“If we get home, you mean,” the Jin sect junior muttered. “Where even are we? And who’s the guy playing Chenqing?” Wei Wuxian was mildly offended. Who in the world knew enough to recognize Chenqing on sight but couldn’t recognize him? “I’m pretty sure that’s Senior Wei,” the shorter Lan sect junior said. “Just, you know, not…Senior Mo.”

In which Lan Xichen, nearly thirteen, visits Nie Mingjue, newly appointed Sect Leader - and decide to swap brothers for a day.

If you’ve ever believed me in anything, believe I want what’s best for Jin Ling, the first line of the letter reads. Jiang Cheng has to stop and take a moment before he continues on to the next line: You must come to Carp Tower as soon as you can and lavish praise on the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen.

Five snapshots of the accidental friendship of Nie Huaisang and Wen Ning, following the resurrection of the Yiling Patriarch and the ensuing events.

Legend said that those who died of anger could die with their last breath trapped in their throat, their consciousness trapped within their bodies by their own resentment, and that if one wasn't careful with their bodies, they might rise again. Nie Huaisang had long ago given up all hope of getting his brother back. Revenge had been all that had been left to him… Or so he’d thought.

In a moment of lightheartedness, Lan Xichen proposes to Nie Mingjue that they go dare the dangerous Burial Mounds to see what the Yiling Patriarch is really doing there, and so judge for themselves whether Lan Wangji's unauthorized visit there was in fact a breach of the rules or not. What they find there - isn't what they expected.

Nie Mingjue leaves his first Discussion Conference as a Sect Leader early, desperately needing to find some fresh air and possibly something to hit. Instead he finds a small, dirty child that reminds him of his brother, cowering away from some dogs - Maybe he should take him home.

Nie Mingjue took one look at the ash-faced girl on the streets of Lanling, caught her by the shoulder and said, “Aren’t you that Wen Qing? I used to see you at discussion conferences – what are you doing here?” Nothing is ever the same again.

Jiang Cheng has seen his home violated time and time again. The Wen sect - the Jin sect - he'll do anything to stop it from happening again. Anything. (what Wei Wuxian doesn't know is...)

Lan Xichen’s hands were shaking, hidden in his sleeves, and his mouth kept opening and closing, trying to find something to say. “A-Yao,” he finally forced out through numb lips. “A-Yao, you swore an oath.” Jin Guangyao blinked, then laughed. “I swore many oaths,” he said. “Which one are you referring to?"

I would like for you to consider that, of all the Yunmeng sibs, Jiang Yanli can curse both Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng under their table. It comes from frequenting the fish markets and the piers, and listening and observing carefully before proceeding to haggle her way through the week’s shopping. The first time bb!Wei Ying heard her switch into sailor speak he stared at her with huge huge eyes and said “can you teach me”

Wei Wuxian was fully prepared to be rejected – no matter what Jiang Cheng said about the Sunshot Campaign caring more about defeating the Wens than anything else, the fact remained that his cultivation was most decidedly abnormal and unorthodox, the sort of thing the cultivation world most scorned. He’d already decided that if they did that, he would return to his previous approach of stalking the Wens from the shadows, fighting them in his own way, on his own. Instead, he walked into the command tent, Chenqing gripped tightly in his hand, and Nie Mingjue didn’t so much as blink, just said, “Can you do anything but ambushes?” and the next thing he knew, it was three shichen later, he’d shared far more than he’d meant to about his new cultivation style, and there were eight different plans of attack that would greatly increase his effectiveness on the battlefield. It was – exhilarating, actually. (in which Nie Mingjue and Wei Wuxian become sworn brothers)

The Nie sect’s ancestors were butchers; that lowly heritage is well known and widely celebrated, much to the not-entirely-concealed disdain of some of the more refined, gentlemanly sects. Butchers at home and butchers at war – everyone knows that. What’s rather less well known is that the third sect leader, colloquially known among his descendants as ‘that idiot’, rather heroically saved an imperial princess in battle and then – and this was why he was that idiot – married her. She was a proper princess, too, the true-born daughter of the emperor; other sects might see that as a good thing, since for all that cultivation sects saw themselves as being above petty things like the politics of the common folk, a princess was still a princess. The Nie did not. The reason for this was quite simple. What does a cultivation style that already incorporates an increased chance of death through anger most assuredly does not need? The blood of the eight-clawed dragon, that’s what.

