#Madam Lan never got to see her kids grow up into teenagers after all. She only had sons. Never daughters.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Thank you all for voting in the poll to decide who was going to be the leader of the band! It turned out to be such a close race!

[robininthelabyrinth]

the nie sect is known for strong, angry sect leaders and strong, angry women; nie mingjue is just the first to be both. she refuses to let this burden fall on her little brother, who is far too young for it (he's barely old enough to understand that their father is dead, and still sucks his thumb at night)--she can swing a saber like the best of them, and, well... it's not like there are many nie elders to object anyway

also on ao3

The stories said that Nie Mingjue’s mother was a goddess.

They said she descended down from the mountains, crisp as a winter breeze and tall as a temple statute; they said Lao Nie fell in love with her the first moment he saw her and married her the next; they said that the heavens were jealous of their love and summoned her to return –

It was a little nicer than saying that Nie Mingjue’s mother was a rogue cultivator that lingered in Qinghe just long enough for a marriage ceremony and a baby before remembering that she preferred living alone.

Still, as Nie Mingjue grew up – and she did grow up, up and up and up – people started passing around the old story more and more. Lao Nie rolled his eyes but didn’t stop the rumors, which Nie Mingjue interpreted to mean that he thought they were useful somehow, though she never quite figured out the reasoning there. What difference did it make if she were the child of a goddess or a mortal woman?

Either way, she was still a girl.

Oh, Qinghe was famous for its indifference to such things: in Qinghe they don’t care if you’re a man or woman, the story went, as long as you can swing a saber, and it was even mostly true. No one would raise an eyebrow if you shared your bed with a man one night and a woman the next, no one cared if you said you were one for a week and the other for a month…

Still, for all of Qinghe’s indifference, the Nie sect had never had a female sect leader.

At least, not officially – there were a number of sect leader’s wives who were terrifying enough to have deserved the title – and officially was what mattered, in this case. The sect leader was the fulcrum on which the sect turned, the core of their fearsome cultivation: if water ran downhill, then evil flowed up, and the sect leader’s saber spirit was always by far the fiercest in the sect.

That was why Nie Mingjue’s ancestors died so much more quickly than her cousins – why she had plenty of great-uncles and great-aunts, and a family consisting of only her father, herself, and her younger brother.

“Do you not want me to be sect leader?” she asked her father once, because he had deliberately gone out and gotten himself a new wife to have a child with, showing great relief when it turned out to be a boy. “Is it something I’ve done, or haven’t done?”

“It’s not that,” her father had said at once, with such surety that her fears of inadequacy had been relieved. “It’s only – there are sacrifices that must be made, if the sect leader is a woman. A saber spirit powerful enough to support the sect cannot be allowed to escape.”

She hadn’t understood it at the time, being too young, but then she got a little older and started bleeding, and an old auntie came and told her why the bleeding mattered.

The sect leader’s saber was too strong, too fierce, too alive: full of resentful energy, almost like a ghost, hateful and vicious, and their bond with their master was too close. Normal swords could be used by anyone; only the powerful refused any hand but their masters – the powerful, and the Nie sabers.

A sect leader who was a woman could never have a child, lest that child’s soul be stolen away in the womb and replaced with something else.

“So I won’t have children,” Nie Mingjue said, when her father died before his time. “Easy enough.”

There were elders enough in her sect, those that had been lucky enough not to be part of the main clan line and to escape the burden of being sect leader; they looked at each other with concern.

Nie Mingjue wasn’t about to let them put the title of sect leader on Huaisang, then only a child of seven, not when there was her father to avenge, and so she reached up behind her back and brought Baxia down on the table in front of them, cleaving the old wooden table in half.

“I have the bloodline, and my saber’s strong enough to bear the strain,” she said while they stared: that table had survived more than a few of her father and grandfather’s strikes, only to yield to hers as if it were nothing. “If you want to protest, challenge me now.”

In the end, they didn’t.

And so she became sect leader.

The sacrifice of any future children turned out to be the easy part.

