"No," Lan Wangji answers, equally soft. Sometimes, still, he must skirt around the edges of his own awareness of the way that he feels about Wei Ying. It is too much, too big, too likely to overwhelm. He breathes out through his nose, very slowly, and continues.
"He told no one. Jiang Wanyin believed himself the recipient of some great work performed by Wei Ying's mother's teacher, an immortal cultivator." Lan Wangji lowers his gaze a little further still. "I only learned of what he had done nearly twenty years later, from Wei Ying's Ghost General1." This memory is searingly vivid: Wei Ying's unconscious body in his arms, Wen Qionglin's absolute inexorability, Jiang Wanyin's face and eyes turning redder and redder with disbelieving rage. The revelation had the feeling of having a mirror held up to several years of history, everything that Lan Wangji had believed he understood cast in smudges of bronze.
Allowing himself to sound just faintly bitter, he says, "Shen Qingqiu knew." Shen Qingqiu, or Shen Yuan, or whomever, living inside an immortal body with a core he did not cultivate himself.
1This is probably another unreasonably hefty can of worms for this specific conversation, but Lan Wangji would be more than willing to explain Wen Qionglin's existence later. The Ghost General is, he must admit despite some of his own petulant drunken actions, a very good man.
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"He told no one. Jiang Wanyin believed himself the recipient of some great work performed by Wei Ying's mother's teacher, an immortal cultivator." Lan Wangji lowers his gaze a little further still. "I only learned of what he had done nearly twenty years later, from Wei Ying's Ghost General1." This memory is searingly vivid: Wei Ying's unconscious body in his arms, Wen Qionglin's absolute inexorability, Jiang Wanyin's face and eyes turning redder and redder with disbelieving rage. The revelation had the feeling of having a mirror held up to several years of history, everything that Lan Wangji had believed he understood cast in smudges of bronze.
Allowing himself to sound just faintly bitter, he says, "Shen Qingqiu knew." Shen Qingqiu, or Shen Yuan, or whomever, living inside an immortal body with a core he did not cultivate himself.
1This is probably another unreasonably hefty can of worms for this specific conversation, but Lan Wangji would be more than willing to explain Wen Qionglin's existence later. The Ghost General is, he must admit despite some of his own petulant drunken actions, a very good man.