up from both the sword and from the shadow below Wei Wuxian's feet. The worst of it came from Chenqing, though the flute was otherwise inert in its place at his belt.
"Wuya-jie, don't let me stay under too long," Wei Wuxian called to her, briefly catching her attention again. "The Jiang sect bell will do, if you have one." He knew she did; no disguise would be complete without it, and Jiang Cheng was more thorough with that kind of detail than he'd ever been before. Wei Wuxian waited until her off hand went to her belt and the bell there, then told the dao, "Let's see it, then."
Dark as thorough as the Burial Mounds' shadows leapt up to meet him.
The first thing Tomoe remembered from that night was blood.
First blood in her mouth, then lightning (like being struck with Zidian) in her veins, then she smelled smoke and jerked awake.
"T-Tomoe-chan, we need to get out of here." Tomoe (Wei Wuxian) didn't recognize the voice at first, too busy fighting the sudden dizziness that wracked her body. What happened? Aside from deep, blank patches, she could only remember the wedding itself.
(Dissonance—the word "wedding" conjured half a vision of red and joy and then solemnity and loss—until Wei Wuxian tasted his own blood in his mouth. Wei Wuxian wrenched the memory into order, falling deeper into Empathy to the sound of Wu Xue—Tomoe's? —archery progress.)
"Shinta-kun, what's happening?" Her voice (around the wrong words) was flat and cold, making Shinta flinch. No. Cower, curled in a terrified ball. His forearm bled from a ring of punctures that could only be from human teeth. Hers. "What did you do?"
"Th-The clan. The Asakura clan—" One of Shinta's hands clamped over the wound, shoving a white sleeve over it as though that would hide the blood. "Th-They're attacking! I didn't know. I swear I didn't!"
("Da-shixiong, it's Sixth Shidi—" Wei Wuxian grabbed the dao's spirit with a tendril of power from Chenqing, imagining scruffing it like a naughty kitten before it could shove Wang Lingjiao's crimes in his face. No. He'd relived that moment enough in his nightmares.)
Tomoe shoved Shinta aside, scrambling to her feet. She tore the wedding chamber apart in moments, fear giving her more force than grace. How she could be caught so totally off guard? Someone should have— It was impossible that everyone was already gone— Where is Yukishiro?!
"T-Tomoe-chan—"
Heart in her throat, Tomoe laid hands on both katana and tantō at long last and let out a slow breath of relief. The gaping hole in her memory didn't stop habit from placing weaponry everywhere she'd need them later. If she had just been able to string enough thoughts together and hide her armor in here—
"Shinta-kun." Tomoe clenched her jaw before she regained enough control to speak without snapping. Yukishiro slid free of its sheath and vibrated faintly as the blade's thirst woke. "Please tell me what is happening."
"The A-Asakura clan, th-they drugged us," he gasped, his violet eyes wide. (Wei Wuxian never knew Wu Tao this young, or in this much distress, but he knew that face now.) "I r-recovered, b-but your family—!"
(Wei Wuxian could see nothing but Wen Ning's quiet pleading, his collar in Wei Wuxian's hands when Jiang Cheng was gone. Forcing himself to let Wen Ning go took all the strength he could muster, even with Zidian's whip-marks burning fresh down his back and terror thrumming through his limbs. If Wen Ning hadn't betrayed his own clan and found a way to bring Jiang Cheng to that waiting boat—)
Tomoe failed to muster any rage over the half-expected betrayal, when she'd never trusted them in the first place (but the grief coiled under her ribs and stuck in her throat in a way Wei Wuxian knew all too well). Shinta, whom she knew and considered a friend, was still here. Wasn't attacking. Or defending.
Tomoe stepped closer, looming over Shinta with Yukishiro's bare blade unmoving in the air. Her voice (steady despite the way the cadence was all wrong and her emotions were a maelstrom) was like ice. "Give me one good reason to let you live."
Shinta, on his knees already, pressed his forehead to the floor in a deep, sincere bow. Not like a martial artist or a servant or soldier, or even a husband to a wife (and Wei Wuxian thinks, what?). Shinta, still on his knees, leans over far enough that his hands are flat on the floor. The sheer unexpectedness of this deep bow made Tomoe recoil. She was no daimyō. Even in the worst of her towering wrath, this was—she couldn't—
(Wei Wuxian watched the vision lurch sideways, showing instead a man in cloth-and-steel armor standing over the corpse of an old man in roughspun robes, saying in a voice just shy of laughter, "See? There's no better way to test the edge of a new blade." And all the men around him nodded and joked while a stomach that wasn't Wei Wuxian's wanted to empty across the ground—
She'd felt the old man die. Felt his qi fade to nothing after the fatal strike, after a wave of terror, despair, and then resignation upon being surrounded by warriors.
