E. Hyde's Archives

There you are!” “There you are!”

The Lan disciples formed a defensive line with Sizhui at the center. It only made Jingyi’s absence more apparent. “Where is he?” Jin Ling demanded. “Where’s Lan Jingyi?”

“It’s Lan sect business,” said Sizhui, and Jin Ling scowled. All he wanted to know was—

“Did you leave him there? Did you just—leave him at the Burial Mounds?”

“We did, but, Jin Ling—”

“With everything else that happened,” another disciple began.

“Don’t give me that! I saw what happened. Lan Jingyi, he—he was growing roots into the ground, he was sprouting leaves and vines, he—I don’t know what kind of curse that was, but he—” Memories, too recent memories, flashed through Jin Ling’s mind. His aunt with a dagger to her chest, his uncle with a sword through his. Wei Wuxian, stabbed with a sword that Jin Ling put there himself. But Jingyi shouldn’t have had anything to do with any of this. “Just tell me—is he dead? Is Lan Jingyi dead?”

Sizhui blinked. “No! He’s not dead, he’s definitely not dead, why would you think—?” He stopped. Looked back at the temple behind them. Took a deep breath. “Jin Ling, I promise, Jingyi isn’t dead. Maybe...maybe you should come with us after all. It’s hard to explain. We’ll show you.”

The Burial Mounds no longer swarmed with corpses. They were barren, dead, and empty—all but for the space around the entrance to the cave, which swarmed with vibrant green. Literally swarmed. The vines didn’t just sit there, like a plant ought to, but writhed about, shivering in something akin to excitement as the Lans and Jin Ling stepped into view. Jin Ling hesitated, but all the Lan disciples kept on, calm and straight, as if this wasn’t the thing that had just devoured—or tried to devour, if Sizhui had been telling the truth—their friend.

Well, if they kept going, Jin Ling had to, too.

Then one of the vines stretched out, coiled itself around Sizhui’s waist, and pulled him out of the safety of the group. Sizhui didn’t cry out, he...laughed? Jin Ling reached for Suihua and ran after. He’d seen that plant tear corpses limb from limb during the siege, and even if it had seemed like it was protecting them then...there was the matter of Jingyi. How could Sizhui be so complacent?

Another vine stopped him in his tracks, coiling tight, holding his sword arm uselessly against his chest. Instead of pulling him in, like Sizhui, it spun him around and shoved him, as if to push him down the mountain. But it was a weak shove, almost no more than a playful push. “Come on, don’t be like that,” Sizhui urged. “Jin Ling was worried about you.” A pause. Jin Ling struggled to turn around—Sizhui was obviously talking to Jingyi, but where was he?—but couldn’t, still held tight. “No, really! He was! I know it shouldn’t have been my decision to tell him, but look...an awful lot happened. I didn’t want him to spend the next six weeks thinking you were dead.”

The vines loosened. Jin Ling spun around. And still, no sign of Jingyi. He looked from Sizhui, to the plant, to the shadowed entrance of the cave beyond. “Where is he? Weren’t you talking to Jingyi just now?”

The vine drew back, then reached out a single tendril and poked him in the middle of the forehead. “Jin Ling...this is Jingyi. Lan Jingyi isn’t human.”

…

After all the revelations of the past few days, this, this utter ridiculousness—well, why not? Still, as a matter of principle, Jin Ling demanded, “Prove it!”

The vine poked his forehead again, then another one wrapped around his hand and tugged him forward. That behavior was almost convincing enough by itself. And then he thought back to when they were tied up inside the cave.

