#he doesn't even remember the burial mounds so he doesn't remember inventing demonic cultivation. he's forgotten jiang yanli died

[coraxes]

wei wuxian memory problems -> "what if his post-resurrection memory problems were worse" -> au in which wei wuxian wakes up from the sacrifice summon in mo xuanyu's body having forgotten everything since the golden core transfer

[hunxi-guilai]

i read your burial mounds feelings and have to ask: what do you think would have happened if wwx had stayed longer than the three months? i know he was like, Dying, but the idea came to me of like, wwx is someone who works hard to master skills he learns even if it doesn't seem like it, and i just wonder what might have happened if he'd stayed longer to work on his demonic cultivation/the tiger seal/ect? esp bc i am Deeply invested in your take of the burial mounds claiming him in its own way

so in canon, I get the feeling that Wei Wuxian stayed in the Burial Mounds for the absolute minimum time he had to, because as you rightfully point out “he was, like, Dying”

I mean, just look at his Burial Mounds checklist:

not die

figure out how to control resentful energy

clear the air a bit? It’s hard to see

cope with loss of golden core

cope with an ongoing list of mental and physical trauma

do something about screaming sword

get sword to stop screaming?

get all these ghosts to stop screaming too? it’s really very distracting he’s trying to meditate for once here

not die in the process of accomplishing the above

maybe get something to eat on this literal mountain of corpses???

invent some new talismans for the sole purpose of Destruction because he has ceased to give any fucks 

get a new outfit

grave robbery? 

continue to not die

obtain a flute

make a flute?

learn the flute

pioneer a new form of alternative cultivation

not lose his mind

figure out how to leverage his new access to resentful energy towards his own purposes

figure out how to animate and control puppets

reforge the screaming sword for some peace and quiet

continue to not die

I think that the longer Wei Wuxian stays in the Burial Mounds alone, the less Wei Wuxian remains himself. We saw how profoundly three months changed him as a person -- in the reunion scene of episode 20, he barely remembers how to crack a joke. He doesn’t remember how to return a hug.

a Wei Wuxian who walked out of the Burial Mounds after six months, after a year -- well, I’m not sure how much of him would even be Wei Wuxian anymore. The way I understand it, resentful energy affects one’s temperament, corrupts one’s mind, erodes at self-control and emotional stability until all that’s left is resentment and that thirst for bloody, lex talionis revenge. For Wei Wuxian to be steeped in the polluted air of the Burial Mounds, to continue re-writing his stagnant spiritual meridians with dark energies that eat a little more away from his soul each time he reaches for that kind of power...

A Wei Wuxian who walks out of the Burial Mounds a year later might be able to walk straight through Wen Ruohan’s hordes of undead without lifting a finger to defend himself. Puppets collapse left and right, strings cut by his mere presence, his overwhelming command of resentful energy. Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji run through the doors into Nightless City’s opulent reception hall, breathless, frantic, only to find that they’re already too late -- Wei Wuxian pulls his hand dispassionately out of Wen Ruohan’s chest, bloodied and caked with gore, and Wei Wuxian, just turns around to look at them, tilting his head in confusion -- no recognition in those eyes, just blank curiosity at these strange, living things.

After all, it’s been long, long time since he’d last seen one of those without killing it on sight.

In episode 23, Lan Wangji grabs Wei Wuxian by the arm on the edge of a too-familiar cliff and asks him about control; Wei Wuxian looks back at him, and says Lan Zhan -- you’re afraid that I’ll become like Wen Ruohan, controlled by the yin iron.

but the Stygian Tiger Seal is not yin iron, and I am not Wen Ruohan.

Oh, 阴虎符啊阴虎符 -- what exactly did the Stygian Tiger Seal do for you, Wei Wuxian? Did it store resentful energy, like an evil battery, or did it help him control it, wield it too? Jiang Yanli warns him not to use it too often in episode 23, because it takes -- well, something from him even while it grants him access to power. It still screams like the sword it was forged from. Darkness swirls around it the same way; blood feeds it and stirs it alike to wakefulness

Some things change forever; some things stay the same, and as Wei Wuxian stands against the entire cultivation world, as he returns to the place that broke and remade him, he’s starting to realize that some of the things he thought the latter were actually the former.

in this post, I got real stuck on the stark visual difference between the Burial Mounds in episode 19 and the Burial Mounds in episode 27:

you can just barely see the outline of the broken tombstones in this one

because yes, the difference in lighting is day-and-night (I actually mean that literally -- I can only assume that Wei Wuxian hit the ground unconscious the first time around and didn’t wake up until hours later), but also there’s a lot less resentful energy floating in the air and coming out from the ground by the time Wei Wuxian brings the Wen refugees here in episode 27.

In episode 19, we come to understand that the Burial Mounds are a place where you come to die. In episode 27, we see the Burial Mounds transformed into a place where you come to live.

I’ve always felt that the ‘we’ Wei Wuxian refers to in episode 23 was him speaking for the Burial Mounds as a whole -- the Wei Wuxian after those three months is aged in a way that moves beyond passing time or pressing trauma and into a weary kind of immortality, the exhaustion of ten thousand lives lived through some unknown and unnameable process more intimate than Empathy, through the hollowing out of his body and soul so that the Burial Mounds can move in. 

It’s only proper, after all -- he, too, is one of its lost souls.

How much of the Burial Mounds live in Wei Wuxian, now? He does the impossible, what the greatest cultivation sects and its proudest cultivators could not -- he cleanses the land, makes it habitable, even hospitable again. He walks out of it alive; he makes it a haven. When he returns to the Burial Mounds in episode 44, he crouches down, runs his hands through the soil, thinks of distilled fruit wine and says that was the time of greatest suffering in our lives. Now the only ghosts that live in the Burial Mounds are his own; the voices that haunt him are ones he knows, gentle words rather than agonized screams.

Because here is a truth: the Burial Mounds died with Wei Wuxian. 

He falls off a cliff in Nightless City and takes ten thousand wronged souls with him. 

Days, months, years later, cultivators who never met Wei Wuxian walk through Yiling, climb the rocky paths to the mouldering ruins of houses and lives, a cave long emptied and gathering dust. Perhaps they look around; perhaps they search; but none of them understand who the former inhabitants were, none of them can understand who the former inhabitants were, because the bodies draped over the gates of Nightless City were only the newest tenants of a long and hungry history. They still call the land 乱葬岗, not realizing that these mass graves have already been emptied.

When Wei Wuxian returns, he scoops up a handful of dirt, lets it fall from his fingers. It’s a visit to the tomb of an old friend; it’s a final farewell.

This time, when he leaves, he doesn’t carry the Burial Mounds with him.

[coresurgery]

#he doesn't even remember the burial mounds so he doesn't remember inventing demonic cultivation. he's forgotten jiang yanli died#so of course the first thing he does when he learns yunmeng jiang are still around is go back to lotus pier.#(is he dead? is he possessing someone else's body right now? he doesn't think so. what did the core transfer DO?)

saving this from my main to continue pondering

wei wuxian memory problems -> "what if his post-resurrection memory problems were worse" -> au in which wei wuxian wakes up from the sacrifice summon in mo xuanyu's body having forgotten everything since the golden core transfer