Wei Wuxian measured the somewhat uncertain distance with his eyes, from the point of the dao to the corpse Tomoe hadn't approached, and tried not to think about the implications for himself.)
"Shinta," Tomoe said, kneeling to match him and placing her empty hand against his shoulder. Her eyes burned and vision blurred, but it was almost certainly smoke. She shook him gently when he didn't respond, letting Yukishiro's point drop to the floor. "Shinta, get up. We don't have time for this."
Shinta lifted his head, and his pupils were almost large enough to blot out the purple in his eyes. "T-Tomoe-chan—"
"I forgive you." ("There is nothing to forgive. Whatever else I might become, I am not a monster to you. No matter what else I will become in the future," was what Wei Wuxian heard, the words pressed up against the back of Tomoe's throat but unable to break free. Seemed like she'd always had that problem.) Tomoe took a careful breath and asked, "Will you help me save them?"
(The memory blurred, spiraling into shadow for a few frantic heartbeats. Faces flashed past Wei Wuxian's perception, too quickly to recall any features later in a manner that felt deliberate. It felt like his hand—or mind, in this case—being smacked to avoid touching a hot stove.)
"Forgive me, forgive me. I should have been here, Oniisama," Tomoe's voice murmured, head bowed and hands clasped as she prayed over the headless corpse of a man in fine robes. The smell of blood sat thick in the air (like Lotus Pier in the stolen moment Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng snuck back in, terrified of what they'd find for so long that the confirmation almost couldn't hurt worse), unable to tell where one grisly scene ended and the other began. "I will avenge us."
(The scene went hazy and dull again, until) Tomoe found Utane and Suzume dead on the floor, surrounded by the bodies of four more Asakura warriors and a wreck of a corpse that might have been Takahiro. (The faces appeared as though on a silk screen overlaying the scene, trying to push Wei Wuxian's attention away.) In the back of the room, behind an overturned table, Tomoe spotted one pale arm lying motionless in a pool of dark blood. Too small to be an adult's arm.
Behind her, Shinta retched.
The Asakura clan will pay. I'll kill every last one of them. Tomoe's hands moved almost without thought, closing eyes of corpses as she came across them. Her mouth moved silently, reciting more prayers as she found more and more of her family dead. In her chest, her heart picked up a different rhythm, to the beat of her world sliding sideways into the abyss. I don't care how long it will take me. I can be patient, but I will kill them all in the end.
(Wei Wuxian felt his own hands clenched tight over that corrupted jian from the Xuanwu's gullet as though nailed there. No matter that the sword was long gone, forced into shape as the Yin Tiger Seal, or that the Burial Mounds no longer had him within the grasp of thousands of ghostly hands. The sense memory overlapped with the burn of Tomoe's—Wu Xue's—dao as it dragged him headlong through the memories.
"Do you want revenge, Wei Wuxian?" asked the restless dead, swirling above and around him with their voices barely audible in the cacophony. Their energy clawed at him, invading, constraining—
And he'd said, "Yes.")
While his hair was plastered to his face with blood and his breaths were faint, Tomoe's youngest nephew still lived. Tomoe patted his cheek, smearing even more blood across her already-damp hands. She didn't know how badly Yūki was hurt, but perhaps… "Yūki, Yūki, Obachan is right here. Open your eyes for me, please."
He didn't wake. His spiritual energy fluttered under her hands as she lifted him into her arms, weak as a bird's, and Tomoe briefly froze in place as the sound of distant shouting wove its way through the halls. She needed both hands to fight. They were unspeakably outnumbered, with no sure ways out of the fortress.
Shinta coughed behind her. After wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he held out both arms beseechingly. "I-I can carry Yūki-chan. I can't fight, b-but…" He swallowed hard, still looking faint. "I can heal him, Tomoe. Please."
(The sword spirit tried to move Wei Wuxian's attention away, but he still saw) the briefest glimpse of Yūki's baby teeth before Shinta pushed his mouth shut on the meat of his arm, wincing as the blood started flowing fast down toward his elbow.
