Chapter Text
Something that isn’t widely known about spirits – resentful or otherwise – is that they are able to recognize their kin. If the spirit of Lan An was placed in a room full of Lan disciples, he could easily determine who carried his blood. This fact wasn’t something new, but yet undiscovered as one needed to be a spirit to converse with other spirits.
The Lan sect had their methods of conversing with the dead – Inquiry – but rarely was that method used for large scale information gathering about what spirits were capable of. Spirits were spoken to, then almost immediately helped back into the reincarnation cycle. Likely, the Lan sect would have long found out more about the nature of spirits if they did not view speaking with spirits longer than necessary as impeding their goal of helping them find rest and pushing them into their next lives.
And it wasn’t just immediate family that spirits were able to detect, however the range of detection shortened depending on how far back or far forward a spirit was looking – and depended on the strength of the spirit before they died.
Wives are able to recognize their husbands, their mothers- and fathers-in-law, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Children are able to recognize their parents – even if they share no blood – but beyond their own children, beyond blood ties, they cannot recognize anyone else.
It is said that when one is on the verge of life and death, when death has come to reap another soul, that one is able to see their loved ones – and despite being a myth, it is exactly what is happening.
When a soul is on the brink of death, when a portion of their soul is within the reaper’s grasp, the ability to see familiar spirits is opened to them. Most do not recover from the reaper’s grasp and if they do, they think what they saw were simply illusions – something their brains fabricated to make their transition to death more peaceful. Some claim to see the spirits belonging to great beings, former Sect Leaders, deities, Gods. Some claim to see darkness, to not feel anything around them, to simply have been within a pool of darkness, an endless abyss.
When one sees nothing, sees darkness surrounding them, it is likely that the spirits and souls that they are expecting to see simply have not arrived yet.
A soul falling into the hands of death sends out a shockwave, alerting all their possible relatives, but there is not a one hundred percent guarantee that the spirits will be able to arrive in time to greet them or to see them off. This is typically the reason for why familiar spirits will stick within certain ranges of their loved ones – mothers and fathers hovering around their children, children following their parents, Sect Leaders and founders remaining within their sects and watching their descendants.
There is, however, a reason a spirit may be unable to follow their target of choice.
Entrapment.
Spirits, if their death happened with certain requirements met, will be unable to leave their location of death until they are set free. Some choose to kill their enemies and trap their souls in arrays – then capturing the soul and holding it captive – some choose to sacrifice individuals to resentful beings.
And some choose to pursue the option Wen Chao has chosen.
***
Two spirits reside in the Burial Mounds.
Two trapped spirits reside in the Burial Mounds, unable to break through the resentment that stands between them and the rest of the cultivation world – as well as ancient barrier arrays created by the five sects designed to keep everything in and preventing anything from coming out.
Two trapped spirits, murdered by people who were supposed to be their allies, who were supposed to be their friends, comrades, who were supposed to be people they could trust .
While the rest of the cultivation world, and the other sects, may think that they died in a night hunt gone wrong – that the strong pair had finally found a beast they were unable to take down. Maybe they thought the pair simply got in over their heads, took on something they should have called help for, that the two rogue cultivators should have known to not take on as large of a beast without the help of a great sect. That their deaths were a prime example of why one should rely on the great sects, why one should always choose to default to a great sect, or to a minor sect under the protection of a great sect.
Maybe some celebrated their deaths, maybe some mourned, maybe some simply chose to use their deaths to their advantage – whether to tarnish their names, their former sects and masters, a horror tale to tell around the fire, a bedtime story to scare their children into remaining loyal to their sects.
The two spirits didn’t know how much time had passed since their murders. Had it been a year? Five? Ten?
Their answer came in the form of a shockwave, coming from far too close to them for their liking.
The pair ran through the Burial Mounds, rushing towards the slowly pulsing heartbeat they felt echoing throughout both their beings. They both shared concerned glances, disbelief as to who they were running towards.
For both of them to receive the shockwave, to both be feeling the same heartbeat, it could only mean they were running towards–
The pair stopped, frozen, unable to move from the sight in front of them.
Their son. Their son .
Ragged labored breaths came from his broken and beaten body, blood pooling around him from multiple cuts and wounds scattering across his entire body. His eyes were open, tears falling down the sides of his face as his hands fisted into the dirt below him.
Cangse Sanren was the first to move, running as fast as her legs would take her to her son. As she knelt down next to him, reaching out and clasping one of his bloody hands within hers, his eyes turned towards her before slowly widening.
