Wei YingWei Ying is told that his new shijie is a forge the day he arrives at Lotus Pier, but he doesn’t learn what it means until more than a year later. They’re lazing around on the dock, the three of them, and he’s annoyed Jiang Cheng one too many times daydreaming out loud about the stunts he’ll do when he has a sword of his own. “Don’t you know how swords are made?” Jiang Cheng explodes at him. “Show a little more respect, and don’t talk like that in front of jiejie.”
Jiang Yanli laughs it off. “Now, now, I’d feel bad if A-Xian didn’t enjoy using a sword I’d forged.”
“Shijie, you’re really going to make me a sword?” Wei Ying asks. “I’m down by the swordsmith’s a lot—” because be it swords or bells, seeing how things are made is pretty neat— “and I’ve never seen you there. Do you do your apprenticeship somewhere else?”
An awkward silence falls. “Wei Ying,” Jiang Cheng says, finally. “Jiejie is a forge, not a swordsmith.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Ugh! You—”
“Shh, A-Cheng, it’s all right. I’ll explain.”
Jiang Cheng stands up and storms back up the dock, his footsteps echoing on the wood and fading into silence until either of them speaks again. "Sorry," says Wei Ying. "I didn't—"
“It's alright," Jiang Yanli repeats. "No one talks about this as much as they should. A-Xian, do you know how a spiritual sword is made?"
“Well, by a swordsmith…” But there’s obviously more to it than that, or she wouldn’t even need to ask. “How does it get its power?”
“By being tempered in the living qi of a golden core,” Jiang Yanli answers, simply.
“That’s. Um. Inside a person?!”
She laughs. She’s talking about being stabbed to make a sword, and she laughs. “It is, yes. Don’t worry,” she adds, seeing Wei Ying’s genuine distress. Of course he’s distressed! “I’ll be fine.”
When she was born, she explains, the sect’s astronomer determined that her spiritual energy would be uniquely suited for tempering spiritual swords. It’s very rare, to be a forge, very important. And so, every bit of her cultivation is spent towards forming a golden core that will give and give and give. Any power held back for herself, she explains, would weaken each subsequent sword, and this generation of Yunmeng Jiang is depending on her.
“Well, except for healing yourself, I guess,” says Wei Ying, because Jiang Yanli is stating this all so casually, and the alternative—
“Oh, A-Xian,” she said. “It's all done very carefully, there’s no need.”
There’s more, but she doesn't say it. There’s the doctor who redirects her meridians once a year, every spring, filling her with needles and leaving her bedbound for a month as her body learns how to compensate. There’s the way she grows weaker each time. The week Wei Ying came to Lotus Pier, Jiang Yanli could carry him and Jiang Cheng both; now, she sits by the side of the water while they swim and asks Jinzhu and Yinzhu to carry her inside when she grows too weary to walk. Whispers follow her: good that she was born to the Jiang; in Qishan, in Lanling, their forges cannot even stand, and who even knows what they do in Gusu.
Wei Ying doesn't daydream of swords, after that.
At sixteen, Jiang Yanli spends a month in Lanling to forge a sword for her betrothed, her very first one ever. Madam Yu sends both Jinzhu and Yinzhu with her and tells them they must not ever leave her side. Jiang Yanli comes back quiet and odd and so closed off from the world that Jiang Cheng and Wei Ying manage to work together for a whole evening without arguing once, to make her the soup she normally makes for them. She puts on a smile when they bring it to her and Wei Ying, morbidly curious, asks if it hurt.
“You know,” says Jiang Yanli, “you're the first one to ask me that?” She takes another careful sip of the broth—she still hasn't risen from her bed. “You've added more pepper,” she says. "I like it."
“I
told
you it wasn't the same,” says Jiang Cheng.
Jiang Yanli never answers the question.
As Jiang Cheng and Wei Ying build their golden cores it clings to them like a shadow: soon Jiang Yanli will forge swords for them, too. Wei Ying forms his core quickly, and it's the biggest argument in the Jiang household yet. “A-Li will not forge a sword for
that boy
before her own brother! I don't care how much of a prodigy he is; he can use a practice sword forever, for all I care.”
Jiang Cheng’s guilt drives him to train harder than ever and Wei Ying's accomplishments taste sour in his mouth. "It's fine, Uncle Jiang, I don't even want a sword,” he tries, and discovers as he says it that despite everything, it's still a lie. At any rate, it's precisely the wrong thing to say.
