Chapter Text
"They lost their qilin."
Baoshen Xianren, Great Sage, Scholar and Cultivator, by the grace of Heaven Immortal Supervisor of the Kingdom of Yue, stared down at the report currently unrolled on her desk with incredulous disbelief. Five hundred years she'd held down her current post, ruling and caring for the land and the peoples that were assigned under her domain, and she'd never received a report quite like this.
"Wu Kingdom has lost their qilin," Baoshan Xianren said again. It bore repeating; she had hardly believed her own words the first time. "How do you lose your qilin?"
Her wife, Lan Yi, sat on the daybed across the room, taking advantage of the sunbeam coming in through the long narrow window to brush out her hair. "Qilin are gifts granted by the Heavens to guide mankind on the righteous path through their selection of the kingdom's ruler, " she said. "If the population becomes careless and selfish, failing to properly revere and care for their qilin, is it any wonder that Heaven would abandon them?"
Baoshan Xianren shook her head in disbelief. "Dear heart, if that were what had happened I wouldn't find anything unusual about it," she replied. "I don't mean that their qilin has absconded. I mean that they lost it and don't know where it is."
Lan Yi frowned, setting aside her brush and twisting her long coils of hair back up into a quick updo so that she could rise from the settee and cross to her wife's desk. (The full process would take two attendants and three hours, so this was only meant to be a temporary hold.) "How is that possible?" she said.
Each of the Twelve Kingdoms had its qilin, issued by the Heavens for the wise and just governance of the land and people. The qilin chose that kingdom's xiandu according to the will of Heaven, and so long as they ruled justly, the xiandu shared in the immortality of their qilin. Only if the ruler strayed from the path of righteousness would their rulership falter; the qilin would sicken and, if the ruler did not correct their path or abdicate, die -- and with them died the immortality of the ruler.
It was not the only way a qilin could die. They did not age, and were immune to the poisons and diseases of the mortal world, but they could be hurt -- they could be killed. If such a tragedy occurred (or if the divine sickness took them,) then the kingdom would be rulerless, plunged into chaos until the qilin could be reborn on the central mountain. Once the new qilin came of age, tended by the strange supernatural attendants of the shrine, they would be drawn to select a new ruler from among the people of their kingdom. The rule of heaven would be restored, and the cycle would begin anew.
"You know that the Wu Kingdom's Xue clan has been making itself abominable for the past few years," Baoshan Xianren said, and Lan Yi's lovely mouth flattened into a grim line as she nodded. The former Lan sect leader knew all about the Xue clan. "The old xiandu and Wu- lin were killed in the struggle -- nearly the first casualties. Well, last year a new qilin cultivated on the branches of the Holy Tree, but before it could be properly born the Xue sent agents to steal the luǎn guǒ from the Tree."
Lan Yi gasped, her hand flying to clench at her chest at the temerity, the blasphemy, and Baoshen Xianren nodded grim confirmation. "Did they kill her, too?" she whispered.
"They're not sure if it's a her, this time. Too young to tell before the baby was stolen. And no," Baoshan Xianren said. "Apparently they had some idea of raising the young qilin under their own power, force it to select a king from among their clan when it came of age."
Lan Yi shook her head in disbelief. "The will of Heaven cannot be forced," she said. "It's been tried before. It never works."
"I know that, and you know that, but some smartasses over at the Xue apparently don't know that," Baoshan Xianren said with a shrug. "Well, the combined alliance of the other five cultivation clans weren't going to stand for that, of course. They formed an alliance -- they called themselves the Woodcutters -- conducted a counter-raid of their own and in the scuffle, the infant qilin was lost."
"Lost," Lan Yi repeated, in the exact same tone of disbelief. "How do you lose -- eurgh."
Baoshan Xianren couldn't help but chuckle, despite her frustration at the dire situation. "Exactly what I wanted to know," she said.
Lan Yi took a steadying breath. "And they're sure the infant qilin was not -- killed in the struggle?"
"No new luǎn guǒ has cultivated on the boughs of the Holy Tree since then," Baoshan Xianren said. "So either the baby's still alive somewhere, or Heaven has given up on the people of Wu Kingdom entirely."
Lan Yi's lovely features tightened in dismay, and Baoshan Xianren couldn't help but ache for her. Although her wife had not been back to the Wu Kingdom for over four hundred years -- and Baoshan Xianren knew that she had no further loyalty to the kingdom that had rejected her -- it was still painful for her to think of her homeland undergoing such suffering as the latest civil war and be able to do nothing to help.
