#without approximately eight billion hedges on implications?

[paradife-loft]

while doing some various Ghost Research™ for fic purposes over the past week, one piece of information I’ve seen mentioned or implied in a couple of places* is that, while generally mourning & veneration for the dead is only performed for ancestors, people older than you - that rule doesn’t necessarily hold for Zhongyuan Jie/the Hungry Ghost festival, since part of the deal there is making offerings for any visiting ghosts that might show up to cause trouble, particularly those that were forgotten/not buried right/otherwise have reasons to be displeased and out to Cause Problems?

anyway, what I’m thinking about here because of that specific detail is. yearly visits from small unmourned violently killed toddler ghost Jin Rusong.

hot, late summer visits to Jinlintai, and a private corner in one of Jin Guangyao’s half-enclosed gardens, set up with a few plates of offerings in the style he grew up setting out, for the child he cannot publicly perform his grief for, for the child poisoned before he was even given life by his father’s failings. folk religion generally disdained by the cultivator elite, but - these customs his mother taught him are still a part of him, and his son still crosses over into the living, sad and bewildered and looking for all of what he was cut short from. how can he deny him?

(Lan Xichen watches as he lights paper money and lanterns, and offers a silent hand on his arm. he can feel the cold yin of the spirit lingering faintly nearby. he understands enough not to offer to help release it.)