Chapter Text
These days, Wen Qing only ever dreamed in fragments of Wei Wuxian.
She could always tell when she was in Wei Wuxian’s mind rather than her own: there was something a little too vivid about her dreams nowadays. She had the urge to shield her eyes against the summer sunlight of them with their harsh, clashing colors and memories that weren’t her own.
If her unconscious mind moved just a little too fast now, she knew who to blame for that, too. She’d had to get used to the way her dreams buffeted her from place to place in her own mental landscape, always bouncing to a new idea before she’d had the chance to grasp where she’d been.
She also dreamed of the Jiang siblings far more often than she ever had before, which was…fine.
She probably owed them a dream or two, after everything that had happened. Or maybe they owed her something. All of Wei Wuxian’s schemes seemed to operate on an imagined currency of debts and favors known only to him. Even a professional economist would struggle to quantify exactly how it all worked.
All Wen Qing knew was that, at the end of the day, the Jiang family had gained a brother and lost another, so maybe Wei Wuxian’s formulas had been sound. She just doubted the Jiangs would agree.
After one too many mornings waking up feeling just as exhausted as when she’d fallen asleep, Wen Qing finally cracked and asked A-Ning if the same thing ever happened to him.
A-Ning had shrugged.
“I don’t really remember my dreams,” he’d said. “But I am a little afraid of dogs now. Does that count?”
She never asked Wei Wuxian about it. She knew if she had, he would panic and lock his mind up even tighter than it already was. And although Wen Qing wasn’t that kind of doctor — not an expert on telepathy like Wei Wuxian was — she was pretty sure that level of mental strain wouldn’t be healthy for him in the long-term.
Not to mention how uncomfortable it would be for Wen Qing.
Case in point: the three of them were sitting in a tedious meeting about an off-the-books night hunt with a cultivator who was only maybe going to double-cross them later. A-Ning’s presence in Wen Qing’s mind was constant and comfortable, like ripples of a pond lapping gently against the shore. Wen Qing couldn’t grasp any concrete thoughts from her brother, but if she focused, she could make out a blur of emotions: vague discomfort, wariness, maybe hunger.
A-Ning could shield his mind from Wen Qing, just as Wen Qing could do for him, but they didn’t often bother. What did either of them have to hide from the other?
In contrast, the point of tension at the back of Wen Qing’s skull that was pure essence of Wei Wuxian was constant only insofar as it was a constant distraction.
On the one hand, Wei Wuxian had some of the best mental shielding that Wen Qing had ever heard of. If he wanted to disappear from their minds, he could make it feel like he wasn’t even linked to them at all. Like he didn’t exist. It had sent Wen Qing into a spiraling panic the first time he’d ever done it, because it had felt like he’d died.
On the other hand — as Wei Wuxian had discovered himself after shutting himself off from the Wen siblings for several days — he couldn’t maintain that level of shielding forever. He’d lose focus, or take a nap, or wear his own brain out until it dropped the shield out of pure exhaustion. When Wei Wuxian was distracted or dreaming, bits and pieces of his thoughts and emotions would always punch through the shields, aggressively enough to make Wen Qing’s ears pop.
Right now, Wen Qing could catch flashes of Wei Wuxian’s thoughts and feelings — stronger than A-Ning’s, but never anything complete enough to be useful. Instead, his mind shifted in and out of her focus like a bad radio connection:
“…talismans never…if he’s here about…snacks would…CINNABAR!…”
Wen Qing winced at the mental volume, and then did her best to transform it into a smile for their client, who was describing the creature he’d been hunting in a truly painstaking level of detail. Wen Qing could already tell they were going to take this job, just based on the emotions that she could feel radiating from Wei Wuxian like a tiny star. He was intrigued by the night hunt description. He liked how fussy and demanding the client was, because he felt that it added to the challenge of the project.
Wei Wuxian might actually be the most insufferable person on the planet.
Wen Qing couldn’t imagine how boring her mind would feel without him.