Jingyi was afraid. They’d all been afraid, even Jin Ling, who by that point was 90% certain that Wei Wuxian did not intend to kill them—after all, someone had kidnapped them, and someone still wanted them dead. But Jingyi was terrified , and he was making even less sense than usual. “You guys, I can’t move!” he’d wailed. None of them could; their bonds were tied tight. But the other Lans all agreed this was a disaster and did their best to shift Jingyi’s position, even a little bit, to no success. “I don’t want to grow here,” Jingyi had whispered. “They say you can’t stick a shovel in the Burial Mounds without hitting old bones, I don’t want to—I don’t want my roots—”

Eventually, he’d grown quiet, then still. Jin Ling assumed he’d fainted, until Wen Ning cut them free and Jin Ling saw green tendrils twisted around Jingyi’s pale form, rooted to the ground—but by then far too much was happening to ask any questions.

Okay, so in retrospect, the most unbelievable part was the fact that he hadn’t figured it out sooner.

Still— Jingyi? Jin Ling would much sooner believe that Sizhui was inhuman, or, hell, any of the other Lans. He’d have easily said—not within Jingyi’s earshot, of course—that Jingyi was the most human of the whole sect. “How is Lan Jingyi a—” He paused. “Plant...demon?”

Every vine Jin Ling could see—and that was quite a few of them—moved in a way that he could only call an exasperated shrug. The one nearest him—besides the one still wrapped around his hand—started scribbling something on the dusty ground. “Young Mistress Jin,” it wrote in perfect imitation of Jingyi’s hand—not a messy scrawl, as Jin Ling had once predicted; Jingyi was still a Lan after all and certain things were unavoidable. But it did have its distinctive traits to be sure. “You can still talk to me, I’m right here.”

Right here, to be sure, but what exactly was Jin Ling supposed to look at when he spoke? These vines were everywhere!

“Also, not a demon,” Jingyi continued writing.

“As far as we’ve ever been able to tell,” Sizhui explained, “he’s just a plant.”

“That makes no sense whatsoever,” Jin Ling concluded.

“Look,” the plant began to write, and then stopped. It wriggled around in what could only be frustration, then tapped Sizhui’s hands in an odd sort of way.

“He can sign faster than he can write,” Sizhui explained. “I’ll translate.” He paused. “Jingyi says, look, I don’t even know where I came from, so can we skip that part and address the fact that I’m going to be stuck here for six weeks? In the Burial Mounds? Those corpses aren’t going to stay away forever, you know!” As Sizhui translated, the vines became more and more agitated, and finally Sizhui interrupted.

“Jingyi, calm down,” he urged. “We’re not going to leave you here alone. Senior Wen can stay here with you for as long as you need—I told him to follow us, and he’s probably already here somewhere.”

Sizhui had invited the Ghost General, and hadn’t told Jin Ling? Not, Jin Ling supposed, that he could blame him. And if Wen Ning stayed here, and thus away from him, for that long—well, that was fine.

Behind them, whispers started up. — The Ghost General? Here?—Shh, don’t you remember how he protected us?—Hanguang-jun isn’t here to keep him in check this time, what if he— The other Lan juniors, who had caught up to where the others had been carried, fell silent as Sizhui turned around to face them. “Hanguang-jun seemed. Um. Too busy, to come check on you,” one of them spoke up.

“Busy with Senior Wei,” Sizhui explained. “And Zewu-jun...probably won’t come either. An awful lot happened—yes, yes, Jingyi, we’ll tell you.”

“Grandmaster Lan will probably come see you soon, after business is attended to. We’ll…” they looked amongst each other hesitantly. “We’ll go back home and tell your moms what happened?”

Sizhui nodded. “Good idea.”

“Hang on, hang on.” Jin Ling was trying to keep up. Moms, plural? More weird plants? And Lan Qiren, willingly returning to the Burial Mounds? And— “Why do you have to stay here for six weeks?” He asked. “I get that you’re—this.” He didn’t get it, not at all, but he could accept it. “But you looked human before, can’t you just—change back?”

“Jingyi, that’s not very nice, I’m not going to translate that,” said Sizhui, only for another disciple to say, “He said he really wishes he could roll his eyes right now.”

“But the answer is,” said Sizhui, “that Jingyi can change back, and that’s how long it takes. Six weeks, give or take, to grow a body.” Sizhui shrugged. “Like I said, he really is just a plant. There aren’t any magic spells here, and fruit takes time to grow.”