A man who binds himself with so many rules is afraid of what he will do without them. When all his righteousness is not enough and his little brother is killed by one he trusted, Nie Mingjue casts aside all restraint and principle. He travels to the Burial Mounds, his brother's corpse cradled in his arms, and kneels before the Yiling Patriarch, begging him to bring his brother back - And then he goes to seek an accounting. No matter what the cost.

Wen Ning began to go, then hesitated. “Do you need medical assistance, Sect Leader Nie? I know a little…” “Wen Qionglin.” “…yes?” “Take the child and go.” (an unexpected encounter in the aftermath of the Sun Palace)

Sandu Shengshou and Hanguang-Jun had, infamously, long since mastered the art of existing in the same space without ever acknowledging one another directly, and Wei Wuxian, having never in either of his lives met a delicate social situation he didn't blithely barrel through if it suited him, happily chattered enough to fill what might have been awkward silences in any other company. But in the end it was not Wei Wuxian who ultimately prompted the cessation of the cultivation world's coldest and most famous feud. or: The Badass Teamup of Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji

Nie Huai Sang (Ji Li/纪李) cute face expressions.

“Thank you all for coming,” Lan Xichen said, pouring tea for the other three people at the table. “I think you all know why I’ve asked you to gather here today.” “Sure,” Nie Mingjue said, accepting the cup. “Because our younger siblings have decided to join together to become a criminal gang.” “That seems like an unduly harsh way to put it,” Jiang Yanli murmured, inclining her head in thanks to Lan Xichen as she took her own. “After all, they’re helping people, aren’t they?” Wen Qing huffed. “Leverage,” she drawled. “If I ever find out who gave them that idea…!”

“You are never allowed to do this again,” Jiang Cheng’s mother said, her voice harsh in the way that means she was scared, because she hated being scared. “Never again, you hear me?” “I hear you, a-niang,” Jiang Cheng said. “Did it live?” “Yes, of course it lived,” Madame Yu snapped. “You’re the one that nearly died! You can’t – death-sharing is a rare gift, A-Cheng, but you can’t use it too often, you hear me? Every time you use it, your own life gets shorter. You must never do it again. And you mustn’t tell anyone else about it! No one at all! Swear to me!” “I swear,” he said. “No one at all.”

The healers said it was trauma. Perhaps he was too young, or too sensitive; perhaps it was only that it had happened in such a way, at such an impressionable time – in any event, Lan Wangji’s reactions to his mother’s death had gone well beyond the normal signs of grief and turned into something much more severe. After some intense discussion, it was agreed that he should be temporarily sent to live as a guest in another sect to see if he would benefit from the change of scenery. From not being around the place where he was drowning in the memories of his mother. They sent him to the Jiang Sect.

Nie Mingjue and Baxia have always been close. Maybe a little too close. (Nie Mingjue watched as his body leaped to the side, avoiding the beast’s charge – the movements were a little jerky, he thought, and Baxia sent some frustration back that he thought might roughly translate to listen it’s a new body and I’m trying here if she were capable of speech – and then spinning around, leaping up, and then bringing him - Nie-Mingjue-the-saber, that is - down on the beast.)

Lan Xichen did his best to like most people, to give them the benefit of the doubt whenever possible – truly, he did. He even thought he was mostly successful at it, purposefully looking at Sect Leader Yao’s boorish nosiness as well-meant although ill-executed sympathy or Sect Leader Ouyang’s tendency to follow the crowd as a sense of fellow-feeling taken to an extreme. And yet – He was certain that there was something wrong with Meng Yao.

It was Wei Wuxian’s idea, of course. Jiang Yanli’s big didi was brilliant and talented beyond measure, as reckless and impertinent in his thoughts as he was in every other way, just as her little didi was earnest and soft-hearted and dutiful, the outlines of the serious man he’d become when he grew up just barely visible underneath the baby fat that still lingered in his cheeks. It was Wei Wuxian’s idea, but it was Jiang Cheng that made Jiang Yanli decide to use it.

“It’s not wrong if you write it down,” Mo Xuanyu muttered to himself like a mantra as he scribbled down a rough explanation of what he was going to do. “If you write it down, it’s just an experiment, and that makes it okay.” That’s what they used to say back at Koi Tower, back when they were doing all those bad things. They also said that you’re supposed to try stuff out before you do the real thing, because practice makes perfect. And anyway, surely it wouldn't hurt to put the cat in the middle of the body-sacrificing array before he put himself in - the array ran on resentment, on revenge, and how much resentment could a cat possibly have?

