His aunt was a cultivator who focused on healing and his uncle was a dead man who still walked and talked and sang him lullabies. His big brother who protected them all had carved out his golden core to give away but had once been a warrior and was now a scholar and inventor. The whole village of refugees who raised him had been skilled workers who taught him how to brew beer and grow crops and spin thread, and assured him that they would be happy as long as he was happy, so he did his best to be happy. But what Wei Sizhui wanted most of all was for his family to have the protection of a proper Sect.

He knew—he knew because his education was the best that anyone could imagine, he was sure, with all of the adults telling him their experiences and their memories of the histories they had learned in their studies—that few Sects in existence would desire to protect them, and of those, none of them had the ability to protect them. Their best protection was to remain unknown: a small refugee village in unclaimed territory.

But he had a golden core at six, and trained in inedia since he had been eight and realized how much food was set aside specifically for him. He had an ancient sword given to him by a ghost and cleansed by a necromancer, and all the training that any of them could give him. His big brother hadn't been able to demonstrate everything that he had taught, but he'd been able to teach the cultivation and Sizhui had been a first and only disciple for years. He could make his own bow and arrows and shoot them high and far and straight. He could ride his sword, renamed "Letting go of Memory", and fly loops and tricks and dodge rotten turnips that were thrown at him.

He could play a flute and write beautiful calligraphy with paper and ink he had made himself.

There hadn't been another child in the village until he had been nearly fourteen and already planning for the future.

He didn't have any friends his age, but he had direction when he left the base of the Burial Mounds and he headed to Cloud Recesses where all the young masters of the cultivation world trained to be respectable and capable before they grew to lead their own Sects.

And that was what he was determined to do: create his own Sect so that he could defend people.

He walked most of the way from Yiling to Gusu because the only travels he'd done before had been around Yiling on night hunts. He'd most gone into the old Wen territories that were still abandoned even a decade after the war and full of resentful energy although not as much as in the Burial Mounds where his big brother went to hunt and didn't allow him to go at all.

He'd never traveled towards any of the Great Sects before and he wanted to see the people and the land. Sometimes though he would fly as high as he could to see the whole world laid out below him, and then go diving back to the ground so he could explore it once more.

Caiya town was so big and overwhelming and he spent time just watching all the young masters from so many sects with their entourages, dressed in brocades and silks and shimmering layers and tried desperately not to feel ashamed of his own robes that were the finest ever woven in the Burial Mounds, but now seemed so obviously to be peasant-wear.

Appearances can be deceiving, he told himself. 'Not all beautiful people are beautiful people,' as Granny used to say, 'and not all beautiful people are beautiful either.'

But he walked slowly up the path to the Cloud Recesses, standing aside whenever a group of invited students came up behind him. He saw as the students showed their passes to the guards and were allowed in, He waited until the last group had passed before approaching the guards, one a middle aged adult and the other a younger adult close to his own age.

"I don't have a pass."

"Then you can't enter." The older guard was blunt but polite.

He nodded to acknowledge that. "Is there a place outside Cloud Recesses where I will not disturb anyone, where I can sit to study the rules carved into the wall?"

Because the wall of rules had been visible all up and down the path, but all the resting points along the way had clearly been intended as merely that: resting points for travelers to pause, rather than for a student to actually study.

The guards looked confused though. "You want to... study the rules?"

He nodded. "I was told that the 3,000 rules of Gusu Lan were necessary knowledge to anyone who might want to be a proper cultivator."

"... there are 3,500 rules."

"Even better."

"Copying the rules is a punishment, though!" the younger guard burst out. "I mean, I have a dozen copies. I could just give you one of them if you want."

His companion snorted. "Being a gate guard is also a punishment, for Jingyi here."

Sizhui bowed. "Thank you for the offer, but surely you need the copies yourself, if only to turn in to demonstration a completed punishment."

He kept his face pleasantly polite and hoped it was okay to tease. He thought it probably was, but it was hard to know with strangers.

The older guard laughed. "He's quicker than your teachers were, Jingyi! How long did it take them to realize you'd made the copies ahead of time?"

The younger guard, Jingyi, was grinning too, Sizhui was pleased to see. "Two years before they caught on. Now if I get assigned copies, they set someone to supervise. In the library pavilion, though, not out here."

"There is a resting spot over there," the other guard added, gesturing towards some trees that might vaguely form a path, "it's historically been used by petitioners hoping for entry and has a good view of the wall of rules."

There were another group of young cultivators approaching the gate, so make quick goodbyes to get out of the way.

"Thank you, sir. That is perfect. It was nice to meet you both."

It was a beautiful spot that the Lan Clan ancestors had picked for petitioners to wait in, and had a very good view of the wall of rules. He set up his portable desk and pen set and got to copying. Many of the rules, he knew already, had been taught by Xian-gege along with stories of having spent long days copying them himself when he had been Sizhui's age. But some of the rules were new and others must have slipped his big brother's memory which Xian-gege always claimed was terrible but which Sizhui often thought was a bit too good given his ability to recite all the things that Sizhui was supposed to memorize.

He made a good start on the copy by the time it got dark enough to make copying difficult. And there was plenty of space to camp.