...fruit.

“Lan Jingyi.”

Jin Ling nearly jumped at the sound of the soft, toneless voice behind him. Wen Ning was already here? How long had he been there? “A-Yuan explained...somewhat. I can stay here for as long as you need me.” He paused. “But A-Yuan didn’t say...ah, that is, Lan Jingyi…”

Jin Ling took pity on the Ghost General. Almost. “You can’t just leave us with ‘I don’t know where I came from.’ I mean—I don’t remember my parents. Sizhui doesn’t remember his parents. That’s normal. Your situation—it’s a little different!”

Sizhui coughed. “Yes, well—Jingyi? Is it alright, if I tell what I know?”

The vines didn’t answer. They were poking and prodding at the Ghost General who, in turn, seemed like he was attempting to examine Jingyi’s leaves and coiling tendrils while avoiding actually touching them. But Wen Ning nodded, and Jingyi didn’t move to counter him, and the other Lan disciples gathered close like they were about to join in the telling. Jingyi just—slumped, an almost visible sigh, and scrawled, “Sizhui has no embarrassing childhood stories—unfair,” in the dust before allowing Lan Sizhui to begin the tale.

“Well,” Sizhui began, “thirteen years ago—” He paused, as if considering something he hadn’t thought of before, and Jin Ling wondered if Wei Wuxian was going to figure into this tale as well. Thirteen years couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? “Thirteen years ago, one of our sect’s cultivators brought back a strange plant he had encountered while night-hunting, and gave it into the care of the sect’s herbalists for further study…”

Thirteen years ago, Lan Yue woke before dawn and began her usual task of tending to the garden in the back mountain where the Gusu Lan sect grew their medicinal plants, and was greeted by a weed that seemed to have sprouted and grown up overnight. Her first instinct was to grab it by the center stem and uproot it straight away. This certainly was nothing she, nor her master, had planted here.

Lan Yue pulled. The weed pulled back. Lan Yue came to her senses, and stopped to consider. This was far too large to have grown from nothing overnight. It didn’t crowd her precious herbs, but was planted a clear distance away. It possessed some semblance of spiritual power, and bore traces of foreign soil around its roots—which sat far too close to the surface. If the thing hadn’t been able to pull back, it would have come out just like that.

So. Someone had left this here on purpose, and in a hurry.

She watered the other plants, checked for pests, satisfied herself that all her regular morning duties were taken care of, then returned to the garden’s strange visitor. The vines drew away from her touch, but at her “shh, I won’t pull you out, I just want to get to know you,” they stilled. Fascinating.

Something had happened, even after the great siege, even after Wei Wuxian’s death. The leaders of the sect were busy, distracted, constantly. Weeks passed before Lan Yue could get any answers about the strange little weed, and in that time, she grew attached. She transplanted it into her own personal garden, and invited her shijie—always better with the magical and spiritual aspects of gardening—to examine it with her, and by the time Zewu-jun came in person to explain the situation to them, they, in reality, probably understood it better than he did.

“It was found on a night-hunt,” Zewu-jun explained. “Unrelated to the hunt, but the one who found it thought it a curiosity. I will leave its fate in your hands.”

“Sect Leader,” Wu Qiufeng bowed respectfully. “Surely there’s more to it than that? This plant—I can’t work out what it was created for , but it’s not natural, and it doesn't seem to be demonic, either. Someone created this. Sir, if there's any more information you can give us—"

"I'm afraid not," said Zewu-jun.

Can't, or won't? Lan Yue wondered, but of course she didn't ask that. "It bore traces of grave soil," she said. "But no resentment, no evil. It has a personality. ” She’d seen plants that could move on their own before, of course, but not like this.

Zewu-jun closed his eyes, and nodded, as if none of this surprised him. Lan Yue recited rules in her head and tried to convince herself that whatever he wasn’t telling her, he must have a good reason for it, and that the best way to learn more about this plant was to make sure she didn’t jeopardize her position taking care of it, so she could figure it out herself.

