#was keeping it for a rainy day and I'm honestly just so empty today lol

[ibijau]

Xue Yang’s master pt 3 / on AO3

Xue Yang and his master leave the forest

They stayed a few more days in that little house, until Wen Chao’s wounds were healed enough he could think of travelling… and until their food supply became too low to stay any longer.

Wen Chao wasn’t a very good teacher, Xue Yang quickly figured out, but he wasn’t a very bad one either. He was really trying hard to explain things in a simple manner, rightly guessing that Xue Yang didn’t have the level of education he might have normally expected from a new disciple, but it was clear he struggled with some of those concepts himself.

It couldn’t be blamed on his amnesia, as that appeared to only affect personal matters, like his name, or his family, or his close ones. When it came to things that didn’t touch his emotions in any way, Wen Chao had a great memory… unless he deemed the topic boring, as seemed to be the case with cultivation.

He still was good enough to perform every necessary ritual to purify the house they had used, and to check that the soul of its previous owner hadn’t lingered on in spite of never getting a proper burial. Wen Chao even made Xue Yang dig a grave for the man, as if that really made any difference for someone who had been dead so long.

“You’d be surprised,” Wen Chao said, lazily fanning himself as he watched Xue Yang work. “Some people will linger on for years and years, if they feel they’ve got reason enough. Once you’ve learned the basics, I’ll show you how to get in touch with spirits and see what they want.”

“Can’t we just blow them apart or something?” Xue Yang asked, angrily planting his shovel in the ground. It was an old, rusty thing that did very little when going against the hard ground of the forest. “I thought cultivation was about fighting.”

Wen Chao rolled his eyes. “It’s not just that, even if some sects have gotten excessively martial in the last century. Mine more than most, I guess. But because we can get in contact with ghosts, we have a duty to attempt it. There’s a right way to do things, we have to… to…”

He grimaced and closed his eyes tightly, the way he did whenever he came a little too close to personal memories. At least, so Xue Yang assumed. 

“There’s a way to do things,” Wen Chao repeated. “Liberate, suppress, and only if that fails, eliminate. You have to do things in the right order.”

“Sounds inefficient,” Xue Yang retorted.

“It’s about respecting others,” Wen Chao said. “If you died an unjust death, wouldn’t you want to have a chance to let others know, so they might try to right the wrongs done onto you?”

Xue Yang leaned on his shovel, giving the question some consideration. He’d very nearly been in that situation, after that encounter with Chang Ci’an and his hand had gotten infected for a while, so it was remarkably easy to make up his mind.

“I’d rather just destroy those who killed me,” Xue Yang said. “And then if I have to be destroyed I don’t care, as long as I get my revenge first.”

Wen Chao’s fan stilled, his eyes round as cherries, as if he'd never heard anything so horrifying in his life. “Oh. Well. We’re going to work on this too, I guess. The cultivation path I can teach you demands righteousness, and help given to the weak.”

“Sounds stupid,” Xue Yang grumbled, but he resumed digging that damn grave, so they could burry that damn man who’d been stupid enough to die all alone like that.

He wasn’t sure what that man had done to even deserve an actual grave, when most people Xue Yang knew had been lucky to get a mass grave, or had been incinerated because nobody gave a damn about preserving their body, and many damns about not wasting resourced on some teenage criminals nobody cared about. But he supposed he would consider it nice if someone had taken the time to dig a grave for him, and so maybe Wen Chao had a point.

They left the little house the next morning, and headed out of the forest. Xue Yang had feared it would be difficult to find their way back to the road, especially since it was a cloudy day, but Wen Chao appeared quite at ease. He looked at trees, at what little of the sky was visible, at the ground, and got them back to the road before noon. Xue Yang had to admit he was impressed.

Well, he privately admitted it. He wasn’t about to start complimenting his weird teacher until he could be sure this hadn’t just been a random stroke of luck.

Having rejoined the road, Xue Yang and Wen Chao picked one direction at random and started walking that way. They urgently needed some fresh food, now that they’d more or less gone through all of Xue Yang’s provisions, and figured that they would decide on a direction once they had taken care of that. 

After walking the better part of the day, they reached a village, only to find that there was an unexpected problem to consider. Wen Chao, however exhausted he was by this long day of effort when he was still in recovery, absolutely refused to step into the village, terrified he might be recognised and denounced to the victors of the Sunshot Campaign. Irritating as that was, Xue Yang had to admit it wasn’t a stupid concern. He had to go into the village alone to trade one of Wen Chao’s gold rings for an immense quantity of food, which he then stored into a magic little pouch that his teacher had given him. Feeling magnanimous, and conscious that he wasn’t spending his own money, he also negotiated for another item to be thrown into the deal, one that he hoped would make things easier in the future.

“A mask?” Wen Chao remarked when Xue Yang returned to him with provisions and his present. “Isn’t that just going to make me more suspicious?”

“Everyone knows cultivators are weird,” Xue Yang countered. “Especially the ones that don’t even have a sect. They’re always saying they got to hide who they are, but they also need everyone to know they’re special. So they’ve got masks, or veils, or they wear make-up… it’s good for business to show you’re so powerful you can get away with being weird.”

Wen Chao looked unconvinced, but still put on the crude wooden mask that Xue Yang had bought for him. It only covered the top half of his face, the way rogue cultivators seemed to prefer in Xue Yang’s experience. But since it wasn’t very good quality, it really failed to give Wen Chao any sort of mysterious allure, and instead made him look a little stupid.

It made it even more efficient as a disguise, Xue Yang decided. After all the Wen sect were a bunch of proud assholes, so nobody would suspect one of their young masters would go around looking like this.

Speaking of young masters… as he handed a warm bun to his teacher, an idea hit Xue Yang.

“Hey, Shizun, your dad’s dead, right?”

Wen Chao, who had been about to bite into their dinner, froze.

“I think I’ve heard that. Someone… someone murdered him, right? Not even someone from a big sect even, right?”

“Yeah, some son of a whore who betrayed him to protect Nie Mingjue,” Xue Yang confirmed. “And your brother’s dead too, right?”

Wen Chao nodded grimly and shivered. “Wen Xu was killed by… by him. By Nie zongzhu.”

“Yeah, exactly. So wouldn’t that make you the new leader of the Wen sect, by default?”

Even with the mask, Wen Chao’s shock was obvious.

“I’m too young to be a sect leader!” he gasped, nearly dropping his bun. “And I’m not good enough at… at anything!” he complained. “There’s got to be someone else… can you imagine me, trying to avenge my family?”

“It’d be something,” snickered Xue Yang, who could imagine it indeed, and guessed it would end very, very badly for his teacher.

“Yes, yes, I wouldn't, I don't know how to... it really not come to that,” Wen Chao whined, before pitifully biting into his dinner.

This, as far as Xue Yang cared, was the end of that conversation. No Wen with any talent for cultivation would have been allowed to live, meaning anyone left around would be weak and useless, so reuniting Wen Chao with his people held no benefit for Xue Yang. And Wen Chao was obviously a selfish, talentless little coward who didn't give a damn about anything except himself, quite possibly the only trait the two of them had in common.

Wen Chao was Xue Yang’s now, his master, and he had no interest in sharing him with others.