Nie Huaisang rather liked their Neighbors. He was aware that that was widely viewed as being a little bit odd of him, but it wasn’t any more odd than his general distaste for training his saber – though combined with his passion for pretty things, fans and clothing and paintings and birds, more than one person had not-so-subtly implied that they thought Nie Huaisang might be a changeling. (They only ever implied it once – Nie Mingjue seemed to have an extra sense for finding out when people were being cruel to his brother, and no hesitation whatsoever about beating the living daylights out of them when he did.)

so what if modern nie sect BUT with tattoos (and nmj’s got “dage” tattooed on his forearm with baby nhs’s writing) (nhs started with making projects for his friends and afmily and for fun and eventually became tattoo artist himself)

In that scene when JC hallucinates his family at Lotus Pier, do you think it’s a memory or what he /wishes/ had happened? Because I remember in the novel it said that the number of times JFM picked him up could be counted on one hand or something, but in the hallucination he’s very physically affectionate with JC

The fact that Wei WuXian is still empathizing with Nie MingJue during this scene leads me to believe that Nie MingJue was, perhaps, not a fierce corpse. He was still very much alive even if it was a strange half-life. Jin GuangYao also orders Xue Yang to kill him (They use Baxia! How evil can you get!?) and you can’t kill someone that isn’t alive/is already dead. So CQL Nie MingJue did not die by qi deviation. He died by decapitation.

Nie Mingjue A northern soldier. Old with a grey beard, Baxia took his head clean off.

AU where NHS gathered his resources sooner so the sacrificial ritual happens when MXY is still a Jin disciple who wanted revenge on JGS and JGY. WWX wakes up amidst a bloody array in Jinlintai, and his first thought upon recognizing his surroundings is to look for Jin Ling.

In which Jin Guangyao and Lan Xichen discover something very interesting about the Nie sect, and what exactly a "qi deviation" means when it comes to the main Nie clan. ...also, tigers.

Nie Huaisang loves beautiful things, and plucking game birds is an exercise in destroying something beautiful. After which it's an exercise in picking off tiny bits of fluffy down that hide in the crevices and don't want to come out, and that's just annoying. He might hate doing this, but he does know how, so the motions come easily. The Nie were butchers, after all.

It had always been something of a behind-closed-doors debate – a chicken-and-the-egg problem, what came first, what was the cause and what was the symptom. Was the Nie sect’s atypical cultivation method the reason behind the notorious Nie temper? Or were they born with the temper, and the cultivation method merely built upon that? Which one was the reason for their clan’s tendency towards early qi deviations? Nie Huaisang usually threw his money on the “blame the cultivation style”, almost entirely for the sake of pissing off his brother. He was starting to think, though, that he’d been wrong.

By everyone’s agreement (except his own), Wen Ning was the sect leader. Of course, practically speaking, Nie Mingjue actually ran everything; he was the one with the experience in it, after all, and he claimed he was no good at teaching, which was the other thing they generally did. Other than, you know, the whole...fierce corpse thing.

Canon: The Untamed Jiang Yanli didn’t know Nie Huaisang very well. He’d been close with A-Xian and A-Cheng during their time in the Cloud Recesses, but Jiang Yanli was older and had made her own friends at the time; she’d pretended ignorance of her brothers’ and Nie Huaisang’s antics, while engaging in some (much subtler and better-hidden) antics of her own. She had remained in touch with the young women who had been her friends from the lectures right up until the Wens came to Lotus Pier. Her last letter to Ouyang Anzheng had gone out right before she and her father left for Lanling.

The last year before Jin Zixuan figures out that his father will only ever love him as an accessory to his power is also the year that he meets Luo Qingyang. For a long time, he thinks of it as the last truly happy year of his life. The Luos are a long-time family of the Jin sect. Most of them live in Lanling City, although there are a few cousins living farther out in the more rural areas. It is to these cousins that Jin Zixuan will go to learn to ride horses the year he turns eleven.

A dancing demon? Some kid is dreamin'? Whatever the mystery, the gang will work together and figure it out in the end!