So Jiang Cheng is the first of them.
He stabs his sister himself. Wei Ying knows that much, now. He does it himself to strengthen the bond between blade and wielder, he does it himself because he is the sect heir and is trusted enough to run his sister through. He does it himself because everyone encouraged it. Jiang Yanli encouraged it.
Of course Jiang Cheng doesn't
say
this. Jiang Cheng doesn't speak a word of it, and Wei Wuxian only learns from context and whispers that Jiang Cheng, always so protective in the way that only little brothers are, ran his sister through. He names his sword Sandu, three poisons. It's a good blade, and Jiang Cheng doesn't draw it unless he absolutely has to.
For her part, Jiang Yanli doesn't treat Jiang Cheng any differently afterwards, other than that she doesn't rise from her bed for two weeks and cannot make him soup to cheer him up.
Three months later Jiang Yanli has healed as much as she will heal and it is time for the forging of Wei Ying's own sword. Jiang Fengmian has patiently quizzed him on exactly what qualities he would like in a blade but sternly instructed him to stay away from the swordsmith until it’s time for the final tempering.
“Have you decided what you'll call it?" Jiang Yanli asks him, pleasantly, distantly curious.
He hasn't. He hasn't thought of a name yet that will carry the weight of what he's about to do. “How can I name it when I don't even know what it looks like!” he protests. "Give me a hint?”
She laughs. “I haven't seen it yet either, A-Xian.”
“Haven't you ever been interested in
making
swords?" he asks. “Or wielding them? I mean, you—put so much of yourself into each one—I think I would be. If it were me.”
And suddenly the facade is gone. “But A-Xian, it isn't you.”
“But it’s only right that you—”
“A-Xian,” she says firmly. “I can't even lift a sword, what do you expect me to do?”
There's something raw and real there, something she never shows any of them. “Shijie, if you don't want to forge me a sword—" He's lucky to have been given a chance to come this far, he knows. He can live without a sword, for his shijie.
“I
do
want to, A-Xian. I want to be a forge for you, and for A-Cheng, and for Jin-gongzi, and—can’t I want, and want, and regret it all the same?”
Jiang Yanli's presence at once brightens the swordsmith's workshop and makes it foreign. The ritual clothes she's wearing—at a glance, a high-waisted ruqun, but the skirts are split up the middle from hem to chest for ease of access—lend a mystic air, and Wei Ying, who has spent many an afternoon both watching the swordsmith work and tinkering with his own projects, somehow doesn’t know where anything is anymore, doesn’t know which way to turn.
Jinzhu and Yinzhu are here to hold Jiang Yanli steady. Jiang Fengmian places an ordinary sword into Wei Ying’s hands. “Place the blade within the forge,” the swordsmith instructs. “Feed it your own spiritual power until you feel it balance.”
“Have you decided what you’ll call it?” asks Jiang Fengmian.
“No...I have a few ideas. Is that alright?”
He’s not really asking about the name, but it has to be alright. Jiang Yanli is calmly waiting to be impaled and Jinzhu and Yinzhu, who never let Wei Ying get away with anything, are here to hold her down, and her own father is calmly chatting as if the process is irrelevant.
Although—
Although he isn’t looking at her.
Wei Ying swallows. “I’m ready,” he says.
Jiang Yanli, still standing, parts the skirts over her lower abdomen, forming a diamond with her thumbs and fingers to point the way to her dantian. There’s an ugly red scar there, for all she’d said she had healed.
She nods, and closes her eyes.
He thrusts.
Practice dummies are not so soft, he thinks, as the blade slides in, as the blood wets the fabric of her skirts, as his shijie wrenches her face and lets out a soft cry despite her clear attempt to hold it back. The back of her dress is clean; the blade doesn't go through her. It buries itself in her core, so hot he can feel it. Can feel her power pouring into the blade, and belatedly remembers that he's supposed to be feeding it his own spiritual power, too.
Finally he draws it out, and Jiang Yanli collapses in a faint into Yinzhu's arms while Jinzhu quickly bandages her. Wei Ying wipes the blade clean. Jiang Yanli, he thinks, might have the strongest core of them all, and she will never know its power for herself.
“What name shall I have engraved?” asks Jiang Fengmian, as Wei Ying passes his sword to him.
The workshop smells only of blood and his shijie lies nearly lifeless, and he has a sword. Not one of the names he had considered feels sufficient. “Call it whatever,” he mutters.
Later, when she hears of it, Jiang Yanli laughs.