Chapter Text
Wei Wuxian is slumped in a high-backed armchair, nursing a pot of strong tea. It’s eleven-fifteen on a Wednesday morning, and there are no other customers in Caiyi House except for an older man engrossed in a crossword on the other side of the room. There’s no wifi in Caiyi House, which is why Jiang Cheng refuses to go there with Wei Wuxian, but it’s part of what makes it Wei Wuxian’s favorite establishment in the city. Caiyi House is a place where you go to elegantly waste time, and there’s nothing Wei Wuxian loves more than elegantly wasting time.
He takes another sip of his tea. He’d wanted something stronger, but he’s only just feeling better after two days of a nasty migraine and dizziness, and he’s a little gun-shy of drinking until he has a few more good days under his belt. It’s hard to be a louche day-drinking dilettante and also have a bunch of autoimmune bullshit from a fucked-up golden core—not that Wei Wuxian doesn’t try his best.
His phone starts ringing, and the man doing the crossword looks up reproachfully. “Sorry,” Wei Wuxian mouths, and steps outside to take the call. It’s Yanli.
“Hey, shijie, what’s up?” He hears Yanli take a ragged breath, and Wei Wuxian’s heart stops. “Shit, is everything okay?”
Yanli swallows audibly, and then manages to say, “It’s A-Ning. He—he’s been cursed.”
“He what?” Wei Wuxian almost shouts, wincing as his voice echoes off the walls of the cloakroom. “What happened? Who did it? Tell me everything.”
“That’s the thing,” Yanli says. “We have no idea. It happened at work—they called us, we’re his emergency contacts—and they said it was an accident. But Qingqing doesn’t think so.”
Even in the midst of his worries about his brother-in-law, some part of Wei Wuxian’s heart is still warmed by his shijie’s soft pet names for her wife, one of the most terrifying women Wei Wuxian has ever known. “What kind of curse is it, do you know?”
Yanli takes another deep breath. “He’s got black cracks all over his face and neck, and it’s like all his spiritual energy vanished. And he’s so pale, A-Xian, he looks like death.”
“Fuck, that sounds like a fierce corpse curse,” Wei Wuxian says. “You can’t usually get those by accident.”
In the background, Wei Wuxian can hear the faint sound of Wen Qing yelling “Thank you!” She must be hovering over Yanli’s shoulder.
“That’s why I wanted to call you,” Yanli says. “You know so much about these things, and you’ve gotten so good at solving those weird spiritual cases. Someone at A-Ning’s work suggested we hire a spiritual investigator, and of course I thought of you first…”
Wei Wuxian’s heart sinks. After the last case—three months spent tracking down a street artist who was drawing cursed pictures in front of her exes’ apartment buildings—he’d told himself he wouldn’t take on any more for a while. It’s not that he doesn’t love solving these weird mysteries. Non-cultivators don’t usually have much recourse if magic starts messing with their lives, and sometimes cultivators don’t either, plus he’s always loved unraveling difficult problems. But more attention means more people asking him for help. It also means more risk—a rogue cultivator trying to take him out as revenge, a grumpy member of cultivation enforcement getting him arrested for stepping on their toes. Wei Wuxian is just one man with depleted spiritual power, a chronic illness, and a bunch of weird cultivation workarounds that could get him in trouble with the wrong people. He can’t solve everyone’s problems.
But, he realizes as he listens to Yanli talk, he has to solve this one. First of all, it’s his shijie, her beloved wife, and his extremely sweet brother-in-law. Second of all, if he doesn’t help, Wen Qing will absolutely have him murdered.
“I’m at Caiyi House right now, but I’m not busy,” he says. “I’ll come over right away.”
****
Thirty minutes later, after his sword driver makes a dizzying descent into the streets of the Dafan Heights neighborhood, Wei Wuxian is climbing the steps of Yanli and Wen Qing’s brownstone. Wen Qing opens the door the instant Wei Wuxian rings the bell, like she’s been standing in front of it the whole time.
“What took you so long?” she demands.
Wei Wuxian toes off his shoes and leaves them on the mat. “I was over in the Gusu area, I told you!”