"There are ways out of even a burning castle." (Wei Wuxian didn't need to know her well to hear the strain in her voice; the carefully placed lie and desperation for a solution even when everything crashed down around their ears. It wasn't so different to his own confident front, just before the surgery.) "Follow me."
(And then the dao's spirit used the moment of bafflement to shove him forward anyway, skipping over a moment that left a shapeless impression of blood and death. Shadows cast by licking flames convinced him there was nothing good to be found in that gap.)
The arrow tore free and Tomoe lost the thread of thought entirely, only realizing she'd muffled a scream in her horribly stained sleeves when she tasted cloth. Her whole body tensed, spasmed with pain around the other arrow, rabbit-kicking against the snow for a few heartbeats. When it was over, her breathing was no easier—the other was in just the right spot to make anything deeper than shallow gasps impossible.
Shinta's horrified face was a blur framed by his dark red hair, the world narrowed to the point of the arrow he'd just ripped out of her shoulder.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—" Shinta managed, only taking his eyes off her face briefly to check if Yūki was still in his nest. He should have made Tomoe move or moved her nephew, but this process was already started.
No stopping now. "Ah, I—ah, it hurts," was what came out of Tomoe's clenched teeth, but the eyes that refocused on Shinta's were still aware through the pain. Blood, bright and terrible, seeped steadily from both wounds. No time. "Just—next. Next one. Now."
(Wei Wuxian shifted the vision along, and this time the dao didn't fight him. It actually sped up, showing fragments and narrowing focus on shorter, clearer memories drenched in less blood. For the spirit of a blade, such a choice was—well, Wei Wuxian didn't know. Before this, he'd only performed Empathy a few times, in a safe ritual space with more Jiang bells as backup, and never on an object instead of a ghost or corpse.
But was he or wasn't he the one who forged his dark path in the heart of the Burial Mounds?
He dove in again.)
"If you were anyone else, I would never even consider—"
"I know," Tomoe interrupted, her voice like steel. In her mind's eye, she could still see the fear in Shinta's fever-bright eyes as the servants pulled him from the donkey's back and dragged him to the clan's doctor. "But I am not anyone else. And I am asking."
"You can't expect me to lie to my husband," Sumomo protested. When she moved, it was carefully done. Her face was so much like Tomoe's, down to the brow and mouth, but her features were tense with fear and grief. (Wei Wuxian had never seen this woman before in his life, and likely wouldn't recognize her if they met but it didn't take much to recognize a pregnancy too far along to risk putting the mother under this much stress.) "He may be yours by technicality, but that boy's family destroyed ours."
"The only reason I lived is because he turned on them. No sword will touch him," Tomoe said after she'd forced her voice to perfect poise again, even as she reached out and settled her hand on top of her sister's. "Not even yours."
She was not miraculously immune to being drugged and beheaded. Based on what she'd pieced together during the grueling journey down from the mountains, a dosage that incapacitated her brothers ought to have killed her. A true agent of her clan's enemies might have wanted her kept alive, but Shinta would have given his life to see her escape.
In the end, she owed Shinta her life twice over for that night. After his fever set in, she might be able to remove one debt.
(Wei Wuxian thought, If only life was anything like that simple.)
Sumomo's spirit twisted in denial. Into something her baby sister recognized, but not in her. "Don't tell me you plan to act as though that wedding meant anything. Did you two—?"
"No."
"Then it can be dismissed and forgotten. There are no living witnesses besides the two of you." Sumomo didn't tug her hands away, but they did twitch under Tomoe's palm. "You can stay here. He won't."
"So I should stay, waiting for the moment your husband might rally his clan for revenge? Let responsibility fall to someone who wasn't there?" Tomoe shook her head, pulling back and standing. "If I have to choose between safety and extracting the blood debt by my own hand—"
"Tomoe—" her sister tried to interrupt, missing her hand by a hair.
"—then I know exactly what I'll choose." She rose, picking Yukishiro off the floor and bowing to her sister. "Goodbye, Oneesan."
"Then you're dead to us!"
"So be it."
