Now I want the story where NMJ is half war god and NHS is half fox spirit, thank you so much xD
based on this tumblr post and Lao Nie’s decision to refer to WRH as A-Han in this one ficlet
on ao3
Nie Zonghui had long ago suspected that his Sect Leader was a madman, but he didn’t really know it for certain until the first time he lost the man while on a bodyguarding mission – his first, and a great honor.
Supposedly.
“It’s all right,” his father said, looking long-suffering, when he reported back in distress. “He’s an adult, our sect leader, and this is a small city with no major threats in the middle of some idiosyncratic festival celebration for some goddess or another. How much damage can he really do before he sobers up?”
Nie Zonghui stared at his father, then turned to his mother, who was also staring at her husband with an expression of sincere incredulity.
“Lots,” she supplied. “Lots and lots and lots, and that’s assuming he doesn’t get himself killed in the meantime. Why would you even say that?”
“He’s our sect leader, have some respect.”
“I respect the boss bull of the herd, too, but it doesn’t mean I let it go wandering around the fields wherever it pleases!” She shook her head, snorting in a manner not entirely unlike a bull herself. “Well, if we’re very lucky, maybe our cousin will knock up a cow while he’s out and about rather than just breaking things. We could use a direct heir already; he’s not getting any younger.”
“We could use him being properly married is what we could use. I don’t understand why he’s so resistant – ah, Zonghui, you’re still here? Go gather some cultivators and go look for him, but don’t kick up any fuss, and worry too much if you can’t find him at once. He’ll be back to business soon enough.”
He was, if by “soon enough” one meant “after nearly ten days” and by “back to business” one meant “still drunk off his ass and waxing rhapsodic about some girl he met and possibly married”.
“Yes, yes, I’m sure the sun shines out of her ass,” Nie Zonghui’s father said, his face stormy. “You still could’ve told us where you went. Look what you did to poor Zonghui, he’s been wearing down his heels pacing in worry over you!”
“Oh, heels, yes, did I mention that my gorgeous goddess had amazing legs, too?” their sect leader asked with a soppy smile and stars in his eyes, totally uninterested in any of their petty complaints. “She could kill a man with them – oh, but I would die a happy man between those thighs…!”
“Zonghui, go guard the outside door,” his mother told him. “Also, tell his younger sister that she might need to be sect leader sooner than she’d hoped, because I’m going to murder this fucking –”
-
Nie Zonghui was there, too, when ten months later his new little baby cousin was (metaphorically) ditched on their doorstep.
The entire thing was entirely too dramatic for his taste, and yes, he was aware that as a person who chose to dual wield sabers he had very little room to criticize others for being overly dramatic, however correct he might be.
They had been fighting bandits – barely disguised mercenaries, really, probably paid off by the Wen sect to harass them – in what had turned into a particularly bad situation. Three separate regiments had joined together to take advantage of a terrible thunderstorm and ambush them at all once and them with their backs against a raging river, swollen with rain to the precipice of flooding, with no way to retreat except by fleeing on their sabers, abandoning the common people they were protecting and losing all face.
The sect leader had been raging on the battlefield, saber in hand, but even he had seen that they would need to shortly choose between death and dishonor; Nie Zonghui, close by his side, had seen how his face was split with a terrible scowl as he wracked his brain for more options.
Then there had been a terrible roar of thunder, and then a flash of light that had blinded them all.
Nie Zonghui had immediately noted the anomality of it, thunder first and lightning second, and wondered it if it was some sort of array working against them, especially when the light had not faded away but grown brighter, causing searing pain in his eyes that made him fall and clutch at his face. But he was a good soldier, loyal and true, and he forced his eyes open to squint into the night, looking to see he did not know what.
Through his sun-blindness, he vaguely thought he could see a silhouette not unlike that of a woman, ten feet tall and radiant as the sun, wearing a dress of nine colors and carrying a guandao in her hand that seemed to reach the clouds, but when he blinked again he saw nothing at all.
Or, well, he did see something: all of their enemies were headless, no matter where on the battlefield they were, their bodies dropping like a loosened string of coins where they had been standing and splattering anyone they were fighting with blood as they gawped at the sudden corpses.
Also, the sect leader was suddenly holding something in his arms when he hadn’t been before.
“What’s that?” Nie Zonghui asked, and the sect leader turned towards him. Nie Zonghui squinted, and suddenly wondered if this entire battle had been a very bad dream. “…is that a baby?”
“Yes,” the sect leader said, grinning broadly. “He’s my son!”
