Half the room exploded into screams and drawn swords.
Jiang Cheng gaped at Wei WuXian, fallen into his true form in a fit of incandescent rage. He’d said he had it under control! He said his temper wasn’t being effected by the Demonic Cultivation! Jiang Cheng had known he was overstating his control, but had been too busy to do more than trust Wei WuXian’s judgement.
Watching the gelatinous parts of Wei WuXian’s body collapse on themselves in the open air and the long, ribboned stingers in them sprawl across the floor as his more muscular tentacles began to strain under the weight of his body without water to buoy him up.
Muscles tensing and skin itching with a surge of his own true form, Jiang Cheng darted looks around the room, struggling to decide what to do.
It was only himself and A-Jie and Wei WuXian left now, since the massacre. A few of Wei WuXian’s enormous eyes turned to him as his variegated purple and black skin flashed a coded warning of pale blue bio luminescent language.
Fingers shaking around the hilt of his sword, Jiang Cheng closed his eyes with a shaky breath.
“The Yiling Patriarch has become a monster!”
“A demon come to eat our bodies and souls!”
Jiang Cheng’s eyes snapped open when no moaning cries from Wei WuXian or hideous screaming of men being torn apart and devoured began.
The lesser sect leaders and their men had clustered closer to the walls and door, shouting toward the leaders of the five great sects to lead the charge.
But….the Jins, Lans and Nie were not moving. Instead, they all still sat frozen at their dining tables, staring at Wei WuXian with indescribable looks. Jiang Cheng’s fingers shook, but puzzlement began to dawn through the terror. Shouldn’t righteous cultivators immediately leap to destroy such a monster, appearing before their very eyes? Why weren’t they doing anything? Though there were many here he’d call coward easily enough, there was no man that should have so completely frozen. Especially now that Wei WuXian had been transformed long enough it should be blatant even to someone unfamiliar with his form that he was weakened and struggling. His skin was flickering in panic as the thick suckers on the bottoms of his tentacles clung to the floor hard enough they turned white.
As most of the lesser cultivation clans began audibly expressing such questions, one screamed about the glory of his own clan and lunged forward.
With a crash of smashing wood, a fast-moving white mass flung itself across the room and between Wei WuXian and the cultivator.
Jiang Cheng joined the other cultivators in dumbfounded silence as the nameless cultivator was torn in half and thrown back hard enough the two halfs embedded in the wall and failed to fall.
Not wilting on the floor like a fish out of water, the creature took up about the same space Wei WuXian should have. Instead of something familiar though, it was white and appeared to have no solid body, only endless rows of serated teeth and smooth, suckerless tendrils that knoted around itself in the center and ceaselessly moved; stretching and writhing around the floor as a tentacle might.
“Lan Zhan?” Wei WuXian’s voice echoed painfully around the room, tones meant to travel through water cutting through the air powerfully enough to make blood begin pouring from the ears of most of the room.
Not a single cultivator from one of the four remaining great sects though, he noticed.
“Wei Ying.” Lan Wangji’s voice was a rippling, shimmering thing, full of starlight and bells that made the lesser cultivators begin to smile guilelessly and walk forward a step before regaining themselves when he spoke no more. Jiang Cheng himself had to shake his head a bit to push aside thoughts of how lovely that voice was.
Lan Xichen scrambled up and put himself between his brother and the rest of the room with a determined look and a glare at the cultivators now screaming for Lan Wangji to be killed.
“No one will kill my brother for being what he is.”
“Or A-Xian.” Jiang Yanli put herself beside him.
There was a long pause, then Jin ZiXuan slowly stepped forward, biting his lip as his eyes darted over the increasingly pathetic puddle of Wei WuXian on the floor and Lan Wangji’s hulking mass over him.
“A-Zuan!” his mother called tersely, but he ignored her.
With one lingering look at Jiang Yanli, Jin ZiXuan’s expression firmed and, in in a ripple and some sound of ripping skin, feathers and scales and claws burst into being where he’d once stood. Smaller than the other two monsters in the room, but still dwarfing any ten men. Jin ZiXuan’s body looked like a twisted mess of muscle over exposed bone, plate-like scales dotted over the most vulnerable parts of him, feathers and fur mixing in a strange ruff around his neck that framed the gruesome, skeletal head. His mouth opened and Jiang Cheng caught sight of extra jaws and rows of teeth in patterns that made him wonder how he swallowed. His gaze quickly dropped away from the gaping empty sockets Jin ZiXuan’s eyes should have rested in when he felt a lancing headache begin.
A couple dozen lower cultivators dropped dead on the floor.
Eyes shifted among the leaders of the five great sects as the rest fled screaming and the room fell silent.
Jiang Cheng met Lan Qiren and Lan Xichen’s eyes levelly as she slowly approached his sister’s side. Jin Guangshan was hid behind his fan, not quite hiding the strange bulge and ripple of his muscles as if his body longed to shift.
Nie Mingjue hadn’t looked away from Lan Xichen.
Rounding his dining table, Nie Mingjue’s form rippled in a surprisingly gentle heat-shimmer of a change. Between one step and the next, he gained his height twice over, body elongating and warping and growing strange horns and unsettlingly sharp edges, like a blade given life, but stretched over the bones of a man by someone who’d never seen a man before. Then turned him somehow inside out. Jiang Cheng couldn’t tell where his mouth ended, or if it did at all
After a moment of meeting Nie Mingjue’s gaze, Lan Xichen silently changed into a nearly identical mass of white, muscular limbs as Lan Wangji.
“Well-” Jin Guangshan tried from his throne-like seat. “Well….”
Impatient as ever, Jiang Cheng was the first to get fed up with the stalemate.
“Wei WuXian, change back before you dissolve complete, idiot.”
“Jiang Cheng~” Wei WuXian whined, writing uncomfortably as he tried to heave his mass together. Lan Wangji’s many limbs circled around and gently scooped and curled around the tender, gelatinous parts of Wei WuXian and carefully pushed him together.
“Lan Zhan~ Thank you!” the nearest wood column holding up the ceiling cracked under the force of his happy voice.
“Wei Wuxian!” Jiang Cheng snapped, exhasperated. “I’m not paying for any damages you do.”
With a low, mournful moan that didn’t sound right out of the water, Wei WuXian collapsed and tucked in on himself until his human form was standing, somewhat winded, where his true form had been. Lan Wangji stroked a dozen tendrils over him before similarly collapsing back to human form.
“Alright then.” Jiang Cheng nodded, satisfied Wei WuXian wasn’t going to crush under his own un-bouyed weight, then turned back to the other sect leaders. “So. We clearly have much to discuss.”
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