The first time Lan Huan sees him, he thinks it’s a trick of the light. The sea glimmers like translucent pearls off of the man’s pectorals, polishes his long wavy hair like jet. But the most fascinating part of him must be the thousands of tiny glittering scales lining his lower abdomen, down, down, down to a pair of translucent olive fins that shimmer like gold in the summer light. Lan Huan breathes in, but the salt spray somehow tangles in his lungs. (Mermaid AU)

Pale skin, a beautiful face, and dark hair with a Lan headband were all unsurprising, but his ears were capped with blue frills the color of the wall hangings in the Teaching Hall, and below his navel he had a tail, blue and white and tapering to the size of Wei Wuxian’s waist where it dipped below the water. The cold and the shock were finally too much - Wei Wuxian fainted.

One day Lan Xichen will ask Meng Yao why he chose to go to Qinghe after his mother died. Meng Yao will say that he chose the Nie Sect because of Nie Mingjue’s well-known distaste for Jin Guangshan, but the truth is at once simpler and more immediate: Meng Yao walks out of the sea, hangs the pouch with his mother’s ashes around his neck, and vows never to swim again until he gets her other-skin back from Jin Guangshan. Qinghe, tucked between mountain peaks and barren hills, is as far from this gentle sea shore as he can think of. That Nie Mingjue turned out to be a man Meng Yao didn’t expect and couldn’t anticipate was an accident. - In which Meng Yao makes promises he cannot keep, some things are irreversibly broken, and the villain earns his due punishment at last.

Xiao Zhan looks up, ears twitching. Yibo's staring straight at him, mouth hanging slightly open, a towel clutched around his waist. Oh, shit, Xiao Zhan thinks, blinking slowly once, twice, and then hops right back out the window again.

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.)

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.

A very specific part of Jin Ling's Yunmeng Jiang heritage makes itself known when he comes of age. His friends help him out.

Lan Zhan is glaring at him. That's probably fair. The last time they'd seen each other, Wei Ying had been digging through Lan Zhan's garbage. They'd made eye contact over the shredded bags, the week's trash scattered around him like stinky, oversized Lego. Lan Zhan's eyes had been wide with horror, and Wei Ying's had been equally wide with feigned innocence. He'd reached out slowly, maintaining the eye contact, and then flipped over the food waste bin full of onion peel and carrot skin as a distraction and slunk off into the night. Probably not his finest moment. - Modern AU dragon!LWJ meets fox!WWX.

There's a mermaid bleeding in the lifeboat. Wei Ying stands over the mermaid on the ship deck with his thumbs hooked into his own belt, coat swung back behind him. The mermaid looks at him like he’s a particularly pathetic bug, even though Wei Ying isn’t the one laying flat-out on the deck looking like a- well. A fish out of water, basically. Wei Ying crouches in front of him and the mermaid bares his teeth, presumably to warn him off of touching or coming closer. Wei Ying holds his hands up, but frowns severely to establish dominance. “Hey, buddy,” He says. “It’s not my fault you decided to bleed all over a lifeboat. We need those.”

Prompt: Along with forming a golden core most cultivators gain the ability to shapeshift. What they shift into depends on the cultivator, but there are certain tendencies in bloodlines. Jiang Cheng has shifted exactly once in absolute privacy. He didn't stay shifted after finding scales and claws instead of feathers and wings, some sort of reptile from the Yu bloodline. He's since been pretending not to be able to shift at all, but you can only deny your nature for so long.