“Did you take the bus?”
“Did I take the bus, she asks. Who do you think you’re talking to? I called a sword like I always do, but it took forever to get one. The quality of sword drivers these days, Qing-jie—”
“Are you two bickering already?” Yanli appears in the doorway. “Be nice to her, A-Xian, she’s distraught.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Wei Wuxian says. He feels a little guilty. Obnoxious banter is his love language, and Wen Qing has given as good as she’s gotten since the day they met. But with her brother cursed, there’s no way she’s feeling up to it.
“Ah, I’m not that fragile,” Wen Qing says, shoving him in the shoulder. “Come in and talk to A-Ning.”
“And there’s chicken for lunch if you haven’t eaten,” Yanli says. “With that spicy sauce.”
Carefully, so his socks don’t snag on the wood floors, Wei Wuxian steps into their apartment. It feels like letting out a long-held breath, the way it always does. The front room is large and filled with light from the big windows that face the street. It’s stuffed, but in a cozy way, Wen Qing’s desk piled high with medical journals next to the sofa scattered with books Yanli is reviewing to add to the children’s collection at the library, prints and photos covering every wall. It smells like the chicken dish Yanli is cooking, and like cedar, and like dust, and one day Wei Wuxian is just going to hide under one of the floorboards and stay here forever.
Lying on the sofa, feet sticking out of a huge fluffy blanket, is Wen Ning. He looks up at Wei Wuxian eagerly. Wei Wuxian holds back a gasp. He’s seen fierce corpse curses before, but to see Wen Ning’s soft face so pale and the cracks coming up from under the collar of his black sweater is hard to handle.
“Xian-ge!” Wen Ning sits up, ignoring his sister’s glares. “It’s so good to see you! Did you come from a party?”
“A party? No, why?”
“Oh, I just thought—because of what you’re wearing.”
Wei Wuxian looks down at what he’s wearing. Skinny black jeans, a billowing, silky red blouse, his black cashmere-blend cardigan. It’s the sort of outfit he wears when he’s finally feeling good again after days of bad symptoms, a mood lifter. “You don’t need an occasion to dress like you’re having a good time, didi.” He doesn’t need to turn around to know Wen Qing is rolling her eyes. “But what happened to you? Did you start a blood feud without me? You know I told you to let me handle all your enemies.”
Wen Ning lets out a dry, cracked chuckle. “I...I don’t really know.”
“Well, you have to tell me everything you know,” Wei Wuxian says, sitting down on the other end of the sofa. “I’m going to solve this for you, okay?”
Wen Ning grins. It looks like a wound in his pale face, and Wei Wuxian’s heart aches all over again. “Okay.”
“This happened at work?” Wei Wuxian draws a notebook out of his pocket and flips it open in the smooth, dramatic gesture that he practices in front of the mirror at home. “What were you doing when it happened?”
“Uh, I was looking through some talismans. One of our clients sent us a bunch of sample talismans that add flavor to meat, like you’ve been marinating it all day, and we were going to test them out at lunch. Which is really cool! And I offered to go into the conference room and pick a couple good ones out of the pile. But I didn’t realize, it’s kind of a lot of pressure having to decide what everyone else gets for lunch. So I was getting kind of overwhelmed, and, and I dropped a bunch of them everywhere, and I leaned down to pick one up, and the next thing I knew I was lying on the ground and people were all staring at me.”
“That’s definitely suspicious,” Wei Wuxian says, writing as fast as he can. “Wait, your client makes meat-flavoring talismans?”
“Oh yeah! They’re one of the top foodservice talisman manufacturers in the whole region! It was a huge deal when we got them, we worked so hard to pull in that account. Next week we were going to try their talisman that helps ice cream stay frozen for longer and make root beer floats on Friday afternoon. But I guess I’m not going to be there for that.” Wen Ning frowns. “They said I had to stay home until at least a week after the curse lifts, in case I’m contagious. Company policy.”
