Yeah, That Tracks.

Yeah, that tracks.

The Real Struggle in the Burial Mounds

Food this, food that. Everyone wonders about food in the Burial Mounds.

You can last weeks without food. Water? You have days.

Worse of all, the more you spend energy wise, the faster you starve yourself; because you are actively using up the stores of fat and muscle that can sustain you over the weeks of little to no food.

And then there is the audio drama which makes it very clear that Wei Wuxian was instantly in peril from dying from the ghosts and other undead within the Burial Mounds. As soon as he landed there (possibly cushioned by all the resentful energy and also him knowing how to fall properly; look they fly around on swords, they better know how to fall when they first start figuring that out) his goal was actually to survive all the undead there.

So he had to have invented a very rough version of demonic cultivation within the first 24 hours.

Once that is done, he can sit down on his ass and control the undead to do the most important thing; digging for water. If the blood pool exists, there has to be underground springs of some kind. Or there is a stream nearby. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that Wei Wuxian needs water first.

Once he has water, he can send out the undead for more supplies; something for a fire and food. And by Chenqing and the fruit wine that Fourth Uncle has (and a few mentions of the fruit trees in fact) there is bamboo and fruit in the Burial Mounds that are edible.

Wei Wuxian wouldn’t be eating at his best, but he certainly wouldn’t be doing cannibalism. Which, btw, tends to be, historically speaking, either a) colonists justifying horrific things done to the natives by taking literally something that is likely symbolic or b) white dumb assholes like the Donner Party.

So yeah. He can eat at least some food to give him energy. He can send out the undead to do the difficult physical tasks to conserve energy. And he can work at his demonic cultivation so as to be very good at it, very safe at it, and capable of breaking the barrier around the Burial Mounds with it.

Forget about the food issue guys. Wei Wuxian had to have created demonic cultivation within hours of his fall to have survived. AND GOTTEN WATER IN CLOSE TO THAT TIME AS WELL!

That is the most important thing.

This fits with so many of my favorites…

The enemy of my enemy is my friend…

Nah, not anymore.

The enemy of my enemy is my bait.

The hobbits invent a fun game called ‘how close can we get to our friends before they notice us’

easy mode: Gimli (makes a lot of noise himself, very easy to sneak up on)

medium mode: Boromir (challenging enough to be great fun)

hard more: Aragorn (VERY attentive to his surroundings)

expert mode: Legolas

Maybe unpopular opinion, Wei Wuxian matured faster then Lan Wangji, he just was never romance focused. Besides keeping himself alive on the streets and thriving in a sect where his superior at the very least strongly disliked him (Madam Yu and her relationship with Wei Wuxian has been discoursed to death), he was head disciple for at the very least his generation on down of one of major sects. Which means training, potentially housing, politics, watching diet, classroom work, the Six Arts, core foundation. And he probably had a role in assigning night hunts and any administration task that neither Jiang Fengmian or Madame Yu wanted to do. Boy was busy, even discounting the civilians who could approach him for something they considered important but not enough to bother the sect leaders about.

Going to Cloud Recesses was probably the closest thing he’d had to a vacation in years. (Which, explains a lot about his general attitude while there. And why Jiang Cheng kept wanting to strangle him. Imagine going for study abroad and your obnoxiously talented sibling spent the whole time site-seeing and getting straight A’s while you studied your ass off just to get A’s and B’s.)

This is not, in any way, trying to say that Lan Wangji was not mature for his age, or that he didn’t have duties and responsibilities of his own, just that he wasn’t taking on an adult’s workload while still in puberty. I think a large period of his personal growth started with the burning of Cloud Recesses. The Wen Indoctrination Camp is a dark mirror of the Lan Lectures as the fandom points out, but people seem to miss that it was also a personal dark mirror of Wei Wuxian‘s Cloud Recesses experience. Forced to obey the rules of another sect that he found ridiculous, physically punished for what amounts to a personal grudge, most definitely did not have his choice of food or drink. Some of the only things that made the Summer Camp From Hell bearable for him were probably all related to Wei Wuxian. Noticeably, this is the first time that he is able to experience the benefits of Wei Wuxian being a pest to authority figures, and see some of the moral benefits to Wei Wuxian’s antics.

And then after the crucible of growth and maturity that is war, they are both indisputably adults, and mostly mature. Lan Wangji has decided that it’s Wei Wuxian or no one at this point, and while he has a few rough edges, he’s ready to commit. Wei Wuxian however is not in the headspace of a romantic relationship being possible. We know he’s at least a little bit of a romantic himself, because no one saves/protects their first kiss like that if they aren’t. And given that the word “protect” is used, it wasn’t due to lack of interest in his person. But the majority of the romantic relationships he has observed first hand have been unmitigated disasters, and he doesn’t remember his parents. It’s no wonder he questions Jiang Yanli about romance. He’s trying to figure out if she’s agreed to be the next generation version of Jiang Fengmian at best, or the next generation version Madam Jin at worst. He wants to know why she’s going back to the man that has been hurting her, and quite badly, since they were at least fifteen. I tend to think it was for longer, because of how willing Jiān Fengmian was to break off a political alliance when the Wen were on the move. This is, actually, also a scene that reminded me of my own brother. There’s roughly the same age gap between he and I as between Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian, and while he is an adult and mature, his own grasp of romance has lagged behind. I’ve had conversations with family over this where they all comment that what he’s found that helps him understand to be juvenile, I have observed to be about right for him emotionally.

So, while I adore fix-it’s and early get together stories, I don’t think the two of them were in compatible places in life until Mo Xuanyu did his thing. There, after he fulfills the summoning rituals demands (and in the novel, the only targets were the the Mo and A-Tong) he is free of all debts. With the core transfer he squared his debt with the Jiang Sect as a whole, and with protecting the Wen he paid any remaining debt between he and Jiang Wanyin by saving the latter’s honor even if no one else knew it. Any debt between Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng ended when the latter set the dog on him. (That does not mean the emotional connection between them snapped then, but with the breaking of the promise, it was the last debt tie.) This is literally the first time since Jiang Fengmian took him off the streets that Wei Wuxian has not been either debt bound or tethered to anyone. For the first time, his life is his own.

So he makes himself responsible for a donkey and goes to become a rogue cultivator. And finds himself smack dab next to the one person who can draw him in like a moth to a flame without even trying.

Tolkien was amazing.

That’s it, the Professor is truly the King of Sass

That smile

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