“A-Niang?”
A sob wrenched its way out of her as she nodded, a hand reaching towards her son’s face, cupping his cold cheek.
“A-Ying.” She whispered, her voice breaking as she saw her husband on the other side of their son, grabbing his hand.
Cangse watched as her son slowly turned his head towards his father with the same look of disbelief as a small smile bloomed across his face.
Then his eyes rolled back and his hands went slack.
Cangse and Changze could feel the resentful spirits circling them, able to sense Wei Ying’s imminent death and wanting to seize their opportunity to feast on him.
“Over my dead body.” Cangse spoke, unable to laugh at her joke in the current moment, before she closed her eyes and spoke an ancient enchantment.
The knowledge Baoshan Sanren held within her mountain, the amount the immortal was willing to share with her disciples, most of it had long been lost to the great sects – belonging to sects that no longer existed, that were destroyed for their ways, that did not survive changing weather patterns and social climates. One such sect had a wide knowledge of what one was capable of as a spirit, what they could do under certain conditions. Their methods would be considered blasphemous, unorthodox within the current cultivation world, but Cangse knew this would give her son the time he needed to heal – the time she and Changze needed to heal him.
The enchantment drew on the golden core of the deceased spirit, typically done within minutes of death before a golden core would dissipate without constant sustainment within the body. Luckily, when Changze and Cangse had been murdered and their bodies disposed of within a cave at the heart of the Burial Mounds, preservation talismans had been placed on their bodies – whether that was because their murderers wanted to revisit their bodies, to desecrate their corpses, or rather they thought if a body was unable to return back to the earth to which it came then neither could the soul.
What this meant was both her and her husband’s powerful cores resided within their grasp, they would be able to aid their son. Another unanticipated result was the time they spent within the Burial Mounds as spirits allowed them to continue to cultivate and grow their power reserves – but with resentment instead of spiritual energy. Unknowingly, they pair had become the first to be able to tame resentful energy and bend it to their wills.
Cangse looked across her son’s body to her husband – who had cast a barrier around the trio. The banging of spirits and beasts was muffled by his barrier, unable to enter and consume their meal.
It was a gruesome, tedious process to heal the internal injuries before Cangse could start with the external ones – deciding that keeping her son alive and not bleeding out on the decrepit dirt covered ground of the Burial Mounds took precedent over examining the external injuries. The energy she was able to siphon was eventually able to stabilize Wei Ying, at least to the point where she was no longer worrying about him dying in front of them.
When she finally opened her eyes, her hands dimly glowing from where they hovered over her son’s chest, the sun had begun to rise. With wide eyes, she looked at her husband – Changze knew exactly what she was going to ask.
“It’s been 15 hours.”
She could only nod, her eyes falling back to their son.
His breathing was stable, no longer quick and labored. She could tell from his heart beat that all her work had been able to save him – she didn’t allow herself to think about what would have happened if they weren’t here, if the resentment and resentful spirits were able to get their hands on Wei Ying.
Cangse wanted to move him, to get her son somewhere safe. She knew that while Changze had been fueling the barrier that surrounded them, it would not be something that would be capable of being maintained for long periods of time – no, they needed to be somewhere with entrance and exit points, sheltered from the elements, a place where Wei Ying could heal and the pair could better examine him.
“We need to move him.”
“The cave is likely our best chance.” Changze spoke, both their voices soft as they looked at Wei Ying.
“I need to be able to look at his external injuries, now that the internal ones aren’t posing as much of a threat anymore.”
Carefully, Cangse lifted her son into her arms – noting that he was much lighter than he should have been – before following her husband towards the cave where their bodies remained.
The pair had already warded the cave’s entrance after they woke up as spirits and realized they could not leave the Burial Mounds – to protect their bodies and to give them a place where they would be able to escape the other beings that resided inside their prison. While Cangse didn’t know how strong the wards were after she practically pulled all their combined strength from their stagnant cores, she knew that (for reasons she did not have the knowledge of) their cores regenerated spiritual energy. She also knew that both her body and Changze’s held the capacity to channel resentment – Cangse hadn’t checked their cores in a while, but she had the suspicion that their bodies potentially could be housing secondary cores formed by resentful energy.
As she laid her son onto a flat slab of rock near the back of the cave, she could hear Changze moving around before he returned to her side with a small bowl of water and a cloth – likely ripped from their robes – and began washing the dried blood off of their son’s face.