“That’s stupid,” Wei Wuxian says. “Curses aren’t contagious, and especially not the fierce corpse curse. Most of the time, the curse only works if you specify the person you’re targeting...” Wei Wuxian feels like his brain has finally woken up. “Shit, that means you could have been cursed on purpose. Someone might be out to get you, didi.”
“I told you so!” Wen Qing crows. “I knew it couldn’t have been an accident.”
“Who do you think it would be?” Wei Wuxian asks.
Wen Ning frowns. “I never thought I had any enemies there. Most people are really nice! At least they are during work. I don’t really see anybody from the office outside of work. They have all these dinners and happy hours and things, but I only ever go if everybody else is going, and I always try to leave early because I get so awkward and I feel like everybody’s looking at me.” He gently sighs. “But somebody wouldn’t curse another person over something like that, would they?”
“They might if they were petty enough,” Wei Wuxian says. “But you’re right, it seems like a pretty flimsy reason. I’m going to need some more inside information. Who should I talk to first?” He writes SUSPECTS on a fresh page, then underlines it. The characters are crooked, but Wei Wuxian likes to think that future cultivators reading his notebooks will find it charming.
Wen Ning glances over Wei Wuxian’s shoulder. Wei Wuxian turns around and sees Wen Qing hovering behind him, a determined look on her face.
“Oh no, did you two already come up with a scheme?” Wei Wuxian puts his head in his hands. “Fuck, what am I in for?”
“Well, it’s just—Peony Marketing is such an insular place,” Wen Ning says.
“Incestuous,” Wen Qing corrects.
“Wait, your company is called Peony? And it has nothing to do with perfumes or gardens?”
“It represents the wealth and success we attain for our clients!” Wen Ning says cheerfully.
“I’m going to pretend you did not just say that,” Wei Wuxian says. “This corporate stuff bums me out. So, Peony is a...marketing factory…”
“A marketing agency,” Wen Ning says, and he still sounds way too happy about what is objectively deeply boring. “A business-to-business marketing agency for talisman manufacturers. So, we do the marketing for companies who make talismans for other companies.”
“And you enjoy that? Holy fuck, A-Ning, were you cursed already when you took this job?”
“It’s interesting,” Wen Ning says defensively.
“Sorry, sorry, I don’t mean to trash your career. If it’s good enough for my little brother-in-law, it’s good enough for me. But I can’t think of anything more boring.”
“Oh, I’m sorry you feel that way,” Wen Ning says. He sounds genuinely sorry. “Because I told them you could temp for me while I was out, and they want you to start tomorrow. Jie said it would make it easier for you to investigate.”
Wei Wuxian whips around and glares at Wen Qing. “You said what?”
Wen Qing throws up her hands. “A place like that, if you try to get them to talk without being one of them, you’ll set off alarm bells. You’re not cultivation enforcement, you don’t have the authority to run an investigation, and whoever is responsible will just scatter. But if you’re on the team, you’ll be able to learn so much more.”
“Fine, fine, I get it. But I’ve got a reputation now, Qing-jie. Maybe someone on staff has heard of the mysterious Master Wei, spiritual investigator, and they’ll put two and two together—”
“Oh, I told them that your name was Mo Xuanyu and you had freelanced with me at a past job,” Wen Ning says. “Yanli-jie gave me some of the stuff you wrote in college so I could use it for your sample, and apparently it was good enough for Mr. Lan—he’s the creative director—and jiejie made you a fake freelancer profile with really high ratings.”
“I hope I never have to investigate you,” Wei Wuxian says to Wen Qing, who smirks at him. “Okay. Okay, I can work with this. Mo Xuanyu, hmm? Where’d you come up with that?”
“Remember when I used to play that online game Ancient Cultivation World?” Wen Ning says. “Mo Xuanyu was my character name.”
“Of course,” Wei Wuxian says. He can feel the faintest sigh from Wen Qing behind him. Maybe she’s also remembering the four months post-college and pre-employment when Wen Ning spent ten hours a day parked in front of his computer pretending to be a cultivator from the third century. Those were dark days.
“I told them that you were a hard worker who was friendly and creative but not flashy,” Wen Ning says. “They don’t really like flashy in the copy department.” He gives Wei Wuxian’s outfit another look. “I can lend you some of my sweaters if you want.”