Jin Guangshan stared at her breasts whenever she sat across from him, and tried to stumble into her to take advantage of the fact that the top of his head only reached her chin; she made sure never to accept any invitation to ever be alone with him, especially when he was drunk. His wife glared at her as if it were her fault that her chest and hips had grown proportionate with the rest of her, giving her curves that were relatively rare among her countrymen.

Jiang Fengmian might have been all right, she supposed, if his wife hadn’t hated her nearly as much: Madame Yu had been childhood friends with Madame Jin, Nie Mingjue vaguely recalled, but she suspected the real reason was the Jiang sect’s inclination to keep women away from politics no matter how high their cultivation.

“How are you supposed to ‘attempt the impossible’ if you refuse to let half of your population even try?” she asked Jiang Fengmian once, and he just shook his head and tried to pat her head (she glared death at him until he retracted the offending limb before it could be chopped off), and said she wouldn’t understand, that Qinghe was too idiosyncratic, too indiscriminate, that other places were different.

(His daughter gave Nie Mingjue a flower after that meeting, blushing red to her ears, and followed it up with a bowl of soup, and to this day Nie Mingjue still didn’t know if it was because of what she’d said or if everyone in Yunmeng was just as indiscriminate as Qinghe and they just didn’t admit it to themselves.)

Even the ever-polite Lan sect wasn’t friendly.

The irritating part was that she was sure they would have gotten on well if she had been born a man, or at least presented as one, as she would have if she’d been a misaligned reincarnation; alas, she wasn’t, she was a woman, and the Lan sect rules dictated that men and women could not grow too close or intimate. Lan Qiren guarded his nephews against her as if they were treasures, and it took quite a while before she finally met Lan Xichen face to face.

“Wow,” he said, blinking at her. “They weren’t kidding when they said you were a goddess.”

“No, that’s my mother,” Nie Mingjue said automatically.

Lan Xichen smiled, his eyes turning into crescents. “No,” he said. “I’m sure I meant what I said.”

Nie Mingjue felt something jump in her chest, which had never happened before. But she had fought long and hard to be taken seriously as a sect leader despite her youth and her gender, and she wasn’t willing to give that up by falling, like every other female cultivator her age, for the man ranked first on the list of most attractive young masters.

(Nie Mingjue was ranked seventh. She’s not even sure how she got on the list, but apparently there were plenty of female cultivators who were happy to vote for her no matter her gender.)

Besides, even if her heart did beat a little faster whenever Lan Xichen smiled at her, and even if he indicated through some hints that he might be inclined to feel the same, it didn’t matter. She knew, even if he didn’t, that she wouldn’t bear children in this life – she loved Baxia dearly, she did, but her willful, vicious saber would make a terrible child – and she couldn’t impose that on anyone else.

Anyway, she’d figured out pretty quickly that Lan Xichen’s younger brother was a cutsleeve – whatever Lan Qiren might think, pornography was a perfectly reasonable gift for a teenager, especially given how successful Nie Huaisang’s side business was – and that meant Lan Xichen had to be the one to have descendants.

Nie Mingjue had heard all the stories about what happens when a man marries one woman who can’t give him children and another who can, and she wasn’t interested in that.

So they were friends.

She wasn’t sure if it got easier or harder when she met Meng Yao, who was small and delicate and scheming in a way that she found ridiculously endearing.

He wasn’t expecting her to be a woman, she thought: he’d set himself up on a mountain path, buckets of water at his side and a pitiful expression on his face as he chewed on hard bread without even taking a sip of the water right beside him to wet his throat, and when she’d stopped right in front of him to ask him about it he’d looked up at her and his eyes had gotten to be half the size of his face.

Nie Mingjue might’ve fallen for the gambit if it wasn’t for the way she could almost see the way he was rapidly reevaluating his entire strategy in real time – it almost made her nostalgic about listening to her cousins teach each other the warning signs of a white lotus seductress selling misery and purity.

Still, in the end it didn’t really matter if he was deliberately exaggerating his misery to sell it to her – the responsibility for good behavior was on the bully, not the victim, so she went and scolded the people inside the cave.

Afterwards, she took him out to walk with her.

“I’d already spoken with some people about you; it seems like you’ve established your merits in the battlefield and off,” she told him. “You don’t also need to be pitiful to get my attention.”

