Essentially: LWJ's mom and WWX's mom ON THE RUN with THEIR KIDS. (...and also MY's mom. And any other goddamn moms who need help. Get in the fucking car, ladies, we're saving everybody) Because here's the thing: LWJ's mother was a cultivator who killed her future-husband's teacher. And I think we all have a pretty damn good idea what might have gone down to provoke that, and why the Lan menfolk never actually explain what precipitated this act of extreme violence, and thus we can probably take a stab at why a perhaps-newly-pregnant lady* might end up agreeing to a marriage of convenience with some guy she really wasn't into, who was determined to keep her locked up in a pleasant little prison in Gusu. And I'd like to say "aww, bless him, he saved his unrequited crush all selflessly like, even though they didn't then live together as husband and wife"....but he subsequently knocked her up with a second child. :/ The ladies in MDZS tend to have a pretty shitty time, so this fic is pulling a goddamn Fury Road and scooping them up and taking them off to form their own Ye Olde Themyscira-ish Rogue Sect of ladies looking out for other ladies. (*obvs this is my headcanon.)

“Something happened at the Lotus Pier.” “Oh? What does Fengmian have to say?” “Nothing,” Wei Changze said, and that’s when Cangse Sanren noticed that her husband was an unhealthy shade of pale. “He’s – he’s dead.” “What?” She snatched the letter away from him. “What – him and Yu Ziyuan both? Impossible! They’re – they’re sect leaders. Of a Great Sect! What happened?”

The woman that men called Cangse Sanren, a title she accepted out of lack of anything better to use, had any number of suitors, but her favorite one was one that never formally approached her to state his suit – neither the one who scolded her because she broke all the rules, nor the one who idealized her for it, but the one who made her laugh about it. His name was Wei Changze. He wasn't quite the same as all the others in another way, too.