Wei Wuxian laughs. “I’ll let you know. Maybe I’ll buy my very own boring corporate wardrobe. Somewhere Jiang Cheng will be beaming and he won’t even know why.”
Wen Ning makes the specific face he always makes when Wei Wuxian mentions Jiang Cheng, a mix between chagrin, gentle sympathy, and suppressed fury.
“Anyway!” Wei Wuxian says jauntily. “Tomorrow morning? I’ll be ready, A-Ning. I’ll write a million boring-ass marketing campaigns if it helps me find out who cursed you.”
Wen Ning gives him a real smile. “Thanks, Xian-ge.”
Wei Wuxian saunters into the kitchen in search of lunch. Yanli is standing in front of the stove, stirring the chicken to keep it warm.
“Mmm, that smells good,” Wei Wuxian says. “And I’ve got a plan to help A-Ning, so I think I’ve earned my lunch.”
“I heard!” Yanli says. “Are you sure it’s going to be okay?”
“Some time in an office is not going to kill me, no matter how boring I find the corporate rat race.”
“No, I mean—” Yanli turns away from the stove. “With your illness and everything. Are you sure you’re okay to work a nine to five?”
Wei Wuxian’s arms are suddenly shaking. “Have you been talking to Qing-jie about me?”
“You’re my little brother, A-Xian. I worry! After you didn’t come to the anniversary party—”
“Oh, right.” He’d been bedridden for four days that time, after pushing himself too hard on a case and draining what little spiritual energy he had. The only reason he hadn’t felt worse about missing the party was that he’d been too tired to have feelings at all.
“She told me that you had migraines and dizzy spells sometimes, and that you didn’t want to talk about it, but she helped you whenever she could. Is that so bad?”
“No.” Wei Wuxian hangs his head in shame. “You’re right. It’s just…”
“I know, I know,” Yanli says. “Xianxian is a big boy who can handle his own problems.” She’s teasing, but her tone is too light to sting. “Just let me look out for you sometimes, okay? Don’t put your big sister out of a job.”
“Fine.” Wei Wuxian sighs, faux-dramatically. Yanli turns back to the chicken. “Anyway, Qing-jie is the one who came up with this idea. If she thinks my shitty body can handle office work, then I’m not worried.” He’s a little worried, but Yanli doesn’t have to know that.
“You’re right,” Yanli says, more cheerfully. “Want to help me serve the chicken?”
There’s a silence, as Wei Wuxian takes plates from the cupboard and Yanli heaps steaming mounds of chicken and rice onto each one. He scrambles to think of a topic to fill the silence, so that Yanli doesn’t ask questions like why don’t you like to talk about your illness or when did it start or how come you never bring this up when Jiang Cheng yells at you for being a lazy idiot with no job. But Yanli lets the silence persist, and pretty soon they’re eating chicken with Wen Qing and Wen Ning like it’s an ordinary family dinner.
Wei Wuxian leaves shortly after lunch, armed with as much information about Peony Marketing as he could fit in his notebook and a container full of leftover chicken and rice. It’s one of those fancy reusable containers that’s made of glass and comes with a talisman to prevent leaks, and he spends a few minutes wondering what, if anything, a person could say about leak-proofing talismans that would entice another person to buy one. Isn’t their usefulness pretty obvious? He sighs. He needs to figure out how to convincingly fake being a marketer in less than twenty-four hours.
Three blocks over from where Yanli and Wen Qing live is Tiannu Teahouse, a charmingly dingy relic from the days before you needed a doctor’s salary to afford Dafan Heights real estate. It serves excellent tea and mediocre food to poets and screenwriters, and is the perfect place, Wei Wuxian decides, to get into character as a copywriter. He orders a large pot of jasmine tea and the least stale-looking bun and wedges himself into a tiny chair. He feels conspicuous and overdressed, but everyone is looking at their books or their laptops, so he stretches out his legs, opens his notebook, and tries to concentrate on the notes from Wen Ning. But before too long, he’s doing little more than staring into space, reminiscing.