"Is there nothing we can do?" Lan Yi asked. Baoshan Xianren sighed, and laid her hand over her wife's.
"I can't imagine what we could do," she said. "Not our kingdom, dear one, not our qilin."
"But without the protection of Heaven, the Wu kingdom will undergo terrible suffering," Lan Yi fretted. It was the natural progression of things, they both knew. Diseases, crop plagues, terrible storms, animals gone mad and yao spawning out of control -- all the natural disasters that Heaven's protection normally kept at bay would run amok in a kingdom with no qilin and no xiandu . "We can't just allow that to happen. It's not like it won't cross over into our lands soon enough!"
"I know." Baoshan Xianren grimaced. It was already happening; the provinces closest to the Wu border were already dealing with an influx of refugees, and attacks of wild yao coming up through the forests or along the rivers were increasingly a problem. "But we can't just march in there and put the Xue in their place, much as I'd like to. We're strictly forbidden to interfere with other kingdom's internal affairs. Even if Wu Kingdom didn't raise objections -- and I can't see how they wouldn't -- every other kingdom would raise an outcry."
"The Xue might be outside of your authority," Lan Yi pointed out, "but the fate of qilin is a matter for Heaven, and as such a concern for all those who serve the will of Heaven! Even if the civil war isn't our business, finding that child surely is."
Baoshan Xianren sighed in exasperation. "And how, love, do you propose that we find the qilin without sticking our hands in the mill of their civil war?" she demanded.
Lan Yi met her gaze with a steely glare. Baoshan Xianren did dearly love her wife, but at times like this she wished she weren't quite so obstinate. The same iron will that had allowed her to ascend as Sect Leader of the Lan Sect despite their backwards views of women as leaders -- at least until they'd cast her out, more fools they -- made her impossible to argue down once she was set on her course.
"It seems we are at a deadlock," Lan Yi sniffed. "Well. Obviously what we need is a tiebreaker."
"No we don't, because this subject isn't up for a vote," Baoshan Xianren protested, but her wife ignored her.
Lan Yi rose from her seat next to Baoshan Xianren's desk and glided over to the door. "Xingchen," she called into the next room. "Xiao- qi, could you kindly grace us with your guidance?"
"Not fair," Baoshan Xianren groaned, as her wife shot her a triumphant look. "You already know what he'll say. He has to advocate whatever course of action will prevent the most suffering, it's literally in his nature."
"Well, if you won't listen to me," Lan Yi said primly, gliding back over to her settee, "then maybe you'll listen to the one whose job is to provide you with heavenly guidance."
Their familiar, comfortable bickering was forestalled as a slight, luminous figure came to the doorway and ducked through it, stopping briefly at Baoshan Xianren's desk to bow before turning to greet Lan Yi as well. "Xiandu . Consort Lan," he said. "How may this one be of assistance?"
Lan Yi took the lead now to fill in Xiao Xingchen on the latest news from Wu Kingdom. Despite her annoyance at Lan Yi going behind her back on this, Baoshan Xianren couldn't stay angry when her qilin stood in front of her. It was literally impossible, she was fairly sure, to have any kind of negative emotions in the presence of Xiao Xingchen.
She would admit unabashedly to being biased -- he had been her dearest friend and companion for five hundred years now, after all -- but Baoshan Xianren was convinced that her kingdom's qilin was superior to any of the others. Not that she would ever say so to her fellow rulers, on the rare occasions they met up. It was entirely possible that each one of them believed that their qilin was the best. (But they were wrong.)
Today Xiao Xingchen wore his signature court outfit of grey and white, which complemented but could not outshine the lovely length of silver-white hair that flowed from his crown. That hair, even more than his inhuman beauty, marked him as a qilin -- not only as pale as starlight on snow, but actually casting a faint inhuman glow into the space around him.
But aside from his unearthly beauty, it was Xiao Xingchen's presence that made it impossible to stay angry; his sweet nature, patient temper, and unfailing gentle wisdom. It was all part of being a qilin, Baoshan Xianren knew -- they were by temperament incapable of harming a living being, eternal advocates for compassion and mercy in all things.
That was why they needed protectors and partners -- humans who could make the crueler decisions, loyal yao who could defend them against the ugly violence of this mortal world. That was why, Baoshan Xianren thought, she had to be cruel for him.
