#but cultivation baby sizhui au a-yuan was created when wangxian dual cultivated in the xuanwu's cave

[stiltonbasket]

I'm rereading Twelve Moons And A Fortnight for the 4th time, as well as dipping into your other fics - I love the world(s) you've created so much!

I want to ask about the thing I'm kind of still confused about: how exactly does Wei Ying (and Xichen as well) actuallt cultivate a child? Is it your JC that they do some kind of intensive meditation that creates one from a golden core? Or does the soul that wants to reincarnate pick them or what?

Always the former, sometimes both. The parent's golden core has to set aside an amount of "extra" energy equal to the total energy the child's body would contain, once born; and after the parent stockpiles enough energy, the child is able to use the parent's body as a kind of template to construct a body of its own. This is why the infant spirit of Lan Jingyi spends so much time wandering around Lan Xichen's body in Life in Love's Exchange; he's learning how human bodies work so that he can manifest one after LXC saves up enough energy to create it.

Re: reincarnation, this is the only way someone without a golden core can cultivate a baby in the TMAAF verse. When Jiang Yanli's soul was ready to reincarnate, she went to her original birthplace of Lotus Pier and found that two of Jiang-furen's dead relatives were waiting to be reincarnated as her children; and by the time she traveled to Lanling, Jin Zixuan's spirit had already chosen Jin Ling as his future father. After that, she went to the Cloud Recesses and waited until Wei Wuxian had soaked up enough spiritual energy from the cold springs before being reincarnated as his daughter Chunyang.