****
He’d never meant to start solving spiritual cases. With a dual degree in classical cultivation and talisman theory from Gusu University and a resume that included the school newspaper, the archery team, and a brief stint on student government, he could do anything he wanted. Jiang Cheng was pushing him to go into cultivation consulting, joining one of the firms that helped larger organizations manage their spiritual affairs, so they could take over the family business from Uncle Jiang when he retired. A few of his college buddies wanted him to help them start a talisman business. Personally, Wei Wuxian wasn’t ready to decide yet, and he didn’t really see why everyone else was in such a hurry when they had their whole lives ahead of them. He was taking a gap year and working odd jobs until he made his mind up. But then a dead body had turned up right outside Jiang Cheng’s apartment, and everything had changed.
The body was covered with lightning marks. The injuries bore all the signs of a crime of hatred. It turned out to be a middle manager at the cultivation consulting firm where Jiang Cheng worked, a man known for being overbearing and cruel to junior staffers like Jiang Cheng. In the six months since he started the job, Jiang Cheng had already gained a reputation for harboring resentments and letting his temper get the best of him. Even Wei Wuxian, eternally loyal to his brother, could see why Jiang Cheng was the prime suspect.
He knew Jiang Cheng didn’t kill the man for two reasons: first, leaving the body right outside the apartment was an amateur move unworthy of Jiang Cheng’s intellect and cultivation level; and second, Jiang Cheng swore to Wei Wuxian, over and over, that he had nothing to do with it. Wei Wuxian believed him. But Jiang Cheng wouldn’t say more than that. He wouldn’t even give an alibi to the investigator from cultivation enforcement. The investigator tried Inquiry, but the dead man’s spirit wouldn’t talk—not uncommon, for a recent death from a crime of hatred. Many such spirits stayed out of the reach of Inquiry until their killers were dead and they could be certain they weren’t being summoned to be tortured a second time. Still, it meant there was no way to prove Jiang Cheng hadn’t done it.
Wei Wuxian tried every tactic he could think of to learn Jiang Cheng’s whereabouts on the night of the murder. All of them failed. Wei Wuxian was stubborn, but Jiang Cheng was even more stubborn. So Wei Wuxian sat down with a stack of textbooks and his browser open to CultivationFinder, and set out to research how to contact the spirits of the violently murdered.
It was easier than he thought. All he needed to do was create a few talismans, set them up in an array, and present his offering, and the spirit would talk. There was just one small problem—he had to offer his qi. And not just some of it, either. The articles and books differed on exactly how much the ritual drained your golden core, and whether any of it was recoverable, but the consensus seemed to be that everyone who performed it lost some of their golden core function permanently.
When Wei Wuxian thinks about it now, that’s the moment that comes to his mind. Staring at the words on the page, trying to absorb them, cursor hovering at the ready to close the tab. And then imagining Jiang Cheng locked up, or banished, or stripped of his spiritual tools. Jiang Cheng forbidden from cultivating, even. Jiang Cheng’s prospects ruined, his goals in tatters. Wei Wuxian could keep this from happening, and all it would take was his golden core. Who wouldn’t make that choice?
He’d made the talismans. He’d added a soundproofing one, for his apartment door, so none of his neighbors would barge in. He’d called up Wen Qing, the top medical student in the year above him and his favorite of Yanli’s friends, to supervise. She had raged at him, pleaded with him to reconsider, threatened to tell Jiang Cheng, but ultimately, she had agreed. ”I can’t lie to you, if it was A-Ning, I’d spill my own blood.” She brought along Wen Ning, who brought along the fancy mic he’d used for radio shows in college so he could record what the spirit said. Wei Wuxian had locked the door, and then—
He can’t remember it straight-on, not the way you recall ordinary events, but there were things he’ll be thinking about for the rest of his life. The hazy blue light cast by the spirit entering the talisman array, making the whole room look like a fish tank. Wen Qing biting her lip hard, keeping one hand on her medical bag the whole time. The inchoate worry in Wen Ning’s eyes. Mostly, the pain, searing and bright, like being stabbed by a beam of light. He wanted to scream, but he had to ask the spirit questions. He thinks he screamed when he was done, the spirit vanishing as quickly as it came, but everything after that moment was a black pit, until he woke up in a hospital bed four days later.
