Ink Lines

Chapter 29. Lotus flowers

As the sun dipped beneath the clouds, sailing down the sky to disappear behind the mountains, a ritual took place as if had done for years.

Carrying fresh flowers in her hands, Jiang Yanli left the main house at Lotus Pier and wandered slowly to the Ancestral Hall, aware she was watched if not judged for this somber walk. No one breathed a word, nor tried to accompany her. This was hers to bear and impossible to explain. It was grief. It was also duty, expected if not wanted, regret and the finding of some sort of closure.

From a very young age, Jiang Yanli understood three important things, growing up in a massive house, a sprawling proud sect that adhered to ancient tradition and aspired to the heights of technological prowess.

You could love someone fiercely and yet never like them.

You can try your best and some will never appreciate it.

You make life what it is. Only you can decide who you wish to be.

She took these tenants and made them her own, all but raising her two brothers in a household where affection was considered pathetic, conversation a war and love something for fools. A home shouldn't be a battleground, love shouldn't have a price, but theirs always did. Except for the three of them. They were inseparable, always orbiting each other and determined to stay together through all the moments of their lives, good or bad.

Although a child herself, Yanli had like Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen, chosen to look after her brothers, be for them their parent, their sister, their safe haven.

Perhaps if she had been born in the ancient times when their sect was young, Jiang Yanli would have had very little say in their lives. But this was the modern world filled with knowledge at your fingertips, access to media and books never easier in so many ways, a self-help guide a click away. Determined to understand, she had learned different coping mechanisms, learned the tools of therapy, the power of her own self-worth.

She took her mother's lessons and made her own choices, found her own strength.

And used it to protect her brothers, where and however she could.

So she came here to the old Hall, a temple built centuries ago to honor every fallen disciple and sect leader, without her brothers who made this journey on their own when they felt they wanted to. These walls traced the lineage of the Jiang back to the first days of the sect, tablets carved with respect and mourned over ever lifetime. Thousands of Jiang had knelt where she did now, in front of the lotus altar where today, the tablets of all of the recently slain disciples and her parents sat proudly displayed.

She lit the incense and prayed. Then sat there in the quiet hush of the small temple, contemplating the two people she loved and would never understand.

Her mother was storms and tirades. Full of antagonism and always prideful. Everything had to be an issue, every word had to be a personal slight. Everything A-Xian did had to be disrespectful. Everything Ah-Cheng had to be a disappointment. Nothing Yanli did or said was ever enough. Her cultivation was shamefully low, her manners and intelligence, her educational successes all things to be used on a marriage-checklist. It didn't matter that she graduated from business school with excellent grades, that she was diligent and understood every aspect of the business. She was a failure.

Her father was supposedly the gentle one, but his silence was cutting, his indifference stark. Nothing matched or surpassed his unspoken standard. He was driven and steady, a clever diplomat and transformative leader in the company, in the sect, in the martial world. At home he was there and drifted through life like a ghost, barely interacting with his children.