"So?" Lan Yi said as she finished up her explanation. (Much of which Xiao Xingchen already knew, as her adviser, but he had listened with careful attention all the same.) "What do you recommend?"
Xiao Xingchen clasped his hands and held them to his lips for a long moment. Baoshan Xianren waited patiently, Lan Yi fidgeting beside her. "I think we have a clear duty to intervene," he said at last.
Lan Yi punched the air in triumph while Baoshan Xianren rolled her eyes. "I told you he was going to say that," she muttered.
"You know me so well, xiandu," Xiao Xingchen said, inclining his head in her direction with a smile. Then the smile faded, replaced by a look of painfully earnest sincerity. "My heart aches for the people of Wu. It is true that if we can find the qilin of Wu we can help their people, and also help ours. But more than that, I fear for the child. I can hear the cries of the nu xian from the sacred mountain, but they are beyond the reach of the caretakers.
"My little brother or sister is out there, vulnerable and without defenders. Either they are in the power of people who wish to use them, to exploit them or --" his voice caught, broke and then steadied, "or else they are -- they are alone entirely, in a land overrun with catastrophe. Even human children are not spared when their parents can no longer shield them, and the child has no human parents to look out for them. Please, we must find them. We must help them."
With five hundred years of experience under her belt it was rare for Baoshan Xianren to feel shame; but she felt it now, along with the sting of sorrow that laced Xiao Xingchen's voice. Lan Yi's eyes brimmed with tears, and Baoshan Xianren sighed as she reached out and took her wife's hand in her own. "Very well," she said quietly. "We will heed the wisdom of Heaven."
After a moment of silence Xiao Xingchen offered, "Perhaps we could send out teams of people to search, discreetly?" he offered. "Your students are very capable, xiandu."
"They are," Baoshan Xianren agreed with a smile. "But I don't want to send too many -- that increases the likelihood that they would be caught, and if we are seen to meddle in the affairs of our neighbors, it will only make the situation worse. Two agents, no more."
Lan Yi smiled. "I think I know exactly who," she said.
Cangse Sanren was one of Baoshan Xianren's dearest students. In truth she had attained her mastery of cultivation years ago and could not truly be said to be a student any longer -- except for the bond of loyalty and trust that remained between student and master all their lives. Baoshan Xianren had many such students come to her, learn the Yue ways, and move on.
But Cangse Sanren was special; there was a private part of Baoshan Xianren's mind that considered her more of a daughter than a disciple. She had a quick mind and a quicker laugh, and a fearlessness towards the world that bordered on recklessness at times. Fortunately, in the past few years she had been tempered by a partner of her own: Wei Changze, a native of Wu Kingdom who had fallen in love with the wandering cultivator and followed her back to Yue. Although her level of cultivation was higher, he was a formidable fighter in his own right and a steady, supportive presence in her life.
They made a good team. Furthermore, Wei Changze was a former member of the Yunmeng Jiang and Cangse Sanren had spent years studying at the Cloud Recesses in Gusu. Together, they had the greatest knowledge of their neighbors as anyone in Yue Kingdom today. It was this expertise that made them the best choice for this mission.
Baoshan Xianren gave them all the information they currently had to go on: the time and place where the infant qilin of Wu had been lost, their best guesses on how far they could have traveled, the means and motives of all the different factions that might be striving to take control of the child.
The Xue Sect were the primary suspects, of course; they had been the ones to slay the old xiandu and his Wu-lin, and they were the ones who had stolen the new qilin from the Heavenly Tree in the first place. But they could not leave the other Sects out of their calculations, either. The five smaller Sects had united in an alliance, the qiáo fū zhī zhēng, against the aggression of the Xue. Lan Yi's birth clan; the Nie; the Wen; the Jin; and the Jiang Sect that Wei Changze had once belonged to had all joined together in one too-brief moment of unity before breaking apart into feuding factions once more. While none of them had displayed the naked greed and aggression of the Xue, it could not be denied that having a qilin in their control would be a powerful temptation.
None of the worldly Sects could be allowed to have control over the qilin, no matter how fondly Baoshan Xianren's people remembered them. Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze's mission was to locate the baby qilin, hide them from the sight of any of the Sects, and return them safely to the Heavenly Mountain where they could be reared in peace until the time came that they could choose a new xiandu.