Three years later, Lan Yue still had no guesses as to the strange plant’s purpose, other than, perhaps, to fill all the space in her garden. Their garden. Wu Qiufeng lived with her now. They’d joked that the plant was their child, and moved in together to better care for it, and only then had they finally realized they had other reasons for living together, too.

Calling it a child was more than a joke, too. It went beyond just having a personality. The plant could understand speech, and if it couldn’t talk back, it could definitely express opinions. Qiufeng had mused about the possibility of finding a way for it to communicate with them, but, Lan Yue thought, it could communicate well enough on its own.

“Oh, A-Yue,” Qiufeng called across the room, looking up from her reading. “Hanguang-jun plans to visit tomorrow.”

Lan Yue almost spat out her tea. Hanguang-jun? Visiting them? Rare enough for any male cultivator to come to this part of the Cloud Recesses, but Hanguang-jun? “Didn’t he just come out of seclusion? Why visit us, of all people?”

“Apparently Zewu-jun mentioned our little experiment, and he was curious. He entered seclusion before it showed up, you know, so he’s never seen it.”

She supposed that was true. Their ‘little experiment,’ as Qiufeng liked to call it, was a well-known curiosity by now, and most members of the sect had stopped by to see it at least once. Still—for Hanguang-jun to prioritize this, of all things?

When he arrived, though, he didn’t come alone. A young boy, perhaps six or seven years old, followed quietly beside him. The boy’s eyes widened as he took in the sight of the vines spread out across the whole yard. “It’s big!” he exclaimed. “You didn’t tell me it was this big!”

“I had not seen it,” answered Hanguang-jun.

What happened next surprised everyone. The “little experiment,” which was by no means little, lifted its vines—all of them—and surged towards the boy. “No, wait! Stop!” Lan Yue yelled as the vines lifted the boy into the air, coiled all around him, prodded him all over with tendrils and leaves, finally pulling him in and burying him in a nest of stems and vines that Lan Yue knew from experience she’d have no way to break through. Even Hanguang-jun, well known for his stoic demeanor, looked alarmed...though not nearly as alarmed as Lan Yue would have expected.

“Plant, listen to me. That is a human child, Plant, let him go.” Qiufeng’s demands were met by only the very slightest loosening of the nest...and an outpouring of giggles from the boy. He...liked it?

“Hanguang-jun, I’m sorry, I didn’t know it would do this,” Lan Yue apologized. “It’s usually much more shy around strangers, but it’s never met a child before, it must have been curious…” But that enthusiasm seemed like more than curiosity. She frowned.

Hanguang-jun said, “My son also came to the Cloud Recesses three years ago.”

“Are you—” Lan Yue blinked. The boy was Hanguang-jun’s son? Hanguang-jun had a son? Who wasn’t born in the Cloud Recesses? “Are you saying they knew each other before? How? ” But Hanguang-jun deflected her questions, just as Zewu-jun had all those years ago.

The adults fell into silence, while the high-pitched tilt of Lan Yuan’s voice regaled the plant with a tale of being similarly buried in a pile of Hanguang-jun’s pet rabbits. “Do you know what a rabbit is, little plant?” Maybe it was some previous acquaintance, maybe it was childhood innocence, but the boy appeared to have no trouble accepting the plant as sentient.

Its leaves quivered in the gesture that Lan Yue and Qiufeng recognzed as yes , but of course, the boy wouldn’t know that. “Wild rabbits come to our garden quite often,” said Qiufeng. “Little Plant is very good at keeping them away from the vegetables.”

Finally, as they made to leave, Hanguang-jun spoke up once more. “A-Yuan is learning to read and write,” he said. “It is unconventional, but if I bring him here, they may study together.”