(The dao surged to life again, but this time the shadow that leaked into Wei Wuxian's view came directly from the floor. After a few seconds, they spread across the room until they shifted and morphed into fully-fledged ghosts arranged like a banquet hall, blocking out the walls and doors with sheer numbers. Men, women, and children whose features were slack in death, sporting lethal wounds where skin was visible and large bloodstains where fine silk robes were soaked through. The attending resentment drifted around the room, faintly stirring in an undetectable wind, and the ghosts kept staring with hollow eyes. The spiraling trails of gray and black led back to the dao like unattended ink.
When Wei Wuxian tweaked just the edge of the writhing mass, they turned on him as one. The room around them faded entirely, leaving Tomoe and her sister as empty silhouettes in a black void. The ghosts remained. They watched.
A man with Tomoe's nose and a slit-open throat drifted forward, flanked by a woman in her fifties, half her head caved in from bludgeoning and one eye dangling. They parted around Wei Wuxian, silent, until he turned to track their movements. Maybe to follow.
And Wei Wuxian saw a beheaded man in the edged-red robes of a Wen, clutched between the pair and their ragged, clawed hands. The man in foreign garb slowly dragged the Wen corpse across what might have once been a floor, back toward the waiting gallery of ghosts, while the woman cradled the head in her hands as gently as a child.
The head pleaded silently with Wei Wuxian, but Wei Wuxian recognized the face there. Even as the hairline crawled back from anything that could support a guan, shortening and reshaping itself under the weight of the ghosts' expectations. Years of stress melted away from the person who must have been Tomoe's last victim before meeting Wei Wuxian, even if he was decapitated. One of the first corpses he'd raised without the head attached, before he realized he was capable of it, while still building his army and not entirely aware there was someone else picking at the Wens's army.
Wei Wuxian let the other ghosts swarm that one under without lifting a finger, and then they parted to reveal a new scene.)
"Tomoe, I wanted to ask if you'd wait." Shinta swayed like a reed in the wind as hands reached out to steady him (on a different day than the last vision Wei Wuxian experienced, finally identifying budding cherry blossoms outside the shuttered window). His left arm sported bandages from wrist to elbow and Tomoe's hands flinched away from taking hold of it, gripping his shoulders instead. And still, his voice said, "T-to take me with you."
Tomoe's hand stilled against his arm. "Are you sure?"
"I can't stay," Shinta said softly. "And I don't have anywhere else to go."
This bond, here and now, was something Tomoe wouldn't kill. In herself, or in him. (Wei Wuxian could only think of Jiang Yanli's declaration yesterday when she'd finally gotten him and Jiang Cheng together and hugged them both, that the three of them would never separate again. It was strange to hear the same sentiment echoed in someone else's heart.)
"Of course," Tomoe whispered. "Of course you'll come with me."
(The chorus of ghosts reeled back, but not far. Instead, they began to slowly swirl around the dao still present in the scene. Look at this, look at us, they seemed to say. Between the silk and ceremonial regalia, marks of wealth that they carried even in death on half-visible bodies, there were flashes of other scenes.)
Tomoe stood in the middle of a room lined with paper screens, looming over a headless corpse and resultant blood spilled across the low table. With her bloodstained silver-and-red robes long since replaced by ash-gray and black, to show fewer stains (and hide any injuries, which had been Wei Wuxian's first thought after crawling out of the Burial Mounds) . While her katana dropped blood briefly onto the tatami flooring, a quick flick of her wrist sent the worst of it splattering across the corpse.
Not tenchū, Tomoe thought (as Wei Wuxian heard "divine judgement" and felt his ears ring with her bone-deep resignation of an unpleasant task started at last). She drew a handkerchief from one sleeve and carefully wiped the blood from her katana, then tucked it back into her sleeve and sheathed the sword. With all the candles in the room already snuffed (and not the slightest idea that her night vision was not quite natural), there was a much lower risk of Asakura Yosada's guards realizing their charge lay in two pieces strewn across his office. Having to catch the head as it fell was a small price to pay.
The servants would be horrified in a few hours.
Tomoe didn't have it in her to feel guilt, even after weighing that thought for several heartbeats. Whatever hesitation remained regarding killing had long since been burned out of her.
After sheathing Yukishiro, Tomoe crossed the room silently and began looking through paperwork (with such different usage of characters that Wei Wuxian could only make vague sense of the first page). Her search was over in less than the time it took for the rest of the castle to work their way through their patrol routes. Tomoe folded the documents neatly and tucked them inside her robes, stood still for a few seconds to listen for any possible interference, then went to the window. (For all the fuss she made—silently—about flying across the length of the cultivation world to Qinghe, she had no qualms about just jumping from a fortress's walls.) Before long, she'd slipped away from the fortress with enough time to avoid even the first outcry.