Finding one small child among the chaos was not going to be an easy task, made all the more difficult that none of them knew yet what the new qilin would look like. Wei Changze had once met the old Wu-lin, but there was no guarantee that the young qilin would look anything like her -- or even whether they would be male or female.
Cangse Sanren had laughed at the difficulty. "How many silver-haired children of that age can there possibly be?" she had said.
Xiao Xingchen had only smiled. "Ah, it is true that myself and Wu-lin were silver-haired," he said, "but not all qilin are. Some have gold hair instead of silver; some are even red like fire. There are even histories that tell of the heiqi, the black qilin, although one has not appeared in hundreds of years.
"Further, the child may be disguised -- either hiding themselves on instinct, or forced into concealment by their captors. Certainly they would not wish their prize to be so easily recovered."
"So the child really could look like anything," Cangse Sanren said thoughtfully. "All right. How can we tell?"
"To those who are familiar with the qilin, the signs are unmistakable," Xiao Xingchen said. "They will refuse to take the life of another being, even a small animal like a rodent or an insect. As such, most mundane beasts will refuse to harm them in turn. There is a faint luminosity that matches the color of their coat in their true form. And the places that they step, or water where they bathe, become purified -- disease cannot flourish where a qilin comes down to drink.
"You should be on the lookout for any or all of these signs, but so that you can be sure, I will give you a talisman with some of my spiritual energy. It will resonate only with another qilin. If the child touches this talisman and it comes alight, then you will know that you have found them."
"And we can hope," Wei Changze murmured, "that such a thing will comfort the child, as well, to feel the presence of their own kind."
It took Xiao Xingchen several days and nights to prepare the talisman, carved from the wood of the tian mu, and imbue it with his own energy. The effort left him exhausted, and so he was not able to see Cangse Sanren and her husband off on their mission. The delay was just as well; it enabled the couple to prepare for their journey and make arrangements for their own affairs in their absence. "Just like a second honeymoon," Cangse Sanren laughed.
The two agents would be posing as rogue cultivators, hiding their affiliation; it was hoped that Wei Changze's old ties to the Jiang Sect would lend verisimilitude to their disguise. But it also meant that they would not be able to use most of the Yue kingdom's existing spy network, nor send reports back too frequently. This would be a long, dangerous, undercover mission. Baoshan Xianren sent them off stacked about with powerful talismans, enough money to buy a small palace, and her most fervent well wishes. The pair traveled to the border between the Wu and Yue kingdoms, crossed over, and disappeared from Baoshan Xianren's sight.
That was the last they were to hear of the matter for the next thirteen years.
~tbc...
fusion/translation/worldbuilding notes
Putting here because the chapter notes doesn't have enough space for them.
Notes on translations and xiandu:
Every CQL author has to decide at some point what words they are going to translate, how they are going to translate them, and what words to leave untranslated. I usually come down on the side of translating everything except proper names, but for this fic I will leave xiandu untranslated, and here's why.
In Twelve Kingdoms, the Heavens (by way of the kirin) choose a king. The society in focus in The Untamed does not have a king, nor (that we ever see) an emperor, but they do have one high position of authority, the xiandu. Xiandu is most usually translated as Chief Cultivator, but it more literally translates to Heavenly/Immortal Supervisor/Boss. Heavenly! Immortal! That seems like a pretty direct analogue to a heavenly appointed immortal ruler.
The problem is that Immortal Supervisor just doesn't sound... cool! I simply could not find a way to rephrase or translate the phrase that didn't sound like someone with whom you'd file your expense reports and put in for vacation time. Sorry. So, for the purposes of this fic, the kirin chooses the xiandu, which will remain untranslated, or more generically only be referred to as ruler.