Cangse began slowly and carefully taking off the tattered clothing Wei Ying was wearing, being careful to not further agitate the cuts and scabs littering his body.
She grew more horrified the more she removed.
The last time they saw their son, his body barely had any scars – the only ones he had were on his knee from tripping over a fallen tree and along the side of his left thumb after he got too close to Cangse’s sword. Now, his body was littered in scars, in open wounds, in-
“Changze.” She suddenly spoke, her voice cold.
She turned to her husband, watching as his eyes widened before anger crossed his face, his hands clenching in his lap.
“How dare she.” He growled, reaching over to help his wife turn their son over and remove the rest of his robes.
The couple looked in rage at their son’s bloody, scarred back. Old and new crisscrossing marks crossed the entire length of his back – it looked as if not a single inch of skin had been spared. Scars wrapped around his waist, flickered across the tops of his shoulders, the backs of his arms.
“When I get my hands on that woman! ”
Resentment flickered within the cave as both Cangse and Changze felt nothing but hatred, anger, nothing but the desire to see that woman rot in the pits of hell.
To see her be whipped for every mark that seared across Wei Ying’s back, to be the one to be able to inflict that deserved misery onto her , to be able to take immense joy in her screams, her cries for help, for mercy, stating that she did nothing wrong, that everything she had done to their son was deserves, that he was lucky that she wasn’t harsher.
To see the life drain from her eyes.
Just as she had done to them.
Just as she had heard their pleas for mercy, that they had a son, that he was alone, expecting them to come back.
She had heard their cries of pain, as she used the very same weapon she used on their son. She had smiled and laughed in joy at their pain, cheered on her companions as they took out their own dark, brutal, gruesome fantasies with their bodies – primarily Cangse’s.
There was a moment, a singular moment, where Cangse and Changze looked at each other with complete understanding that they were not making out of this alive, that their son would never see them again, that he would never know what happened to them.
She hoped, prayed to any god that would listen to her, that her son would manage to survive, that her attackers wouldn’t get their blackened, murderous hands on him. Who knows what they would do to him, what they would convince him to do, what they would tell him was okay, what they would condition and groom him into being.
Resentment flooded the cave, wisps of gray darted around the couple as they realized where their son had ended up.
Who knows what their son had been raised to think, how their assailants had raised him. They knew the Jiangs had a son and daughter, had their son been raised as a protection for their son? Was he loved or just told he was to protect the Jiang heirs?
No, he wasn’t loved in that house. They would both go as far as to guess that no one in that family loved him.
They viewed him as lesser, inferior, and would use that mindset to justify any mistreatment towards him. Wei Ying may have been under the impression that he was an equal with the Jiang siblings, that he had been taken in and should consider them siblings, but Changze knew how Lotus Pier operated – how those viewed as lesser were treated.
Wei Changze knew that their son had likely been punished frequently for things that were not his fault, likely taking the blame for many things done by Jiang Cheng. He knew that Jiang Fengmian was such a pushover that he would allow his wicked wife to do whatever she wanted with their son – and likely, everyone in Lotus Pier knew about it, and continued to allow it to happen.
He didn’t know how their son ended up being thrown from above into the Burial Mounds, who would have had the thought of disposing their son’s body into the same place as his parents, but he knew the Jiangs were involved. Wei Changze knew the Jiangs had something to do with the reason his son was before him in the state he was – maybe they hadn’t been the ones to throw him into this cursed place, but they caused someone to.
They and their actions had caused a family reunion in the worst way possible.
When Wei Ying woke up, when the three of them were able to escape this hellhole, never again would his feet find themselves in any Yunmeng owned land.
A sob tore his thoughts out of his mind as he looked at his wife, tears flowing down her face as she held A-Ying’s wrist in her hands.
“His core…it’s gone.” He barely heard her voice.
“Gone?”
“Torn from him, ripped out of his body piece by piece.” Cangse gently placed her son’s hand down, gently turning him onto his back, running her finger down a bright red scar that couldn’t be more than a week old.
“Someone cut him open and stole his core, ripped it from him and left nothing behind. Someone stole my son’s core.” Her hand whipped away from the scar, covering her mouth as she collapsed in sobs.
Tears fell down Changze’s face as he held his wife as she sobbed into his chest, hands fisting into his robes. His eyes fell onto his son’s motionless body, taking solace and comfort in his slowly rising and falling chest, knowing that he was still alive, that whoever had done this to him would not get away with it.
“We’ll get it back. We won’t let whatever bastard did this to him get away with it.”