Meng Yao smiled self-depreciatingly. “I find that men have a soft spot for people they think need them.”

“Well, I’m not a man, am I?” she pointed out in return. She thought about it for a moment, then decided, as always, to be blunt. “I might spend most of my time now with men, but I spent my childhood with women; a woman’s tricks don’t work that well on me. What is it that you want?”

He looked at her with raised eyebrows.

“Do you want to be my deputy? I’m willing, since you seem competent enough,” she said. “But if your goal is to get back into your father’s good graces by reporting on me, don’t bother. He has spies enough for that – he doesn’t need a son to do it.”

“Perhaps I just want to show him what I’m capable of,” Meng Yao said.

Nie Mingjue laughed. “At my side? If you’d like to try, I’m not going to stop you, but I’ll tell you now that the merits that Jin Guangshan values may not be to your taste.”

She made him her deputy, and he lived up to her expectations – he was efficient, capable, competent. He was good at understanding people, which she wasn’t, and he could figure out within moments what any given person wanted.  Just as importantly, he lived up to the principles she prized, valuing the lives of the common folk as well as Nie cultivators; he did what she asked of him, and he did it well.

It would be a shame to lose him, she thought, but she still brought him with her to a wartime meeting with the Jin sect.

Afterwards, she made her excuses to leave early, as she always did, and when Meng Yao showed up later that evening to drop off the usual round of spies’ reports, Nie Mingjue could smell blood from where his nails had pierced his palms.

“He asked you if you were fucking me,” she said, accepting the papers. It wasn’t a guess. “You can tell him that you are, if you think it would help your standing with him.”

Meng Yao seemed repulsed by her suggestion, which amused her.

“Don’t you mind that half the camp thinks I got my position by climbing into your bed?” he asked her, a wrinkle in his brow suggesting that the question mattered to him. “Most of them can’t decide if I’m your boy-toy or merely stupid enough not to notice that I’m deliberately seducing you for my own ends, but either way the implication is highly unflattering. Don’t you care?”

“…not really?” Nie Mingjue said. “I’ve been sect leader since I was fifteen and more than half the sect leaders that currently report to me have been treating me like I’m a walking collection of fuckable female body parts since then; they get extremely irritable any time I open my mouth and remind them I’m not. Keeping a boy-toy is positively tame compared to the rest of it…you must have heard the one that says that I’m a frigid bitch that can only be satisfied by fucking my saber? That one’s a perennial.”

Meng Yao’s expression suggested he had, in fact, heard that one.

“My father always told me that the more people talk behind your back, the harder you have to work to leave them with nothing to say,” Nie Mingjue continued. “But I’ve found that they’ll find something to say, and if there isn’t anything, they’ll make something up. There’s no way to stop gossip.”

Meng Yao was frowning. “That seems unduly pessimistic. Not to borrow our enemies’ words, but if you shine like a sun in the heavens –”

“I’m the sect leader of one of the Great Sects,” Nie Mingjue said. “I’m a war hero. I have a reputation as a upright and righteous person. And yet between me and Wen Ruohan, who’s to say whose name is dragged through the mud more? They curse at him as the man who ordered the rape of their wives in one breath and talk eagerly about how much they’d like to rape me the next…Meng Yao, don’t take insult when I say this, but you could be as wise as a sage, as powerful as a landslide, as beneficent as a buddha and they’d still ask each other behind their sleeves what you learned from being a whore’s son.”

His expression was rather ugly – nothing at all like his usual calm smile.

“I usually get over it by associating myself with better people,” she added. “Have you met Lan Xichen yet?”

It turned out he had, and that they were rather fond of each other, too. Very fond, to judge by Meng Yao’s starry-eyed expression, and wouldn’t it be just her luck if the two men she was attracted to – and which she’d refused on the basis of not wanting to cut off their family lines – ended up pairing up together, which would also cut off their family lines?

Of course, Meng Yao was off limits for other reasons as well…

One day she overheard them talking about Meng Yao possibly leaving, probably intentionally on Meng Yao’s part, and she walked inside rolling her eyes already. “If you want to go, go,” she said. “I’ll write you a recommendation letter, for whatever it’s worth – he’s got a thick enough face that it might not do you any good, but he’s already noticed you, so hopefully that’ll be something.”