"The night wards are about to come up and we'll close the main gate in a few minutes." The young guard had suddenly appeared. "Wait, were you planning to sleep here?"

"I… had intended to." It must have been obvious given that he had his bedroll out. "Is it permitted?"

"Yeah, but mostly it's just potential enemies who stay out here. Aren't you going to ask to come in?"

"I hope to ask after I've learned all the rules. Otherwise I might accidentally break one after I'd asked to enter."

Jingyi looked horrified. "But… no one can actually follow all the rules! Even the grandmaster sometimes shouts!"

"Oh yes, I know. But I don't want to break any by accident."

"Um…"

"My big brother, who's really more like my father, says that if I'm going to break a rule, I have to know what I'm doing and be able to recite the rule and explain why I broke it."

"That's your punishment? Just knowing what the rule is?"

"Oh no, that's a way to get out of the punishment. If the explanation is good, then I don't get punished. He says," Sizhui took a moment to straighten up, put his hands behind his back and pace authoritatively while speaking sonorously, "Sometimes it is necessary to break the rules, but to do so without knowing what they are and without knowing and accepting the consequences can only lead to disaster."

Jingyi looked like he had been struck by a revelation. "I have to meet your big brother! Let me be his disciple too! I'm not great at following the rules, at least not all of them, but I'm good at knowing why I break them. Does he have a Sect? He needs to come to the next cultivation conference and tell everyone else that sometimes breaking the rules is important!"

"Um," Sizhui said, because he liked Jingyi already, and he certainly didn't want to lie but he knew better than to tell anyone about his big brother's demonic cultivation. "Well, he hasn't been in a sect since the Sunshot campaign."

Oh," Jingyi winced. A lot of cultivation sects had died out in the Sunshot campaign. Sizhui knew he could leave it at that and Jingyi would make assumptions and that was what Sizhui was supposed to do, but he liked Jingyi and there were reasons to say more and he was almost sure that his big brother would agree.

"He went into the war as a cultivator and came out without a golden core, but he still has the knowledge so he was able to teach me the theory and direct me through the practice."

"Wait, your brother fought Wen Zhului the core crusher and survived?"

"I... don't know? He doesn't really talk about it."

"I guess I can understand that. I didn't even know anyone had survived that. Although," he said consideringly, "I guess if I lost my golden core, I'd keep it quiet too. Is that why you're a rogue cultivator and not with one of the Sects? Pretty much everyone was recruiting in those days and if your brother fought with them..."

"He stays away from all cultivators. He's really good at talismans though so he keeps the land that my aunts and uncles farm safe. And he still taught me everything I know. About cultivation at least. Can I tell you a secret?" The last words surprised even Sizhui as he said them. He hadn't intended to, at least not more than he already had but Jingyi was so nice and so blunt and he thought maybe they could be friends and he wanted that.

Lan Jingyi nodded enthusiastically. "As long as it's not something I'd have to report, I want to know!"

"I want to start my own Sect. And I want my big brother to be the grandmaster even without a golden core. Because he protects the whole village and he taught me and he deserves it!"

Lan Jingyi looked stunned.

Sizhui blushed and looked down. "I'm sorry, I sound presumption don't I?"

"No!" Jingyi still looked somewhat stunned but was starting to smile again, the smile getting larger and larger until it was a wide grin. "No, you sound amazing. Once you start your Sect, I'll have to visit to study under your grandmaster."

"It's a long time off," Sizhui said, relieved that Jingyi hadn't laughed in his face.

"Sure, but you're on your way!"

A gong sounded. It sounded very portentous happening right at that moment, but Jingyi jumped and then groaned. "And that's the curfew. I'm locked out for the night."

"I'm so sorry!"

"Eh, it's not the first time I've missed curfew. Probably won't be the last time. And I'm counting it as a rule well worth breaking if it got me you as a friend!"

It was fully dark and getting colder by now but Sizhui felt as warm as a summer day. "I hope as my friend, you'll accept some of my bedding for the night?"

"I'd would love to! And tomorrow, I'll get you guest token and ask if you can be a student with me. He'll probably say yes since having someone to study with might keep me out of trouble!"

"I would love that! Jingyi?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm really glad you were punished with gate guard duty today."

"Me too!"

years before:

Sun Tzu said, "Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak." Wei WuXian had been one of the top ranked young masters of his generation. He was extremely well educated.

When the invasion came, resentful energy swirled and bodies fell like rain, and no one counted, no one pretended to care about the individuals. The final explosion that killed the Yiling Patriarch destroyed his body utterly, and with his destruction, the wards that had made the land habitable for the Wen remnants disappeared as well. Wei WuXian had been the only person to survive being cast into the burial mounds and he was the only reason that others had survived entering it as well. With his death, even his killers were forced to flee.

They retreated and celebrated their great success, and no one went back to the burial mounds.

"No one" in this case, included A-Yuan as a child and all of his relatives who had hidden in Yiling village for the duration of the invasion. "No one" included the Yiling Patriarch who had a mountain of corpses available to him, to create a battle and lose it utterly so that he would never be attacked again.