AU where the Nie clan has dragon blood in their lineage, and usually it just manifests as bad temper and a generally martial inclination. Except, once in a rare while, generations apart, an actual dragon will be born among them... (aka nobody really expected that NHS was the latest Nie dragon).
The Nie sect’s ancestors were butchers; that lowly heritage is well known and widely celebrated, much to the not-entirely-concealed disdain of some of the more refined, gentlemanly sects. Butchers at home and butchers at war – everyone knows that.
What’s rather less well known is that the third sect leader, colloquially known among his descendants as ‘that idiot’, rather heroically saved an imperial princess in battle and then – and this was why he was that idiot – married her. She was a proper princess, too, the true-born daughter of the emperor; other sects might see that as a good thing, since for all that cultivation sects saw themselves as being above petty things like the politics of the common folk, a princess was still a princess.
The reason for this was quite simple. What does a cultivation style that already incorporates an increased chance of death through anger most assuredly does not need?
The blood of the eight-clawed dragon, that’s what.
Arrogant, explosive, unruly –
The sixth sect leader came up with the saber halls to honor his father and grandfather – most especially his grandfather, who’d had a bad tendency towards slit-pupiled eyes when he’d been especially enraged, and whose saber had absorbed every ounce of his ferocity – and the next few generations made a point of finding especially meek daughters or sons for their children to marry, and that was that; everyone hoped that that idiot’s mistake could be diluted out of existence.
It was, for the most part.
But every few generations, imperial blood ran true, and not only in terms of majesty or arrogance, and then the entire sect had to close its doors to the outside world and pretend with all their might that no, of course there wasn’t a rampaging beast of an especially draconic variety raging behind the extremely sturdy walls of the Unclean Realm, what nonsense that would be.
Still, if Lao Nie had to wager on one of his children being a dragon, he probably would have put money on it being his firstborn: already far too tall for his age, a brilliant prodigy with his saber, and a temper that rivaled some of the older members of the clan.
The only time that child hadn’t been a disappointment was when he was a baby: he’d been remarkably lazy even back then, sleeping more hours of the day than he didn’t even past infancy, and what had been a relief to his nursemaids quickly turned to annoyance by everyone else. It was commonly believed that such a weak and unlively child was likely to grow up to be slow-witted and dull, and, worse, the doctors confirmed his muscle tone was underdeveloped; even with a great deal of practice, he would likely always be a bit behind those his own age.
As he grew older, his penchant of sleeping twenty hours out of every day got even more noticeable, and the family largely lost interest.
Well, most of them. His older brother, who’d quietly taken on the responsibility for caring for Huaisang when no one else in the family had had the time or, truthfully, the interest in the disappointing son of an especially fortunate (unfortunate?) family maid-turned-concubine, indulged him far too much, even carrying him from place to place.
“You’re not a mule, Mingjue,” Lao Nie scolded one day, reinforcing the lesson through swipes of the flat of his saber. “Have some dignity! If Huaisang wants to go places, he can damn well walk there himself!”
Nie Mingjue bowed his head, obedient and filial in every way except for the fact that he didn’t listen; if anything, it got even worse from that point on, the boy barely being seen anywhere without a napping toddler as an accoutrement.
“Did you hear what I said?” Lao Nie roared at him.
“I’m not a mule,” Nie Mingjue recited. “If he wants to go places, he can walk there himself.”
“If you heard me and persisted regardless, you’re undisciplined,” Lao Nie said, arms crossed.
“I accept whatever punishment is appropriate,” Nie Mingjue said, and that was most irritating of all: why would his otherwise perfect eldest son insisted on being beaten once a week when all he had to do was leave that useless lump behind in his rooms, where he’d be happier anyway? It wasn’t as though Nie Huaisang even wanted to be outside: sometimes it seemed he’d only learned to talk in order to complain about how uncomfortable he was, how hot, how sweaty – and he even had the gall to keep complaining even after his older brother fetched a fan for him, like a loyal dog.
Discipline was paramount in the Nie sect; to be undisciplined is to risk being monstrous, and with their cultivation style they could not tolerate such a thing. That was why their punishments were so strict, even if the rules were relatively sparse - more principle than rule, really. But on the other hand, their family had always been the sort that would rather break than bend: if Nie Mingjue wanted to pay for his willfulness by accepting punishments, he was entitled to do so.