“Sect Leader Nie –”

“I didn’t promote you out of a sense of gratitude,” she said impatiently. “You’ve always wanted to get back to him, for whatever reason; I’m not going to hold you back.”

He smiled at that, and Lan Xichen smiled with him.

Really, there were limits to the sort of things you could expect a person to resist, even with willpower like hers.

“Have you decided that you will go?” she asked Meng Yao. “Is it your final decision? Let me know now.”

“It is.”

“Good,” she said. “You’re fired as my deputy. Also, I’d like to take the two of you to bed, if you’re similarly inclined.”

They gaped at her.

“What?” she said, crossing her arms. “He’s not my deputy anymore, there’s nothing immoral about it. Besides, nobody will get any stupid ideas about marriage if there’s three of us involved. It is only if you’re interested, though; I won’t be offended if you say no –”

Lan Xichen was kissing her before she even finished the sentence, so she assumed the answer was not, in fact, no, and Meng Yao’s reaction was equally enthusiastic – though perhaps equally wasn’t the right word, given how both she and Meng Yao ended up tied up in Lan Xichen’s forehead ribbon before the night was done.

“I knew it was a kink,” Meng Yao said, inspecting it with an expression of satisfaction, as if he hadn’t just demonstrated a fair share of his own. “Something so prominently displayed, Xichen-gege, for shame…”

Lan Xichen didn’t show so much as a hint of shame about it. “We’ll have to do this again,” he said. “I’m not even a fourth of the way down my list.”

“There’s a list?” Nie Mingjue asked, stretching out her legs to see how they felt after all that tossing around. “Tell me this is written down somewhere – no, tell me your uncle found it.”

Lan Xichen shuddered. “Thank you, da-jie. I didn’t need that mental image – it’d be like the time you gave Wangji pornography, only worse.”

Meng Yao decided the best way to muffle his laughter was in Nie Mingjue’s shoulder. With his teeth.

Nie Mingjue gave him a half-hearted shove. “Get off,” she grumbled. “I need to go drink some medicine to prevent contraception before we encounter disaster – this wasn’t planned, you know. I was intending on dying a virgin.”

“Da-jie, for you to die a virgin, that would mean – uh – that would – you were…? Mingjue!”

Nie Mingjue gave them both a glare. “Don’t tell me you two listened to those stupid rumors. I don’t take just anyone to my bed.”

“And you decided on two of us?” Meng Yao said, blinking at her. “Da-jie is very ambitious.”

“Not as much as you,” she said, rolling her eyes and pushing away their grasping hands. “What’s your real plan, anyway? You know Jin Guangshan won’t accept you as a son just because you show up and volunteer.”

“I don’t need to be his son, I just need to wear his colors,” Meng Yao said. “It’ll make for a better story when I defect to the Wen sect – as a spy, don’t look at me like that. You know I’d be good at it. And if I get close enough to Wen Ruohan, I can kill him. I’ll give you his head as a present, da-jie.”

“Unfair, A-Yao! I can’t compete with that,” Lan Xichen complained. “You have to let me help.”

‘Help’ turned out to be Lan Xichen allowing himself to be captured and Meng Yao stabbing Wen Ruohan in the back when he was about to start torturing the First Jade of Lan – Nie Mingjue had a headache and a strong desire to kill them both.

Even if they did bring her Wen Ruohan’s head.

“Stop looking so pleased with yourselves,” she scolded them – both Lan Xichen and Meng Yao, now officially Jin Guangyao (thanks to a bit of pointed haggling over which clan got what war merits and how that applied to the division of the spoils of war), looked positively smug. “What if you’d died?”

“But we didn’t,” Lan Xichen pointed out. “And now we’re here to claim our reward from our goddess.”

“Did I promise you a reward?”

Two sets of puppy dog eyes…and they did help her avenge her father.

“Fine. What do you want? If I can give it to you, it’s yours.”

They looked at each other, and Nie Mingjue immediately started to worry: they’d had time to think about it. That was dangerous.

“We want to marry you,” Lan Xichen said.