Cultivation enforcement had used the recordings to capture the real killer. Jiang Cheng’s name was cleared. Seventy-five percent of Wei Wuxian’s golden core was permanently drained.
Recovery felt endless, an eternity of days and nights in the dingy little hospital room. Wen Qing was telling everyone who asked that Wei Wuxian had mono, and sometimes Wei Wuxian half-believed it himself, he was so tired. And then the doctor pronounced him fully recovered, and he was still tired. They gave him a folder stuffed with care notes and a couple of prescriptions and a faux-cheery little brochure with a blue-green cover that said Coping With Golden Core Loss, and then he was out on the street in the bright, dizzying world, with nothing protecting him.
For three months, he barely left his apartment. He told himself he was figuring out what to do next. Mostly, he ate a lot of instant noodles and got drunk at three in the afternoon and deleted every single text message he got. As far as he could tell, everyone but the Wen siblings thought he was either still dealing with mono or getting bored of his odd jobs, and that was just fine with Wei Wuxian. They could think whatever they wanted, as long as they didn’t know the truth.
When he had more energy, he put himself through half-remembered sword drills, trying to see what his body could and couldn’t do now. Every new thing he couldn’t do was like losing part of his core all over again, another moment of bleak and painful memory.
He might have lived this way for years, were it not for Wen Ning, who pounded on his door one day so incessantly that Wei Wuxian had no choice but to let him in.
“I’m fine,” Wei Wuxian said the moment he opened the door. “You don’t need to check on me.”
Wen Ning furrowed his eyebrows. “Okay,” he said, drawing out the word skeptically. “I’m actually here because one of my friends has an imp in her dishwasher and her landlord is being a shithead about it, and cultivation enforcement won’t return her calls, and I thought maybe you would be able to help.”
Dealing with an imp in a dishwasher didn’t require a fully functioning golden core. Wei Wuxian took his first shower in far too long, headed over to Wen Ning’s friend’s apartment, and promptly dispatched the imp. The traces left behind by the dissipated imp made it clear that someone had deliberately placed it in the dishwasher when it was installed—the shithead landlord, it turned out. Wei Wuxian got rid of six other dishwasher imps in the same building, called cultivation enforcement on the landlord, and went home feeling better than he had in months. The next week, one of the residents whose dishwasher he’d de-imped called him with a tale of mysterious chaos going on after hours at the grocery store where she worked.
Just like that, Wei Wuxian had something to do again, and the faintest beginnings of a positive reputation. He couldn’t practice the vast majority of what he’d learned in college, but he could investigate weird spiritual occurrences, and that wasn’t nothing. He put up a listing on the same site where he’d found his other odd jobs, and he even had business cards made: Master Wei | Independent Spiritual Investigator | No Problem Too Small or Embarrassing. His fee was low enough that most people could afford it, and some of his clients insisted on paying even more. It wasn’t consultant money, but it was enough for what Wei Wuxian needed, and it meant he didn’t have to take a more consistent job, where his health might have been more of a problem.
Ten years later, sitting in Tiannu Teahouse with his head resting on one hand and his legs stretched out beneath the table, Wei Wuxian can look back with something approaching contentment. For everything he’d lost along with the golden core—the chance at a stable career, almost all of his college friends, the ability to leap out of bed without getting lightheaded—his life hasn’t turned out so bad. He’s got his siblings, even if one of them ends every conversation they have by scowling at him, and Wen Ning and Wen Qing. He’s got the inheritance from his great-grandmother Baoshen Sanren, and the trust fund his parents set up before they died, so he’ll never starve even if he can’t work. He’s got spiritual cases to solve, everything from haunted closets to rogue cultivators wreaking havoc. And whatever else is happening, he can always get a pot of tea or a cup of wine. Wei Wuxian shakes his head, pulls himself back to the present, and starts reading through Wen Ning’s notes again.