“He’s your what,” Nie Zonghui said.
“My son! I didn’t know about him, of course – apparently he came as something of a surprise to her as well – but anyway she thought that it would be more appropriate for me to raise him, all things considered. A baby doesn’t quite fit her lifestyle. What do you think of ‘Mingjue’ as a courtesy name? Good, yes?”
Nie Zonghui suddenly understood why his parents were always cursing all the time.
-
“I don’t see why I need another wife,” the sect leader said. “I already have a son.”
“Don’t you want to give said son a mother?” Nie Zonghui’s mother asked, her arms crossed. “One that isn’t the Dark Lady of the Nine Heavens, the war goddess you somehow managed to knock up without getting killed?”
“She never specified that she was –”
“Someone needs to be Nie-furen,” the sect leader’s younger sister interrupted, “because I am sick and tired of doing the job, and it’s a little difficult to ask a goddess to do it. So you are going to find yourself another one that’s a little closer to the ground this time, you understand me?”
The sect leader nodded and agreed, which was universally agreed upon to be the only appropriate reaction when his beloved meimei said something in that particular tone of voice.
(He did, after a suitable period of time, state that he wanted to make clear that there was no actual evidence that he had knocked up Jiutian Xuannü and that it was quite plausible that the mother of his heir was nothing more than a rogue cultivator of particular strength and possibility even immortality. If Baosan Sanren had managed it, why not someone else?)
At any rate, they brought him several pictures of women that might fit the bill and who would not be too offended at being asked to be a secondary wife – their sect leader swore up and down that he had performed bows with the mother of his first son, rendering him legitimate, and anyway no one was in the mood to see if the maybe-a-goddess would take offense to someone calling her child a bastard – but none seemed to catch their sect leader’s interest.
“Consider visiting a few brothels,” Nie Zonghui’s great-uncle suggested. “Anything to get you back in the habit of thinking about women of a less divine nature – though of course we’d prefer that she be literate.”
The sect leader scowled and stalked off to go night-hunting instead.
“I don’t like brothels,” he said to Nie Zonghui as they made their way through an especially deserted mountain valley in search of something that had murdered all the local mensfolk in the surrounding villages with especial viciousness. “Surely there’s an option in between.”
Nie Zonghui preferred his sabers to either men or women, but he obediently wracked his brain to think of where people in stories and famous songs found their wives. “Innkeeper’s daughters?” he finally suggested.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the sect leader scoffed, but the very next day, he decided to break his usual habit of staying out in the wild no matter the weather in favor of taking shelter from the encroaching storm in a small inn right at the base of an especially lonesome and nasty-looking cliff.
“We’re always happy to have guests,” the innkeeper said with a somewhat sinister smile – he was pale as a ghost in the guttering candlelight, and his lips looked very red. “My daughter will show you to your rooms.”
The daughter in question was inhumanly beautiful: small and graceful, with a fox’s face and dark hair that fell to her knees.
“Wow,” the sect leader said, staring at her. “You know, I think you could kill me with those nails of yours.”
Nie Zonghui took a look and agreed with the sentiment, seeing that her nails were as long as claws and looked just as sharp, but apparently he and the sect leader had somewhat different interpretations of this sequence of events and plans on how to address it.
Namely, Nie Zonghui pointed out that the lady was obviously some sort of yao or maybe a gui and that she was probably the one seducing the local mensfolk, draining their yang energy and then slaughtering them, and therefore that it was undoubtedly their duty as cultivators – and cultivators of the Nie sect in particular – to put an end to her vile deeds through the swift application of their sabers. Furthermore, he explained, they should take care never to allow themselves to be alone with her in the process, lest she seek to entrance them with her seductive magics and lure them to their undoubtedly violent deaths.
The sect leader’s rebuttal to this line of logic was limited to “I’m the sect leader and if I want to bang the probably-a-ghost, I’m going to bang the ghost and there’s nothing you can do to stop me”.
Amazingly enough, the sect leader did not end up dead the next day – the innkeeper looked just as surprised as Nie Zonghui felt – and instead announced, very happily, that he was planning on marrying her.
“You what,” the innkeeper said, staring at his very smug-looking ‘daughter’. In light of dawn, she was wearing a dress of many colors with a foxfur ruff, and her beauty was almost painful to behold.
“You why,” Nie Zonghui moaned.
“You shut up,” the sect leader told him. “I’ll have you know that my lady here is very clever, literate and well-learned, and she doesn’t at all mind being the second wife. Weren’t you one of the ones on my case about getting a Nie-furen to help managing things back home?”