Lan Yue blinked after them as they left. “He knows something. He definitely knows something.” Even those cultivators who had accepted that the plant understood human speech—and not all did—thought of it as something like the two women’s pet, not a child. Lan Yue herself was still prepared to think of it as a pet, because to believe more...surely that would only be setting herself up for disappointment. “Shijie, do you think he could be the one who brought it back?”

Qiufeng gave her a look that plainly said, isn’t it obvious? “I think,” she said, “if he could tell us more, he would.”

“Wait,” said Jin Ling. “Wait. You spent the first three years of your life just—growing in the garden like a tomato? Are those really the people you call your moms?”

At one point, Jin Ling might have found the idea of having two moms a little weird. Or he might have called it weird, and secretly been a little envious. “Teacher Lan Yue and Teacher Wu are the best herbalists in our sect!” the smallest Lan spoke up. “They have never treated Jingyi-shixiong like a tomato!”

“No, of course they haven’t,” Sizhui laughed. “And speaking of them, you should return to the Cloud Recesses. They’ll want to know where Jingyi is.”

“You’re staying, shixiong? Aren’t you scared to be here, too?”

Sizhui paused. “People used to live here, you know. When I think of it like that...it’s not too frightening.” The other Lan juniors looked anxiously to one another, and even Jin Ling paused at that. He was just saying that for Jingyi’s benefit, right?

Jingyi tapped the smallest disciple’s hand. “Right! We’ll tell them!” he promised, and they mounted their swords and departed, leaving Sizhui, Jin Ling, and Wen Ning alone with Jingyi. “Jingyi says he doesn’t even know if those were the first three years of his life, anyway,” Sizhui picked up from where they’d left off. “After all, by the time he started learning to read and write, he was definitely more mature than a toddler. I remember back then too,” Sizhui went on. “As soon as Jingyi began learning how to use words, he would not stop talking. Writing. It wasn’t long before he started talking about growing a body, but we all thought he was just dreaming…”

“It’s a pretty big jump from a weird plant in someone’s vegetable garden, to a full member of the clan with a forehead ribbon and everything,” mused Jin Ling.

“That happened after he had a body,” said Sizhui. “And not the first one, either.” He paused, as the vine wrapping around his arm and hand twisted and spelled out another complex phrase, then laughed. “Jingyi says that for a while he thought the ribbon came from Zewu-jun, and that Zewu-jun had to be his real father. Because of the name, overgrowth?”

Jin Ling smiled distractedly, but he was still stuck on Sizhui’s words from a moment earlier. “Not the first...body,” he repeated. And Jingyi was stuck here because he was growing a new body, and—

And he’d had one. Jin Ling had been trying so hard to accept this crazy mess of vines as his...okay, yes, friend, that he hadn’t stopped to ask what had happened to it. Filled with a sudden, morbid curiosity, Jin Ling pulled away and ran for the cave.

“Jin Ling? Jin Ling, wait, stop!”

Jingyi was already there, the vines were growing from in there. They rose up in front of him like a fence, and Jin Ling, knowing full well that Jingyi could stop him if he really wanted to, pushed forward. “I just want to see,” he insisted. “I just need—”

“Jin Ling, even his moms don’t like to see it.” Sizhui caught up to him, placed a hand on his shoulder. “You don’t need—”

“I do!” He took a deep breath. “It’s not like he’s dead. It’s not like—a dead body.”

“Young Master Jin,” Wen Ning spoke up from behind, and Jin Ling shuddered.

“I didn’t mean—”

“I think I know what you meant,” said Wen Ning. “But if I understand correctly, Young Master Lan is just...like this. He didn’t take root here for your sake.”

“No, that’s not…” But wasn’t it? Wen Ning, standing there with a hole through his chest, was one living dead body too many; Jin Ling didn’t know why he so needed to see another.

“Jingyi’s bodies are temporary, Jin Ling,” said Sizhui. “And this is only a few weeks before he’d normally have started growing a new one, anyway. The only reason he was so reluctant was the location.”

“Then why did it happen?”

