#the one chance he ever got to escape this cycle of brutality came with an expiration date built in by consequence of his past atrocities

[aphel1on]

not sure how to phrase this but something i have been ruminating on recently is that xue yang is strangely fragile. obviously he is also incredibly resilient. he survived, and continues to survive, impossible things. he has a million barriers between himself and the world, but none of this actually matters when it comes to what he feels. everything is personal to him. everything pierces straight through all that armor and goes right to his battered heart, the heart that no one else believes he has. that even he is not fully cognizant of. the world strikes and strikes and strikes and so he strikes and strikes and strikes back, even (especially) when the wound is something other people would not think worthy of retribution.

xue yang would never realize this- would be outraged at the concept of it- but the way everything, everything is something to rally a defense against is in itself a form of fragility. he does not know how to let go of things, or let them pass him by. passivity is death. so he is ruthlessly cruel and violent. he projects himself as a lunatic untouchable by anything you might possibly do to him, and on some level he even believes this. but in actuality he is one raw emotional wound. he never learned to separate himself from his emotions, much less process them. the volatility is not so much insanity as it is the constant lashing out of an animal in a trap, and the trap is the world, and the trap is himself, and he is never going to get out. and like so much else, this pain is just part of the background radiation of his life. it hardly registers. to be able to register the hurt, you would have to be able to register a time in which you were not hurt.

i feel like it is a fragility that could blossom into such tenderness, given exactly the right set of circumstances. how at the very first touch of softness in his life he fell into a domesticity from which he never recovered. how much was there, still, to be salvaged from the cruelty. on some level i am always thinking about the little apple bunnies. about the meal for daozhang and the straw in a-qing's bed.

it was too little, too late. it shattered like glass when the world intruded back in. but the tenderness was there. no one, least of all xue yang, knows what might have happened had it been unearthed in him any sooner.

[kingsonne-zedecks]

Beware of Riverseed

Wei Shi Lindon had wanted to defy Fate, reach for the heights of the Sacred Arts and escape the weakness of his past. Classic Xianxia hopes and dreams. Though honestly? Looking at his memories, it really felt like he actually had this whole main character thing going on—a visit from the Heavens and a fantastic quest to save his homeland and everything. Too bad miss 90’s anime space-age magical girl had been completely right about how likely he was to die on this path. 

I came-to in the middle of dear old Wei getting his ass beat by some stereotypical pissed off and jumped up initiate. Let me tell you, that was horse shit. Wei was kind of an idiot for not going to ground the moment he’d pissed the dude off. Like, how many times did he have to get warned before he was going to take things seriously?

Luckily another disciple was kind enough to haul my twitching body back to the Medicine Hall, talking the whole time about how he had planned to take Wei to get his fancy spiritual elixirs himself to make sure something like this didn’t happen as if he wasn’t actually just miffed that someone else had gotten to my stuff first.

It only really hit me that I was in magical china land while I was moaning in pain in the infirmary. Apparently one of the kicks had hit poor Wei hard enough, and in just the right way to stop his heart and kill him. And there, curled up on the ground, I got shoved in. At least I got his memories, and the knowledge on how to actually cycle the medicine that I’d been given.

That and enough context to hide to stupid wooden badge around my neck. I mean—come on—the dude was literally walking around with a neon sign saying “please beat me up, I can’t defend myself and no one will care if you hurt me.” I was ditching the thing the moment I got a chance.

Maybe that wasn’t a very kind way to think about the guy whose body I was living in—but I wasn’t feeling particularly charitable given that not only had I landed in the middle of a sect and a valley whose definition of honor was so out of whack that it would make Merriam Webster weep, but I’d landed in the body of literally the weakest guy around in a world with no goddamned mortals!

Everyone cultivated here! Everyone! My first instinct was to run as far away from any Xianxia tropes as physically possible, but even the trees and the insects in this Valley could end me with half a thought. Let alone all the bridges that grouchy had been burning in his rush to get out of this place. Working in the archives was a perfectly fine fate! I’d have ran home and jumped on that in a heartbeat if Wei hadn’t pissed off the Patriarch and his grandson in his hurry to get here. 

I wouldn’t have even had to have stuck around long enough to get crushed by the giant monster. A couple of decades to hit Iron and then out before the mountains fell down. I don’t know why the idea hadn’t occurred to Wei, he could have taken his wife and kids and run and called it good. That’s not true, I knew why he hadn't thought of it—protagonist syndrome—and look where it had gotten him. Look where it had gotten me. 

My insides twisted and I couldn’t tell if it was the situation I was stuck in or the absolutely brutal healing pill. If there was one thing Wei’s residual instincts and I agreed on at this point, it was that we weren’t sticking around long enough to cycle this thing the slow way. I was getting out of here and throwing myself at sword girls feet. Hopefully she’d keep me alive long enough to find some bolthole on the outside. Somewhere that no one had ever heard of Wei Shi Lindon the Unsouled.