“I didn’t think we needed to specify that the person in question didn’t murder a lot of people!”
“Isn’t his first wife supposedly a war goddess?” the lady inquired, her clever eyes dancing in amusement.
“Well…yes…”
“Also, all those men deserved it,” she said. After a brief pause, she added, “In my opinion as a totally unrelated observer, of course.”
“See?” the sect leader said, putting his arm around her waist. “No problem. Anyway, she’ll stick to killing bad people from now on, it’s fine.”
The lady smiled. There were many teeth in that smile, and they were very sharp.
“If she doesn’t, I’ll have my first wife discipline her,” the sect leader added and her smile abruptly disappeared.
Nie Zonghui coughed into his hand, but reluctantly admitted that maybe this wouldn’t turn out to be as bad as all that.
-
“Huaisang is a lovely name,” Nie Zonghui’s mother said, being the best of them at diplomacy when she put her mind to it, although admittedly it was something she did only very rarely. “I think we were just expecting something a little different, that’s all.”
“Possibly something a little more fox related,” Nie Zonghui’s father said.
“Please,” the sect leader’s second wife said. “That would be gauche.”
They looked at her.
“…all of my suggestions along those lines got rejected,” she admitted, and glared at the small shrine in the corner as if it had personally wronged her. In this context, it very well might have.
“Is there anything we should keep an eye out for?” Nie Zonghui said, watching his little cousin carry around his even littler cousin under his arm as if he were a sack of potatoes and not a baby that hadn’t yet had its first month celebration. He would have interfered but for the fact that little Nie Huaisang seemed to be notably more in control of his various limbs than the usual infant. “A tail, for instance?”
“Oh, no,” the second lady said. “Nothing like that.”
“Great,” Nie Zonghui said. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“It’s very rare for fox children to achieve a grand plot worthy of a tail in their first lifetime.” A pause. “From what I understand, that is.”
“Great,” Nie Zonghui said. “…great.”
“You’ll take good care of him when I’m gone, won’t you?” she asked, and when they all looked at her, smiled. “Not for another year or two, don’t worry, but I really can’t stay here that long. Sometimes, a girl’s got urges she has to take care of.”
“The sort of urges where we’d need to hunt down a mysteriously appearing fox yao for having murdered a lot of people?”
“I already promised to stop killing people,” she said sulkily. “Although I do think I made some plausible arguments in favor of a little bit of entirely justified murder in connection with the Jin sect and maybe the Lan sect and, oh, the Jiang sect –”
“Please don’t.”
“It’s not my fault your Great Sects are all headed by men who wrong women.”
“You’re not wrong,” Nie Zonghui’s mother said, and Nie Zonghui’s father looked alarmed. “But still, don’t.”
“You’re such spoilsports. But no, as it happens, it’s getting to that time when I need to return home for a while to pay my respects to the older generation.”
“How often does that happen?” Nie Zonghui’s father asked. “Once a century?”
“A gentleman shouldn’t ask a lady her age,” she sniffed. “At any rate, my family home is rather far away and they’re fairly insular, so I’ll probably be gone for at least a decade or so. I’d take the baby with me, but, well, you know, long travel and all. He’s better off sticking with his father.”
“All right,” Nie Zonghui’s mother said. “We understand, and we’ll help take care of him as best we can.”
“I’m glad.”
“We have only one thing to ask of you in return.”
Their second lady arched her delicate eyebrows.
Nie Zonghui’s mother smiled. “You be the one to tell your sister-in-law that you’re leaving your post.”
“…you know, on second thought, maybe I can push my departure out a few more years…”
-
“Before you say anything, I want to be clear right now that I don’t need a third wife,” their sect leader said. “I’m fine.”
“Sect Leader,” Nie Zonghui’s mother said, not unaffectionately. “You’re not allowed a third wife.”
“And therefore – wait, really?” he asked, a little skeptically. “You’re not concerned about me?”
“Oh, we’re very concerned about you,” Nie Zonghui’s father said. “But not in that specific respect. Some celibacy would probably be good for you, at least in terms of increasing your life expectancy.”
“…my sister is lying in wait with a cleaver to make sure she doesn’t have to take on the duties of Nie-furen again, isn’t she.”
“I’m not discounting that possibility, but don’t worry about it, it’s fine, we’ll talk to her. The Lan sect haven’t had a proper hostess in years either, we can just say we’re following their example.”
The sect leader eyed his cousins beadily. “They haven’t had a proper sect leader in years, either.”