“Both of us,” Jin Guangyao said. “To avoid any jealousy.”

“That’s…not how that works,” Nie Mingjue said blankly. Men married multiple wives, not women multiple men: they had words for women who did that, none of them complimentary. Or legal, for that matter. “And anyway, I’ve already told you, I can’t have children. Huaisang’s my heir, and he always will be – you deserve to continue your family lines. Both of you.”

They exchanged looks again.

“That’s fine by me,” Jin Guangyao said. “Jin Zixuan’s the heir anyway.”

“I have plenty of cousins,” Lan Xichen said. “Can we go to bed now? I was injured in the line of duty –” He had a scraped knee and exactly three bruises, she’d counted. “– and I need some care and attention.”

“And an agreement of marriage from da-jie,” Jin Guangyao said, because he had a lawyer’s eye for such things.

This was almost certain to cause some sort of political disaster.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t settle for sworn brothers or something?” she tried.

They wouldn’t.

(The stories said that the leader of the Nie sect was a goddess – a war goddess, a goddess of the blade, sharp as the saber she carried and tall as a temple statute; they said that her two lovers fell in love with her the first moment they saw her and fought a war that upturned the entire cultivation world just to win the right to claim her hand; they said that they served as her right and left hands, and that when the three of them were together, the venerated triad, they could never be defeated.)

[laryna6]

MZDS AU where LXC and LWJ’s dad goes on the run with his gf instead of capturing her and basically imprisoning them both. They disguise themselves and eventually start traveling with WWX’s parents, meaning they don’t die in a night hunt bc backup from Murder Mom and Dad who is very righteous and dedicated to following the Lan traditions especially the ones about True Love. 

After she’s raped by the Jin sect leader, the Su sect leader’s wife denounces him everywhere by sending letters and also goes on the run (possibly because her husband refuses to believe her that it wasn’t consensual/she’s concerned for the child?).

Madam Jin, with the assistance of Madam Yu, has JGS assassinated and Madam Jin like lets it be known that she’s willing to take in her husband’s bastards/see them raised right. JGY’s mom can’t leave the brothel bc she’s property and her son’s too young to travel on his own, so she sends a letter asking if they could pick him up - Madam Jin shows up and buys her, figuring she could use some help with the children - and she can also tutor the girls in music and such. JGY and QS grow up sibs and QS beats up people who make fun of JGY for his mom being an ex-prostitute.

With the example of his parents, LWJ is much more aware of Feelings and decides at a young age that Wei Ying Is Mine. LWJ doesn’t initiate Getting Into Trouble, but he goes along with Wei Ying bc Must Protec and draws graffiti, steals chickens and jumps off cliffs bc Wei Ying was doing it. Wei Ying is like ‘sure I’ll marry Lan Zhan when I grow up!’ Their parents aww except Murder Mom, who is awwing internally. LXC is desensitized to shenanigans by growing up with the shenanigans of Wei Ying and Wei Ying’s other half and develops epic level chill. He has seen it all.

WWX’s parents and the people who aren’t the AWOL Lan sect leader and his murder gf go and visit the Jiangs every so often. WWX never develops a fear of dogs (and actually fails to develop a sane level of fear of anything, because his parents are badass cultivators and he has Lan Zhan to protect him too), so they’re fine playing with Jiang Cheng and his puppies. Madam Yu and Murder Mom got along GREAT and Murder Mom may have been the one to dress up as a Wen Sect cultivator and kill JGS. LXC and JYL hanging out being the chill sibs. It’s discovered that JYL isn’t suited to the Jiang sect’s method of cultivation, so she goes and visits the other sects to study cultivation techniques and gets good results with the Nie methods, which makes JC go wha. Madam Yu is Very Pleased. NHS starts calling her big sis and JC is Jealous.

The parents decide to all send their kids to the Lan sect at the same time. LQR is Concerned about his nephews growing up with Murder Sis-in-Law but they’re such calm, dutiful boys-and then Wei Ying yells to Lan Zhan about going on a booze run and LWJ is out while LXC sips his tea. WWX and LWJ hanging out in the library pavillion copying texts together.