The setting that this fic is crossing over with, Twelve Kingdoms, is an anime based on a series of Japanese light novels. There's a lot of world-building in it that is specific to that setting; I am not using all of it (I had forgotten that the hanjyuu were even a thing until I went back to the wiki, and we're just going to throw the meishoku right out the window) but I am using a lot of worldbuilding and terminology specific to that series' conception of kirin. That means that a lot of these terms/concepts were made up in Japanese, then translated to English, and are now being retranslated back -- by my best approximation -- into Chinese. (If there are established Chinese terms for these things that Fuyumi Ono was referencing, I don't know 'em.) Here's what I've got for them:
Japanese -> English -> Chinese
kirin -> kirin -> qílín
kokki -> black kirin > hēi qí
youma -> monsters/demons -> yāo
shirei -> bound/loyal monster/demon -> mìnglìng guài
ranka -> eggfruit -> luǎn guǒ
Houzan -> Sagebrush Mountain -> Péngshān
Houroukyuu -> Brush-Jar Shrine -> Péng Lú Gōng
nyousen -> sages -> nǚ xiān
shashinboku -> heavenly tree -> tiān mù
Yes, that does say eggfruit, it's a whole entire thing in the Twelve Kingdoms setting that babies come from trees. I'm not going to get into the details now, but for the purposes of this story, all you need to know is that qilin do in fact literally grow on trees, and that it is possible to steal them 'in the egg' before they're properly born.
The location for CQL/MDZS is not given a name and I do understand that's very much on purpose, but for the purposes of this setting, the kingdom needs a name -- the kingdom names are important, since the identity of the kirin is tied to them. I eventually settled on Kingdom of Wu , where most of the story takes place, and the Kingdom of Yue , their next-door neighbors.
Kingdom of Wú - 无王国 (shares the same Wu as in Wei Wuxian's name, also can be read as 'the kingdom that has no name,' just like the MDZS setting)
Kingdom of Yuè - 岳王国 (Yue for mountain, as in Baoshan Sanren's mountain, also has a secondary meaning of 'in-laws,' as BSSR is related to our heroes by marriage)
In 12K, Kirin names are derived from their kingdom + their gender, with the -ki suffixed used for male kirin and -rin suffix used for female. I adapted that to be titles/honorific suffixes rather than names, since the characters we're working with already have names. So Xiao Xingchen, as the male qilin of the kingdom of Yue, is Yue-qi; and the female former qilin of Wu Kingdom was known as Wu-lin. Qilin characters might also be addressed by their name- qi.
The qilin belongs to a class of mythical animals known in Chinese as the Virtuous Beasts, along with a few others like the fenghuang (fire bird) and pixiu (winged guardian.) I adapted that class name, -仁獸 (-renshou), as a respectful title/form of address for a kirin; it can be used either as a name suffix or as a form of address on its own. (I believe the ren is the same one as in Lan Qiren's name, the ren for moral goodness and inner righteousness.)
Finally, I hemmed and hawed a bit over Baoshan Sanren's name in the prologue. According to my best understanding, 'Sanren' is 100% a title and not a personal name; as BSSR is not in any way a wandering cultivator or a lone hermit in this setting, then the 'Sanren' title simply can't be used to refer to her. (It can still apply to Cangse Sanren, though, since she absolutely still is a wanderer.) So I gave her the more generic cultivator title Xianren. I have a suspicion that 'Baoshan' is itself also more of a title than a name -- She Who Embraces the Mountain? -- but I figured that since she is still living on a mountain, or rather a kingdom of mountains, she can keep that one.
All that said, welcome to the project that has devoured my fandom time and attention for the last six months, hah! This story was written for the MXTX Big Bang, in partnership with the lovely and inestimable Sixlayerhouse as the artist! You can see their illustrations for the fic here and here... or else just wait for them to pop up in the fic ;)
Things you can expect this fic to contain:
- Wei Wuxian's kind heart and devotion to noble ideals
- plenty of Yunmeng Sibs feels
- Lan Wangji being an enormous sap about Wei Ying
- ...and vice versa
- lots of qilin-specific worldbuilding
- the Qishan Wen being jerks to everybody else
This fic will NOT really contain:
- most of Wei Wuxian's darker side
- the Wen Remnants
- the juniors, including a-yuan -- you won't see Wangxian Dads here
- much of the Nie siblings
- the Jins, even as bad guys. I have plenty of the Jins and JGS being shitheads in other stories, I don't feel the need to surface that here as well.
- much in the way of side pairings. There's some BSSR/Lan Yi in the prologue, Wei Wuxian's parents, and a bit of hinted-at Song Lan/Xiao Xingchen later on. But the fic really isn't going to focus on romance besides WangXian.
Since this work is a bit of a monster all being dropped at once: if you decide to read this fic, please occasionally take breaks to get water and maybe even sleep between some of these chapters! (And of course, if you feel like leaving your thoughts on each chapter along the way, that would be greatly appreciated! No need at all to wait till the end... ;)