You know how we joke about the array being like a group chat or social media? Well imagine if prayers went into a sort of heavenly email inbox. And when Xie Lian ascends for the third time, he expects his to be empty aside from the occasional spam from someone trying to schmooze up to every god they can think of, or the sadder chain emails from people desperate for help from anywhere.
Instead, he opens it and finds thousands upon thousands of prayers dating back throughout the entirety of his banishment, all from the same untraceable source. He opens random ones. Some are sweet little things, "Your Highness, wherever you are tonight, I hope you sleep well."
Others are more complex, "Your Highness, I find myself in a position where I must either seize power myself or risk it falling into other, more wicked hands. My own hands will inevitably be dirtied by wielding that power, but would they not be just as tainted if I did nothing, and let worse things happen? I know what I will choose, but I still wonder what you would do in my place."
Others still make him blush tomato red up to the tops of his ears, trailing babble still imbued with frantic eroticism and clearly never meant to actually reach him, cutting in and out like a poorly tuned radio as the devotee tries to keep thoughts from becoming prayers, panted strings of "Your Highness, Your Highness, please please please..."
The prayers date back to a few years after his second banishment, which makes sense because his inbox had been wiped when he was banished. He's surprised it's been allowed to gather all of this since: he supposes it's just that no one has even thought to notice. The centuries the prayers span makes it clear they do not come from a human, which is confusing and intriguing in equal measure.
And then, early on, he finds one that makes his heart stop and then take off again at a gallop.
"None of them are quite right, Your Highness. If I carve a thousand, ten thousand, will I eventually get it right? Will I ever be able to capture the kindness and the ferocity you radiate in something as base and cold as stone? I'll keep trying forever, or until I can see you again in the flesh. Your Highness has a believer here who still offers worship."
And that is how Xie Lian realizes that Wu Ming still exists.
(Insert long canon-divergent AU I'm too lazy to write here. I think there needs to be some kooky misunderstandings. Xie Lian is now aware that Wu Ming is out there and loves him and is looking for him and is so distracted by his determination to find him that it takes him 600k words of stubbornly denying his growing affection for Hua Cheng before he finally realizes Hua Cheng IS Wu Ming and has been desperately trying to court him for several volumes.)
hmmm why does my uterus hurt and why do i feel kinda off. weird. surely these are not the warning symptoms of a predictable biological process that occurs on a regular schedule. anyway. im going to wear white pants today.
"don't mass reblog/like :/" coward. fool. somebody just went through and liked and reblogged 64 things from my blog in the span of half an hour at most. and i've never felt more alive in my life