JZX still does Teenage Rebellion claiming he’s too good for JYL, which makes JC and his dogs growl at him while WWX just points and laughs, because JYL is fantastic and JZX is a dumbass if he can’t see how great she is. JZX having his sexual awakening when JYL gets back from the Nie sect and he sees her practicing with a saber as big as she is. Unfortunately NHS wrote to NMJ about JZX dissing JYL and NMJ showed up at Lotus Pier to make it very clear that if her engagement were to fall through, clearly she belongs at Nie Sect (the brothers each ship each other with JYL). JZX realizing that crap, his competition is NMJ...

As LWJ’s fiancee, WWX competes for the Lan sect at the discussion conference and the Wens demand he gets sent along with the Lan sect disciples for the turtle incident. On the run, LXC runs into JGY and QS, who are night hunting. JGY laments that his type is slightly older guys with ridiculous upper body strength - he already had a crush on NMJ and now here’s this loser who tears apart their clothing when he does the laundry and all JGY can think about is LXC tearing his clothing off him.

With their kids at Lan Sect (LXC learning to be heir), Murder Mom and Ultra Lan Dad plus WWX’s parents were hanging out at the Jiangs until the Wens demand Jiang sect disciples too. Murder Mom stalks after them, sneaks into the camp, finds out what happened at Lan sect and when Wen Chao heads into the wilderness the four parents start picking off the guards one by one. They rescue the kids from the turtle and bring them back to Lotus Pier, where the Wens attack and Madam Yu demands they get Jiang Cheng to safety. Not sure how to have stuff play out from this point on, however we do need - 

JGY drooling over LXC and NMJ and Qin Su over Wen Qing and the two half-sibs conspiring together.

JZX postwar trying to develop some muscles to Win Back JYL

LWJ not giving a damn that WWX won’t be accepted into Lan sect as a demonic cultivator - they’ll just continue nighthunting with his Murder Mom.

Wen Ning crushing on WWX but finding LWJ intimidating up until he sees LWJ with his poker face doing ridiculous stuff because WWX is, at which point he despairs of them both. Wen Ning trying desperately to wrangle drunk!WWX and LWJ. LWJ being aware of WN’s crush and being like ‘ah yes, good taste that cultivator.’ Like. WWX has been His for basically as long as LWJ can remember, it doesn’t really occur to him to be jealous? It’s not like there’s any chance of him losing WWX, although when he’s in danger of losing WWX like WWX getting killed LWJ goes and shows that he’s Murder Mom’s son. Eventually a threesome happens via WWX deciding to offer to With Benefits Wen Ning and LWJ seducing along with WWX bc they do everything together. 

[mingjue]

Sleep schedules fucked. Please tell me more about the Boys, hxd and jinhai. would like to to more specifically about the Gold Digger akdjjsd

OK IM LATE BUT YES I WILL TELL U............... but w hxd first just to Know Things

Huang Xiaodan

current sect leader of the Huang Sect; given name is Huang Yahui

he has an adopted daughter (Huang Daiyu) and his step mother helps him run the sect, she mostly aids in teaching disciples and the like

he’s stupid kind, he’s stupid, but only when he’s Taihe (where the sect is located), when he visits sects outside of the direct ones next to him he’s considered “cold-natured” bc he just doesn’t talk to anyone unless prompted. or when he does, depending on who it is, he’s impatient w them and moves fast in conversation

the only exceptions were when he was flirting w jiang cheng or lan xichen

anyways, before a lot of things, he had been secretly with a man named Syun Liqiu-- they mainly kept it secret bc Liqiu was set to marry a woman (and also sect leader Syun, liqius dad, fucking hates the Huang sect)

sadly, the night of Liqius marriage with the woman, he came to the Huang sect and took his life in one of the spiderlily gardens to be discovered by Madam Tao/Xiaodan’s step mother a few hours later

SO, with xiaodan being the Sensitive Man He Is when he’s at home, he kind of just............. Switches Off in a sense. he starts being reserved even to his daughter and they were super close :(

also info on the huang sect before i continue

the huang sect was established quite a while ago, but because of the things its notorious for, it’s still a quite small sect. its not SUPER tiny, but it’s no where near as big as like, the jiang or nie sects

a few generations into the huang sect being established, the sect leader at the time brought a curse onto the sect bc he was like wow, i want some god dick, and he got it! but now sect leaders/people directly related to the leading family have a chance of dying super young, like 20-30yrs old

Xiaodans dad actually lived quite a while compared to other sect leaders (late 40s, was able to have 2 kids) so people kinda thought hey. maybe the curse is wearing off. (nope!)

anyways, on top of that curse, they’re just. not human. in a sense. they KINDA are, but aren’t at the same time.