“No, you don’t say,” Nie Zonghui’s mother said dryly. “What a coincidence -”
“You have two fine sons,” Nie Zonghui’s father said hastily. “That seems like enough, really.”
“You don’t think they need a mother…?”
“Sect Leader,” Nie Zonghui interjected politely. “While we admit that it may be within your capabilities to be able to find a mother willing to deal with one step-son who has been waiving around a saber taller than he is since he learned to walk and has a penchant for the unyielding, unmerciful and very violent application of the norms of divine justice –”
Nie Mingjue’s presence bolstered the spirit of good men, while his gaze seemed to make evildoers itch. He was the most earnestly good person Nie Zonghui had ever met, and also one of the most stiff and unbending in respect to what he believed should and should not be done.
Unfortunate that his standards didn’t seem to match up to the needs of either human law or diplomacy…
“– as well as another who can scheme circles around anyone and persuade them of anything as long as he puts his mind to it and only doesn’t because he’s too busy lazing around in the sun to bother –”
Nie Huaisang liked to file his nails down to something that looked quite normal, but they grew sharp quickly enough if he wasn’t paying attention, and he had a penchant for pranks. There was nothing quite as unnerving as running into a sudden and unexpected ambush and then suddenly hearing the shrill peal of a fox’s laughter, hidden behind a scholarly fan.
“– but all things considered, we’d really rather you - didn’t.”
His mother and father nodded fervently.
“Good,” the sect leader said, though he still looked suspiciously at them as if he thought they were hiding something. “Good. As long as we’re agreed.”
-
Nie Zonghui walked in on his sect leader pinning the Wen sect leader to a wall, murmuring something in a low voice with a very particular smile on his face, and then he turned around and walked right back out again.
The sect leader of the Wen sect might appear beautiful and young, but he was at least a generation older than the Nie sect leader. Not that that had stopped the latter from relying on their respective positions to refer to him in startlingly intimate terms – my dear A-Han, the sect leader would say with a touch of wickedness that reminded one of his second son and the tiger gall bravery of his first – and while at first the Wen sect leader had taken it as a challenge to his authority, an act of brash insolence, it appeared that they had progressed beyond that.
That the Wen sect leader already had three wives and two concubines apparently didn’t present any obstacles either – except perhaps in what those poor women might have to endure from their husband when he returned from the wretched teasing he was enduring. Nie Zonghui felt a bit of pity for them.
Shortly thereafter, he felt a bit of pity for himself. The Wen sect had long dreamed of dominating the cultivation world and sought to increase their influence with the other sects through underhanded means, with the Nie sect opposing them at every turn. Even if war was not on the immediate horizon, the wise could smell its distant approach in the air - the best estimates said that it would take another decade or two to arrive, unless the Nie sect leader took an especially hard stance.
It appeared, however, that the Nie sect leader had chosen to take a different sort of…hard stance.
Ugh.
Maybe Nie Zonghui could conspire to throw his sect leader into a cage with a live tiger in heat next time he felt in the mood. It’d probably be less dangerous.
Nie Zonghui had assumed that the first person to talk to him about what he had seen would be his sect leader, even if it was only to remind him of the general rule that the sect leader had ultimate power and therefore could exercise his own bad judgment in deciding to fuck whoever he wished, but instead it was the Wen sect leader that found him later that afternoon.
A flush had yet to fully fade from his cheeks, and Nie Zonghui raised his eyes to the ceiling to avoid looking directly at the man in front of him.
He did not want to know. Others might, given that no one had ever complained about the looks of either party, but he himself had realized long ago that he had no interest in matters of the flesh under any circumstances; he was very content with that conclusion.
“Is there some service this one can provide to Sect Leader Wen?” he asked politely, and it was only when the sect leader flushed again that he realized belatedly that his words could be misconstrued. After all, his own sect leader had probably already made a similar offer regarding the provision of services…
“Your sect leader has a sister, doesn’t he?” the other man asked, his voice tight and his hands in even tighter fists. “I’m not misremembering that?”
“He does,” Nie Zonghui responded honestly, and not without sympathy for the Wen sect leader’s position. He was given to understand that making certain belated discoveries regarding one’s own preferences could be highly disconcerting, particularly later in life. “But she’s rather different in kind than what you may be thinking, so it won’t work out that way. It wouldn’t work even if she wasn’t already married, which she is.”
After a moment of thought, he added, “Also, consider your predecessors.”
The Wen sect leader’s eyes narrowed.
-
Really, it was the sect leader’s own damn fault that he got himself murdered.