“We were tied up,” Sizhui said, simply. “If he holds still too long, he takes root. It just happens.”

The wall of vines shrugged in agreement, as if to say well, what can you do? And then, inexplicably, they parted. “Well, look at that,” said Jin Ling. “All that work convincing me I don’t need to see, and now he’s letting me in.” Sizhui smiled. And Jingyi lifted a single vine, and placed it in Jin Ling’s open hand.

Jin Ling followed the vine inward. He didn’t need to hold it to know the way; all the vines converged on that space in the center of the now-ruined array, where all of them had been tied up together. Here in the dim light, Jingyi took on a different tone: in the sunlight, he’d been thriving with bright green life, but now he twisted around like grey cemetary undergrowth. Jin Ling reminded himself that those vines had all pushed their way out to the sun as soon as they were able, reminded himself that Jingyi had been as afraid as anyone to remain here.

The vines didn’t part, exactly, from the place they grew. But they spread themselves out enough that Jin Ling could step between them and see—

The body of Lan Jingyi. What was left of it.

Jin Ling had seen decaying flesh. Okay, so he’d seen it in the context of fighting and suppressing corpses. He’d never actually seen a mundane dead body left out to rot. But regardless, he knew enough to say this wasn’t that. Waxy skin collapsed in patches like a hollow shell, his whole form misshapen and flattened, slime and rot discoloring what was left as new growth pushed its way out from—mostly the region where his core would have been, but really, everywhere. One vine grew out of his mouth. Another from his left ear. What was left of his face...did not resemble a face, very much, but Jin Ling could still see Jingyi in it and that was—

Abruptly, he realized just how very tightly he was gripping the vine in his hand. “Jingyi,” he whispered. “Lan Jingyi, please tell me that isn’t you.” But it was—Jin Ling had been sitting right beside him, Jingyi had been warm flesh and blood, not—not some decaying melon—

“Your ribbon,” he said suddenly. “Your ribbon’s gone.” Belatedly, he felt the closeness of the other vines, surrounding him from all sides, caging him, and—panic. This wasn’t Jingyi at all! Sizhui had been fooled, all the Lans had been fooled for years, no matter how little sense that made this was still all wrong ...until the net of vines and leaves pulled him back out into the sunlight and he saw the ribbon tied around the vine that had been his guide all along.

“You are never allowed to make fun of me for being afraid of ghosts again, Young Mistress Jin.”

It felt like they were sitting side by side. Really, Jingyi was all around him, under him, cradling him and poking and teasing him in a way both intimately familiar and utterly alien. Sizhui had given them some space to themselves—he was off conversing with Wen Ning again, for some reason—and Jingyi’s writing was slower to follow, but more personal.

“How the hell are you afraid of ghosts?” Jin Ling retorted. “You’re scarier than anything.” He was probably going to regret saying that.

“They’re not what people are supposed to be! It weirds me out, okay?”

“...yeah, that’s fair, I guess.”

A vine scribbled at the ground, then another brushed the words away. Jingyi repeated this process several times before letting Jin Ling see what he’d written. “I don’t know if I should have let you see, so soon after finding out. I know people don’t like it. But it’s just an old shell. Not me.”

Jin Ling could hardly say it was fine, or that it hadn’t bothered him, or even that he could get used to it. He settled on, “Seeing it was better than not seeing it.” Which he thought was, probably, true.

“I’ll make my next body look the same this time, if that helps. You’re not the only new friend I’ve made.”

“Hold on, hold on. Your bodies don’t all look the same?”

“My first body looked like a little kid! One looked like a girl! Of course they don’t!”

“Wait, a girl?”

“Sizhui was curious about stuff, okay? Not that anything happened, because Grandmaster Qiren confined me to the female section of the Cloud Recesses until I took root again, but I mean—they grow like fruit. Of course they’re not all the same.”

It was probably a good thing that Jingyi was writing instead of talking, because this was already far too much to keep up with. “Lan Qiren knows about all this?” he settled on, because that was far less of a stretch than Sizhui being curious about stuff.