It was hours later before she returned to the inn, woke Shinta just before dawn, and the pair of them began the slow trek onward.
(The coils of resentful energy from the dao's small army of ghosts turned Wei Wuxian around with none of the unthinking, unreasoning malice of the Burial Mounds and the sword that would become the Yin Tiger Seal.
All of them were watching him, insofar as those white eyes could. On the edges of the scenes thus far, he'd felt them tugging at his awareness and shoving other ghosts into their ranks. Hiding information they didn't want him to see.
Hiding her. No one in that fortress even began to notice there was a stranger painting their walls with their master's blood.
"She never had to actually turn to you, did she?" Wei Wuxian asked, and the legless shades parted before him like reeds as he strode forward into their ranks. "You're following this story to the end."
He had no idea if any of the Dongying ghosts could understand him, but they'd given him enough room to maneuver within Empathy to feel an impending headache. Perhaps that information exchange went both ways, for all that they were too dead to learn much besides how to hate. Wei Wuxian doubted there was a single ghost here who'd seen all of the people and the names that the bearer of their grudge viewed as her goal.
"Show me what happened to the others."
Several of the ghosts flew apart like sand tossed into a headwind, directly in his path. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted which of them reconstituted themselves behind him, and the dark path unfurled.
Behind the ranks of obscuring shades and shadow, dozens upon dozens of bodies lay in various states of decay. Bare skeletons made up the base of an unnerving pile, crushed under the weight of corpses stacked atop them like firewood scraps. Most of them still wore armor or clothing identical to that of the first man the dao showed Wei Wuxian, with the exception of a lone skull—patches of long, withered hair still attached—that had been wearing seven layers of now-ruined silk regalia. Above that bottom layer, fresher corpses lay scattered all around, each showing less rot than the one below. As many patterns of robes as corpses were easily visible, until the final corpse was the man in Wen robes Wei Wuxian had identified forever ago.
"So, you made a promise not to rest until every single person on that revenge list joins you here," Wei Wuxian said to the dao spirit, to the ghosts of a dead family arranged without a shrine to honor them. Their sighs rang in his ears like most of the sounds here hadn't, and he asked, "Did you ever even need this power?"
And behind him, a voice said, "It was never about need," in a very familiar, unamused cadence.
Wei Wuxian spun on the spot, but—
—when he opened his real eyes, the sunlight was cheerfully trying to put them out. He shoved his hand over his face with a groan, rubbing at them with his fingertips as though a massage would make them recover faster. He leaned forward over his knees and blinked rapidly once he felt comfortable enough to risk it, and then blinked again in surprise.
Wuya-jie—or Tomoe or Wu Xue or whoever she really wanted to be—sat next to him on the bench, her expression completely unreadable. At some point after Wei Wuxian entered Empathy, she'd put her Jiang outer robe back on and unstrung the borrowed bow, and taken the time to clear out all the wasted arrows she'd originally left strewn all over the range. The worrisome tainted dao rested against her knee, placid, and generally not looking like something that made about half the ghosts Wei Wuxian saw in its depths.
Most importantly, she held up both of her hands. In one, there was a folded silk handkerchief next to the Jiang sect bell she'd likely used to rouse him. Dangling from the other hand was a small but identifiable jar of Qinghe liquor.
"I still have questions," Wei Wuxian told her through a dry mouth, but accepted the handkerchief first. "But if bribery is your idea of an apology for what your dao just put me through, I think you're one step closer to forgiveness than most people would be. Just a thought."
Wuya-jie—who had never said not to call her that—rolled her eyes and set the jar on the bench, within easy reach.
Dabbing at his upper lip revealed a slowing nosebleed, which made Wei Wuxian grimace, but it wasn't his first brush with wild resentful energy. Not everything could be as biddable as Chenqing. In fact, literally nothing tainted so thoroughly even made an attempt to play nice. There was a much stronger trend of attempted possession and generally protracted, horrible death. Most of his time in the Burial Mounds—no, none of it bore thinking about.
None of Wuya-jie's ghosts had actually laid hands on him. They were just impatient.
