"By the Heavens, did you hear? The Yiling Patriarch has been invited to the Discussion Conference in Qinghe!" Gossip was, by far, the fastest way for information to spread. "What! Whose idea was that!?" It was not the most accurate or most reliable method, but people were people, and the tedium of daily life would always bore them. "I heard it was the Nie Sect leader's suggestion." ---------- After thirteen years in the Burial Mounds, the Yiling Patriarch finally makes a public reappearance. Civilians are scared. Cultivators are outraged. Sect Leaders are concerned. Wei Wuxian has been too quiet, they say, and nobody knows what dark horrors the Burial Mounds may now contain. Wei Wuxian wouldn't quite call them dark horrors, but the description wasn't too far off. (tl;dr Wei Wuxian lives, raises a whole gaggle of demonic cultivator children, and the cultivation world panics.)

Meng Shi doesn't quite know what she saw, but she knows this much. Something is wrong with her son.

A series of one-shots and multi-chapter works, for a WangXian & XiCheng universe where morals are absent, and our boys are (literally) crazy in love. This AU is a Mafia/Gang universe set in Shanghai - a little fucked up (this is an understatement) and shows a lot of morally degenerate, obsessive behaviour between our four main men. Expect a lot blood, murder, possessive relationships that border on unhealthy, a stupid amount of life-threatening situations, along with gore and lovemaking.

Baxia takes the shape of a woman with the body of a tiger and three heads, each more horrifying than the next. Huaisang is standing between her and his brother. Wings of ink and ash unfurl behind him as the white-throated needletail dissolves into nothing from Huaisang’s right flank and [defend] activates. “What do you want?” he asks. Shouts, really, through the screaming of the desert wind and the never-ending hum of Baxia’s energy. You know what I want, she says with three voices all at once. You know what I want, delicious one, pretty one. Jewel-snake, ink demon, fiend. - in which a sacrifice is made.

When old sect leader Nie dies, the Wen sect attacks and annexes Qinghe Nie, with the two heirs of the Nie sect taken to be raised as Wen Ruohan's wards - and more besides, in Nie Mingjue's case. Nie Huaisang spends a lot of time thinking about that.

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.

“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?