A post-canon twitfic (now cross-posted to AO3) in which Jin Ling, with help from Lan Sizhui, Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng, & Wen Ning, cleans out Jin Guangyao's old treasure chamber, and makes some unexpected discoveries.

Going up Burial Mounds, some worries arise. Can the Wens really work this out?

A week later, Jiang Cheng gets a chance to talk to someone he trusts about the revelations during and preceding the confrontation at Guanyin Temple. Part of the Therapy for the Sunshot Generation Agenda

“What,” Nie Mingjue said, even as Jin Zixuan got up with a set expression on his face to accept a bow from his servant, “are you doing?” Jin Zixuan paused, looking puzzled – and no surprise, since Nie Mingjue hadn’t said anything beyond the most mundane greetings when he first arrived. “Sect Leader Nie..?” Nie Mingjue rose to his feet, his brother’s hand falling off of his arm as if he’d shaken him off like a dog. “What are you doing?” he demanded, louder this time. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

this idea hit me today honestly i just want all of you to think about yllz huaisang our boys ends up kidnapped and beat by wen chao in retaliation for the death of wen xu and when they think he’s about to die wen chao just has him dropped in the burial mounds, crushed core and all, and the resentful energy that’s there just pulls him back together, reknitting his broken bones and filling the space where his weak golden core used to live and this time when they ask ‘don’t you want revenge nie huaisang’ he answers ‘of course i want revenge’ and so nie huaisang is rebuilt and instead of cultivating with a flute, he controls the resentful energy with his fans, flicking them this way and that to direct the energy and bend it to his will

It wasn’t that Jiang Cheng hadn’t liked Nie Huaisang well enough, when they were all learning together in the Cloud Recesses. Anyone who had the energy to keep up with Wei Wuxian – and just enough good sense to help veer him off the really bad ideas, even if he did keep egging him on in regards to the medium-grade bad ones – was good news in his books. But liking him didn’t mean respecting him, and the fact that Nie Huaisang hadn’t participated much in the war – couldn’t participate much – had led Jiang Cheng to discount him more or less entirely. That’s what made it all the more surprising when Nie Huaisang ended up being the unofficial leader of the three remaining Great Sects in opposing Jin Guangshan after the war.

Nie Huaisang thought that - should the time travel array actually work and he end up back in time before everything happened, with his brother still alive and well - that the first thing he would do would be to properly weep and cry and hug his brother, not jump straight into explanations and strategizing. Then again, he hadn't expected that the array would somehow send his spirit into his brother's body, casting his brother's spirit into his own past self, either.

Baxia's beloved master, Nie Mingjue, had a spirit as close as she had ever seen a human come to being a saber spirit, steel right down to the core of him, principles held as stiffly as her blade even when the results of those principles turned to cut against him. Full of rage, just as she was, but tempered, just like her – disciplined, fearsome, just. But still - too soft, sometimes. Baxia decides to fix that.

There’s more to being a Nie than wielding a saber. Or 5 things Nie Mingjue tries to teach his brother, and one he learns.

When the Wen sect came to ask for hostages, Jiang Fengmian decided that he wasn't willing to risk Wei Wuxian getting hurt and instead sent Jiang Cheng to the indoctrination camp alone. Jiang Cheng spent his time there making friends. (“…wow,” Nie Huaisang said when Jiang Cheng finished explaining. “That’s – that’s bullshit.”)

HOLY FUCK IS THAT A BABY?! The howling anguish of the Burial Mounds goes silent. Wei Wuxian has returned, and he has brought other people with him, and one of those people is, indeed, a baby. The little caravan of weary living people (who have a fucking baby with them) works its way up what might generously be called a path, deeper into the cursed hills, and they have the full attention of many, many ghosts. Resentful energy burns away, boiling into nothing under the utter shock of the situation. Who the fuck brings a baby to the Burial Mounds? Or: People think Wei Wuxian somehow cleansed the resentment of the Burial Mounds for the Wen survivors, but actually, the ghosts did it as babyproofing.

Shen Qingqiu attempts to allay Liu Qingge's suspicions.

Sui Zhou couldn't believe what he was seeing... Two of the most wanted criminals, who always seemed to be able to slip away, were having dinner on the other side of the restaurant. Sui Zhou had been tracking them for over a year, and the fact he hadn't caught either was a convenient black spot on a record that his boss was intent on tarnishing.