"Wanted power," Wuya-jie said after a while, nudging the jar toward him. She waited—or composed her answer while he shook the jar experimentally—before saying, "Our approaches are not the same."
Wei Wuxian's eyes narrowed at her, though he still broke the seal on the jar and took a long swig. With all the foreign names and concepts swirling in his head, he needed wine now rather than later. Qinghe's baijiu kicked like few others, but this tasted much milder than he'd expected.
"Not intended. Already haunted, then added to it." Wuya-jie said, after Wei Wuxian took his second sip more slowly. She tapped her fingers against the dao's hilt. The tiniest flicker of resentful energy wafted from her dao to her hand, then coiled up her fingers. As Wei Wuxian watched, she pinched the trailing tail with her other hand before pressing it back into the cloth wrap.
"It really seemed more like you're feeding them. When you made that oath, I bet you didn't expect to be haunted—or making your sword a corrupted thing—but once you had done it, there was no turning back." Wei Wuxian tilted his head to one side. "I'm right, aren't I?"
"It is not… butsudan—" which hit Wei Wuxian's ears as "altar" and made his now-real headache a smidge worse, "—but…" Wuya-jie paused, clearly frustrated despite the blank look on her face. It was in the angle of her head and the way her grip on her dao had changed while she tried to think. Her face was as still as Lan Zhan's.
Wei Wuxian set the jar down and said, every bit as slowly as Wuya-jie did, "This better?" in her language instead.
As soon as the words left his mouth, he grimaced. It was much stranger than trying to speak in a different province's dialect. The syllables weren't impossible to pronounce, but the first attempt felt unwieldy on his tongue and the tone was flatter than he'd expected, all emphasis in length of the sound instead of pattern. He needed more time to figure out how to form a full sentence, because he was fairly sure Dongying natives spoke with very different rules. How did a sentence become more polite with more sounds in it?
Wuya-jie was staring at him in surprise. It didn't look too different than her normal expression, except for the way she'd stopped blinking.
"Ah, don't look at me like that! I may not have the patience to sit through lessons, but I definitely noticed how you and your brother talk to each other. Languages are all about patterns, so it's not so hard." He forced a grin, which Wuya-jie didn't appear to buy. She never did. "Seriously, it's a great idea. Try talking to me in your language and I'll talk to you in mine."
Wuya-jie eyed him. Then, in a whisper: "Your technique was more dangerous than expected."
Wei Wuxian took another swallow of his liquor, mostly as a bid for time to think. And while he'd never tried to outdrink a hangover, he could certainly experiment on an Empathy headache. The bleeding had already stopped, anyway. "Not so much! And you were trying to answer my question about those ghosts, but I've figured it out. They're your family, so of course they're watching over you. You'd have let them keep to a family altar if there was one, but there's not, so you didn't, and now they're following the dao around. And you."
Wuya-jie kept staring.
With a slightly exaggerated sigh, he said, "I don't know why you're so worried. I'm fine."
"What you are is a liar." Her voice was too mild to be truly scolding, but he felt it anyway. Jiang Yanli kept her disappointment couched in gentle concern at most, while Wen Qing had threatened to stab him twice with her needles already for failing to eat or sleep properly. Wuya-jie apparently preferred mimicking the icy judgment of the Lan clan instead. "Every living person has spiritual energy I can read. And I can tell when you lie to me."
The bottom dropped out of Wei Wuxian's stomach. Right. That. He'd almost managed to wholly suppress the realization that Wuya-jie could apparently read qi close enough to know all the stages of violent death. Her memories were studded with flares of emotion from people she saw without using her eyes, whether they were friend or foe. It wasn't even a matter of cultivation strength—Jiang Cheng had already told him not to expect either Wuya-jie or her brother to ever fly—but of some strange, foreign ability to see inside people as though their thoughts were plain as day.
Which meant that she'd known he didn't have a golden core from the moment they'd met.
And never said anything. Never asked, just like he hadn't asked any important questions until they were back in the cultivation world and all the strangeness was thrown into stark relief. All Wei Wuxian knew at the time was that a strange, bloodthirsty rogue took a long look at his army of ghosts, then at him, and shrugged.
"You can't tell anyone." Because if she told anyone, the whole edifice would come crashing down. Demonic cultivation, from start to finish, the result of a series of frantic improvisations in the face of his life crumbling around his ears.