“Hah! Grandmaster Qiren was the first one to see what you just saw. There’s a funny story there…”

“Do I really want to know?”

“Actually, yeah, you do, trust me on this. I just wish I could tell you without writing it all down.”

With multiple vines scratching in the dirt, Jingyi actually was able to write incredibly quickly; still, it wasn’t as fast-paced as his normal speech. “Well, sometime you can teach me that signing thing you do with Sizhui, then.”

Jingyi had already started writing his tale, and didn’t stop to acknowledge this statement except for a brief tightening of the vines that held Jin Ling, what he felt certain must be excitement. “Picture this: a small human child, perhaps seven or eight years old, loose, unkempt hair, wearing only a single layer and wearing it improperly at that, no forehead ribbon, running into the Library Pavilion. ‘I did it!’ he shouts. ‘I’m here! I’m ready to learn things like the other children!’

“Well! Grandmaster Qiren happened to be there, and he threw a fit! The impropriety! He ordered me, then and there, to stand on one hand and copy the rules until I knew them by heart. I don’t think he actually expected me to be able to, but I didn’t realize that balancing on one hand was supposed to be difficult for humans, so, I just did what he asked. I figured that was the first step to being like A-Yuan and the other kids he kept talking about. Didn’t realize it would have the opposite effect. After a few hours of holding still copying, I took root right then and there.”

“You turned back into this inside the library pavilion?”

“Straight down through the floorboards!”

“And Old Man Qiren—?”

“Thought I was some sort of demon that had gotten past the wards. Meanwhile, my moms were panicking because the plant that was growing in their garden had abruptly died—I hadn’t told them what I was trying to do because I didn’t know if it would work. Eventually they figured things out. I spent months in the library before I managed to cultivate a second body and I swear Grandmaster Qiren lectured me the whole time. But he named me, too, so…”

“You know what,” Jin Ling mused. “None of this sounds like not knowing where you came from.” Jin Ling had known exactly where he’d come from, had never been allowed to forget it, but his family, once the lies were peeled away, was no greater than Jingyi’s.

“I guess,” Jingyi wrote. “Still. It would be nice to know. Am I some unknown cultivator’s abandoned experiment? An unknown type of yao?”

“Jingyi! Jingyi, listen to this!” Sizhui, who had been standing at a distance with Wen Ning, raced up to them, and glanced down at the most recent writing on the ground. “Oh! Actually, it’s about that—Senior Wen, come here, it’s okay—Jingyi, Wen Ning remembers something. It might be—Jingyi, he might know where you came from.”

The entire plant froze still. Then, every vine and leaf turned towards Wen Ning, dumping Jin Ling unceremoneously to the ground in the process. But he almost couldn’t blame Jingyi, he’d gotten caught up in the story enough that he was eager for answers, too. “Um,” Wen Ning began. “You see, Young Master Lan, when he lived here, Young Master Wei tried to grow many things…”

No way. No way, and yet, there was never any other possibility, was there? Everything always came down to Wei Wuxian, didn’t it?

“There was—” Wen Ning glanced sideways at Sizhui. “There was a child living at the Wen settlement, just a toddler. Young Master Wei used to bury him in the dirt. He joked it would help him grow bigger and stronger.”

Jingyi suddenly became very agitated, and Sizhui, the only one who could understand him, burst out laughing. “ No, Jingyi,” he said. “The Yiling Patriarch did not transform a human child into whatever weird plant thing you are. Does that really sound like something Senior Wei would do?” He paused. “Okay. Okay, that’s fair, but no. Listen to the rest of Wen Ning’s story.”

“Young Master Wei didn’t do anything to—” Wen Ning glanced at Sizhui again, as if he had to confirm some detail. “—to the Wen boy. He would tell him he’d grow a whole garden of siblings for him, so he’d always have friends to play with and he’d never be lonely. We all thought he was joking but, Young Master Lan, something did start growing there. And it had leaves just like yours.”