Xiaodan has the ability to control his generals sword (@ kagekitsuneoflight’s character, Huang Fan Cong) and his little sisters sword (Huang Jiayi), on top of the fact he’s able to control them

he only really does this when he absolutely needs to because he hates the thought of controlling others like that, but when he does go into that mode, his “True eyes” come out and spiderlilies have a habit of growing out of nowhere on him and those he’s controlling

It’s a really big strain on his golden core and in general his body to go all out and make them fight, so again he never does it

the sects closest to Huang are aware of these abilities, but it’s seen as rude to question anyone about them, or their origin. outside of that no one is really knowledgeable about these things

sect leaders typically get these powers through a specific way of cultivation, but they aren’t able to choose who they control-- if they were Xiaodan would NOT have chosen his little sister (bc shes legit. 18 :( )

there’s a lot more but now for Wu Jinhai

Wu Jinhai has a little bit more intent than golddigging

he has no clear background-- he was orphaned as a teenager, was an only child, and he doesn’t know if he has any aunts or uncles, or even grandparents

The most he’s willing to tell is that he started practicing cultivation with his mother pretty young, and continued training throughout various sects-- still does when he meets xiaodan too, and he’s pretty good at using each sects methods

he traveled by himself for the most part until he was 25, and throughout that he’s managed to help several villages, so he’s got a good chunk of money on him-- which he ends up spending in Taihe bc he likes red and their colors are red and gold, and the Huang sect is VERY much into fashion n shit

so he gets decked out in pretty clothes and hairpins, guans, etc., and still has money left over for whatever he needs. he stays at a small house that isn’t in too bad of shape, keeps it furnished, helps whoever needs it-- and then the news of the Syun’s Sects Heir committing suicide in the private spiderlily gardens comes out and he’s ALL ears

bc first of all, asides from coming to get some hanfus specially made for him among other things, he’s been wanting to fuck around and make major trouble.

he doesn’t do it immediately, like he waits a few months to let Xiaodan mourn (he finds out about the relationship through rumors, and gets it confirmed by xiaodans little sister after befriending her), but eventually he does present himself to Xiaodan

he basically proposes after presenting his credibility and xiaodan is like. holy fuck. ok. um. give me a week and i’ll consider it ok. (huang fan cong is NOT fond of him, and neither is Madam Tao, bc they know his attitude from unfortunate run ins)

Madam Tao tries to discourage xiaodan from considering the arrangement bc like. he doesn’t have family so he could be making shit up. his vibes are rancid. etc etc and xiaodan starts like. thinking about what she’s saying. but he says “ultimately it’s my choice” and madam tao is just ‘r u serious gay boy’

anyways jinhai ends up seducing xiaodan at some point, and manages to convince him to marry.

they marry, wjh uses this to his advantage to finding out sect secrets, he sells some of them to neighboring sects for laffs, then suddenly the two sects surrounding taihe are like “we are going to war bc ur sect is fucked up, also we want more land” and hxd is like WHAT

anyways, wjh fakes his death after hxd finds out he sold sect/family secrets and runs off to the Nie sect (with a bunch of fucking cash) to watch the war from afar, changing his name to Nie Bojing

wu jinhai deadass just started a war because he felt like it. wanted to see some drama. about 4 years after the war (which ended in the collapse of the Huang, Syun, and Liu sects), WWX resurrects in Mo Xuanyu’s body

Madam Tao, Huang Daiyu, and some of Huang Fancong’s sisters survive the war as the remaining people of the Huang sect, and they also refuge in the Nie Sect.

idk what happens beyond then, but Huang Daiyu ends up finding Wu Jinhai again at some point