"It cannot possibly be more obvious that you keep secrets." Emboldened by the presence of someone who understood her, Wuya-jie deliberately swept her eyes up and down Wei Wuxian's appearance. It was very judgmental, Wei Wuxian thought with the part of his mind that wasn't shrieking. "And I do not talk to anyone. Particularly not about my methods."
"That's not what I meant and you know it!" Wei Wuxian realized he'd shouted the instant after he'd done it, then slammed control down over his temper like a grease fire. Quieter, but no less insistent, he said, "Wuya-jie, you can't tell anyone about my qi, or anything about demonic cultivation. It goes entirely against orthodoxy, and we have so many more important things to argue about than a method that will end the war faster. After everything we've learned about Wen Ruohan—"
"I do not want to hear excuses," Wuya-jie said, which made Wei Wuxian's heart thud painfully until she went on, "because they are not necessary. Do as you wish."
"You don't care?"
"No."
And perhaps on a different morning—afternoon—Wei Wuxian would stick around to argue with her about it and really drive home the importance of secrecy. Or interrogate her about any of the dozens of questions that Empathy vision had raised. The option was there, now that they had enough of a common language to make sure all the blows landed where they intended. He could almost feel the demand for a vow of silence building behind his teeth, but they were in the middle of the Unclean Realm and a much larger war. And he had a headache in full, now, which wasn't doing wonders for anyone.
Wei Wuxian instead snatched up the half-empty liquor and left, downing the entire rest of it before he was entirely out of her sight.
To Wu Tao, of Yunmeng Jiang,
Until you sent me your much-belated reply, I had no idea you'd managed to get yourself accepted into a sect! Congratulations on your good fortune in being noticed in such a positive way, but maybe you could actually use better fortune, since I hear there is a small war in progress.
I'll make sure to include you in my prayers the next time I visit a temple, as long as the gods there are tolerant of this humble servant's graphic description of what I'd want to happen to people who might mean you harm. Such a search may take months, so don't go getting stabbed before I can talk someone important around to my line of thinking. I'd have no choice but to collapse in despair. Or charge into battle with a cleaver. It would be a little pathetic, so stay safe and ensure that doesn't have to happen.
To your sister, whose beauty outshines whose smile is who asked me about the progress I'm making: I now have two dogs. Nothing else could more quickly summarize my success in Lanling, because nothing proves "wealth" like repeatedly discovering dog hair in every meal. I'm going to either die choking on fur or by being murdered for insulting both dogs where their masters can hear. Make sure my funeral is tasteful.
Try to visit when you have the time. As much company as I have, I miss you both.
At your service as always,
Chen Hao, currently of Lanling
AN: Wei Wuxian's going to have to come back and ask some clarifying questions once he calms down.
Tomoe's nephew survived that night, though she's had no contact with him or with any other member of her family since becoming a ronin and going on the run.
Empathy is, per the wiki, "involves channeling a spirit to see their past memories. Memories are shared exactly as experienced, with an emphasis on emotional state and feeling." This version of Empathy went a little sideways due to two factors: Yukishiro being a haunted katana as opposed to a ghost in its own right, and the fact that Tomoe was trying to break the spell toward the end there. Both by removing the sword from Wei Wuxian's grasp and using the Jiang sect's Clarity bell.
Tsujigiri (literally "crossroads killing") is a possibly-apocryphal practice by samurai, who would test new blades on live human targets. Usually an unarmed passerby. During the chaos of the Sengoku Jidai, it was definitely possible to behave like this, because nobody was exactly enforcing rule of law for most of that century. Incidentally, a British merchant named Charles Richardson absolutely got killed during the 1800s for getting too close to the Satsuma daimyo's procession, though accounts differ on who's most to blame for provoking the whole thing. Look up the Namamugi Incident and decide for yourself.
The word adauchi is a type of revenge where the family of a murdered samurai seeks vengeance on the killers. Personally. The translations vary from "blood debt" to "vengeance" to "retribution." Regardless of exact wording, Tomoe is definitely doing that.
Especially important to Shinto practices, the word kegare refers to spiritual pollution/defilement, in this case resulting from contact with death (regardless of circumstances). It's not the same as the resentful energy (or yin energy) that Wei Wuxian uses to manipulate the dead, but both concepts seem to require ritual purification after exposure.
Let me know if I can help explain anything else!