Still – there was punishment, and there was wanton cruelty; at some point, one of the men in the punishment hall abandoned the former for the latter. He was a popular man, the son of another sect’s diplomat that had married a close cousin of the main family and stayed in Qinghe; for some reason he’d developed an intense dislike of Nie Mingjue – a dislike which was mutual, and likely to cause trouble in the future when Nie MIngjue became Sect Leader, but which currently put Nie MIngjue in a very bad position given the man’s status as his elder.
Lao Nie only learned about the whole matter much later, and when he did he was so spitting mad he grabbed his saber and would have spitted the man on it, cousin or no cousin, if he hadn’t been held back; but at the time he had no idea, busy as he was defending the borders of his lands against troubles caused by that ever-smiling bastard Wen Ruohan.
When he did hear about it, though, he was infuriated: his son and heir had been beaten three times the usual amount, a compilation of a thousand little offenses that could only technically be termed breaches of discipline, forced to complete several dozen of their most demanding exercises, and then made to kneel outside on the hottest day of the year; to no one’s surprise, he had eventually collapsed rather than yield and beg for mercy, his skin cracking and lips starting to bleed as his consciousness left him.
Who knows how far that bastard might have gone, his eyes fixed on a prize he would never inherit with his outsider’s surname, if Nie Huaisang hadn’t been there, tucked away curled up underneath a shady tree and made to watch despite Nie Mingjue’s request that he be sent back to his rooms.
Those who were near enough to see – and Lao Nie had plans to punish the whole lot of them for not having interfered: what was the point of a clan motto that prioritized justice and suppression of evil no matter what the consequences if they would allow it to happen in their own damn home? – said that it didn’t happen at once, that there was a pause when Nie Mingjue’s body hit the ground; perhaps it was only that Nie Huaisang was slow to realized what was happening.
Perhaps it just took a while for the change to happen.
Either way, everyone agreed on what happened next: the unfurling of a serpentine body twice the length of a fully grown man, although only about as wide around as a goat, a red-eyed glare that was backed with teeth and claw, and a roar of challenge at anyone who even thought about pulling Nie Mingjue’s body away from the center of those coils.
Apparently Nie Huaisang had needed all that sleep because he was still growing. Who would have known?
It was the youngest full transformation they’d ever had in their clan by far. The boy hadn’t even reached the age of three!
“If he’s stopped sweating, he has heatstroke,” Lao Nie told his apparently not useless younger son, having been urgently summoned to the training field. “He needs to be taken inside at once; you’re only making things worse.”
Nie Huaisang bared his teeth at him, and Lao Nie bared his teeth right back.
He might not be a dragon, but his son’s blood had come from somewhere.
“I am your father,” he snarled. “You will listen to me and obey. You hear me? You will get off of him this instant. If he doesn’t get water soon, he will die.”
Lao Nie will never know if it was the demand for filial piety or the threat to Nie Mingjue’s life that got Nie Huaisang to comply – he suspected the latter – but Nie Huaisang gave in and backed off, allowing the clan’s medics to rush over and take Nie Mingjue away.
Lao Nie looked at the dragon, thinking to himself that the vastness of the underground caverns beneath the Unclean Realm weren’t for nothing: if this was what a two-year-old dragon looked like, he’d be a full-fledged calamity when full grown.
His saber itched in his palm at the thought, but he ignored it. The embarrassing yao-derived portion of their bloodline aside, the Nie sect set itself against evil, and Nie Huaisang was lazy, not evil.
“This is going to be trouble,” he finally said. “It can’t be allowed to get out.”
You can’t go out, he meant, but maybe Nie Huaisang in all his laziness wouldn’t mind being restricted to the Unclean Realm. Maybe, if they were lucky, they could teach him to like paintings and books instead, since he could never be allowed out to join a proper battlefield.
He’d be locked at home forever, unless the Sect Leader decided otherwise - and that meant Lao Nie would be the one responsible for it.
Ancestor or not, damn that idiot.
In the end, Nie Huaisang didn’t respond to him at all, merely took to the air – flying must be inherent, since he didn’t seem especially bothered by what should be something brand new – and headed inwards, aiming towards…
Not really a surprise, that.
A bit of a surprise that he could find it so quickly, though, from such an unfamiliar angle…
If his stubborn older son had known about this, he was going to wish he’d died of heatstroke.
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