One hesitant vine stretched out, tentatively inching its way towards Wen Ning. It wrote on the ground, speaking to him directly. “Ghost General, this is true?”

“I don’t...I don’t know, ” said Wen Ning. “What grew back then was small, and it didn’t move other than to follow the sun, but, um, I did study botany. I know you’re the same kind of plant. Um. You should ask Young Master Wei, when you can, but I really do think…”

Jingyi was signing to Sizhui almost frantically now. “Hold on, hold on!” Sizhui stopped him. “Jin Ling and Senior Wen deserve to be part of this conversation too, so slow down—yes, I will tell them everything you said, just watch me.”

“No, you—you don’t have to,” said Jin Ling.

“He is both very excited and mortifyingly embarrassed at the thought of explaining all this to Senior Wei,” said Sizhui. “And that was without the possibility that he might be his—wait. Hold on. What did you say?” He paused. “No, it’s not a stupid question, I just don’t know…” Sizhui turned to Wen Ning. “Does that make Wei Wuxian his dad?”

For someone who was supposed to be expressionless, Wen Ning’s face looked remarkably panicked. “Um, I, I really don’t know? You should ask him…”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said Sizhui. “He won’t start treating you like an experiment just because you were, well...an experiment…”

“Actually,” said Wen Ning, “he might. Speaking from experience.”

“Ghost General, do you really think that’s helping?” Jin Ling demanded. “You said he was supposed to be a sibling for that kid, of course Wei Wuxian is still going to see him as a person.” He broke off as an uncomfortable thought occurred to him. “I guess...that kid was a Wen, so...he must be dead now.” Sizhui’s eyes widened, while Jingyi seemed to wilt all at once. “I guess that’s...too bad,” Jin Ling concluded, awkwardly.

“Jin Ling,” Sizhui began, hesitantly. “It’s too bad...even though he was a Wen?”

“Well—yes, alright?” Jin Ling wasn’t remotely ready to approach any grand decision about who was right, and who was wrong, across history. The Ghost General was a Wen, and he’d killed Jin Ling’s father. He’d also saved Jin Ling’s life. But regardless of all that— “It’s not like a toddler had anything to do with the destruction of Lotus Pier, or—or any of that.”

Taking a deep breath, Sizhui said, “It was me.”

“...what?”

“That toddler, that was me. I don’t remember all the details—I just started to remember, well, today, really. I guess—well, I suppose Hanguang-jun must have brought us back together.”

Finally, after everything, Jin Ling didn’t know what to say. Sizhui, a Wen?

Jingyi coiled around him, tapped his shoulder. Jin Ling, are you okay? He wasn’t sure how he was so sure that was what Jingyi had asked, especially when it was so out of character. “So that makes you siblings, then?” He tried to speak casually, tried to smile. “Jingyi, you know where you came from and you have a brother.”

“Jin Ling…”

“Didn’t I say I couldn’t blame a toddler for stuff that happened before either of us were born, do I need to say it again? I’m happy for you. I really am!” he added, at Sizhui’s doubtful look. “It’s just—”

“We both found family on the day you lost a piece of yours,” said Sizhui. Dammit, he had no right to be so perceptive. “Jin Ling, we wouldn’t have told you any of this if we wanted to use it to push you away. Besides—new family—you know that includes you, don’t you?”

“What...what do you mean?”

Jingyi wrote plainly on the ground for all to see. “Isn’t Wei Wuxian your uncle?”

Was he? Wei Wuxian wasn’t really his mother's brother, and he had been expelled from the Jiang sect long ago. But...maybe he shouldn’t have been, after everything Jin Ling had learned.

“That might make us cousins,” Jingyi added helpfully, as if his point could have been missed.

Jin Ling wasn’t sure that he was ready to call Wei Wuxian “uncle.” But these two, his cousins? A secret Wen and a weird, sentient plant?

“I suppose it just might,” he said.