Come Back to Gusu

51. Jin ZiXuan Interrupts: Family secrets.

If the days had been busy with searching and hoping and needing to find his son, the nights were worse. At night, the nightmares came... dreams of seeing his son's dead body. Sometimes simply strangled, dark finger marks circling his neck. Other times, he was eviscerated. Or had his head chopped off. Sometimes Wei WuXian could see the child's ghost sitting by its corpse, crying loudly... screaming his hatred. And then turning that hatred on the men who failed him.

Nightmares of what he might find when they finally met up with Meng Yao interspersed with his nightmares from the Burial Mounds and the war.

One particularly interesting nightmare had Wen Yuan's fierce corpse sitting by Wei WuXian's side on the faraway mountain where he gave Jiang Cheng his Core as the firece corpse Wen Ning ripped open his abdomen with rancid, knife sharp, fingernails and ripped out his Core. "You deserve that, Baba," the boy intoned. "You can't even keep a child safe. You don't deserve to be a cultivator. You don't deserve that Core. I hope it kills you and you are sent to Hell with no option, ever, for reincarnation. Just eternal punishment."

Lan WangJi's nightmares were slightly less ghoulish, but no less intense and self-deprecating.

There were two ways to stop the nightmares: one, obviously, was to not fall asleep in the first place, and the other was to make themselves so tired that they didn't have the ability to dream. Wei WuXian found a few fellow cultivators who enjoyed the more brutal types of street fighting; bouts where they'd all stumble off to their bedrolls, thoroughly exhausted, covered in blood, bruises, and at least one broken bone, kept the nightmares at bay. After a healer told them to stop being stupid and wasting their qi on healing when they would need to be at full strength during the upcoming battle, Lan Zhan offered up his own method for exhausting each other.

His dreams from his youth of fucking Wei Ying inspired their nightly activities: brutal sex where the receiver was not prepared and no oils were used to ease the way. It was raw and painful and bloody and required more visits to the healer and lectures on properly taking care of their partner. Wei WuXian trying to explain that this was each of them taking care of his husband was ignored. The price of tears in their rectums compared to the nightmares of seeing his son repeatedly raped or mutilated or rambling as a fierce corpse? He'd pay that price every day of his life to keep his son safe from harm.

Jin ZiXuan arrived bearing more bad news. Jiang WanYin had wanted to go with him; unfortunately, the continued stress over losing her grandmother and then not knowing what was happening to the rest of her family plus grieving over the dead, had sent Wen Qing into early labor. "The other doctors and midwives at Lotus Pier are trying to halt the labor. It's early. She might deliver a stillborn, they say. Or the baby might die soon after being born. No one knows for certain."

Wei WuXian added Wen Qing to Meng Yao's tally. "Death by lingchi will be too good for him."

Jin ZiXuan's examination of the mirror/portal was much more efficient than Wei WuXian's. "I would like to ask everyone, except for Mo XuanYu, to leave the building."

"Why me?" his younger brother asked, surprised.

Jin ZiXuan straightened his back. "Family secrets."

Wei WuXian looked intrigued and begrudgingly left the room to the brothers. What kind of family secrets does that mirror hold? Does Jin GuangYao know them? Whatever the elder was imparting to the younger didn't take long. The others were called in to see that the mirror no longer reflected the room it was in: it showed a reflection of somewhere else.

Jin ZiXuan ignored his allies' questioning looks. "I see eight guards around the connected portal. There may be more that we can't see."

What they could see was... a room. A pretty plain room with no obvious decorations to lead the allies to understand where the hostages were being kept. Wooden walls, an empty bookcase, the edge of a window, scuffed floors. And eight men milling around.