***
Jiang Cheng was so bored. When he and Jiang Yanli had agreed to collaborate with the Lans on retrieving some mysterious cursed artifact that had alarmed Lan Qiren enough to voluntarily ask another cultivation team for help, Jiang Cheng hadn’t realized how many pointless meetings he was setting himself up for.
Jiang Yanli gave him a little mental nudge: focus, A-Cheng! And because Jiang Cheng loved his sister a whole lot, he hid his next yawn behind his hand. At the end of the long conference table, Lan Qiren narrowed his eyes. He did not seem fooled.
Sorry A-Jie, Jiang Cheng thought. He both heard and felt his sister huff in near-silent laughter that she was much better at concealing than him. There was a reason only one of them took point on any infiltration-style night hunts, and that person was very much not Jiang Cheng.
“So you think the artifact is going to be moved soon?” Jiang Yanli interjected sweetly. And with that, Lan Qiren was effectively diverted from Jiang Cheng’s rude behavior.
“We have been trying to ascertain its whereabouts for years,” Lan Qiren said, frowning thunderously, as though he considered it a personal affront that the artifact hadn’t surrendered itself voluntarily to Lan custody years ago. “We have reason to believe that it recently fell into the possession of Su Laboratories.”
Jiang Cheng straightened abruptly. “The research division of the Jin Sect? That is serious.”
Jiang Cheng felt echoes of his sister’s alarm through their bond, as well as wisps of a more complex emotion that Jiang Cheng preferred not to examine too closely. Even though they were telepathically linked, they still deserved some privacy from each other, and there were some things in his sister’s mind that Jiang Cheng simply did not wish to witness. Her fraught relationship with Jin Zixuan was one of those things.
Lan Qiren glared at Jiang Cheng. “Did you think I would invite you here just to waste your time?”
“Of course not,” Jiang Cheng murmured respectfully.
Lan Qiren harrumphed but continued: “It is not possible to retrieve the item from Su Laboratories at this time.”
Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli kept their faces impassive, but mentally, their bond was pinging with reactions to that little tidbit. The fact that Lan Qiren had even alluded to the possibility that the Lans had ever considered stealing this thing from another sect was a big deal.
What the hell is this artifact? Jiang Cheng asked Jiang Yanli, who sent back a wordless feeling of foreboding.
“However,” Lan Qiren continued. He still looked as stern as ever, but the way he was stroking his beard had taken on just the slightest hint of smugness. “The head of Su Laboratories, Dr. Su Minshan, has been invited to deliver the keynote at an upcoming academic conference. According to our sources, he plans to conduct a demonstration of the artifact during his talk. He claims that he has neutralized its danger, but the Lan remain skeptical of this claim. Not only will Dr. Su’s demonstration put all the conference attendees at risk if it’s allowed to go forward, but this conference also presents an ideal opportunity to retrieve the artifact.”
Jiang Yanli kept her smile mild as she replied: “We will certainly do everything in our power to assist you, but what exactly do you need us to do? Surely your nephews, or any other Lan cultivators, would be more than capable of attending this conference and retrieving this item.”
For the first time in this conversation — and maybe for the first time in Jiang Cheng’s memory — Lan Qiren looked uncomfortable.
Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli had been bonded for a long time now, and their minds together worked far more rapidly than they’d ever done alone. Near-instantly, they both simultaneously grasped what Lan Qiren was struggling to say.
Somehow, this had to do with their brother.
Jiang Cheng felt the sorrow emanating from Jiang Yanli first, but his own distress was right on her heels. Their mutual pain reverberated through their bond until one of them — Jiang Cheng didn’t know who, their minds had become too intertwined for too long — shoved the feeling away from them both.
Their bond got like this sometimes. The two of them had always been close, even before bonding. Now, after years of nourishing their mental link, the two of them could often think and react in perfect sync. That was the whole reason cultivator pairs had started bonding in the first place, after the technique had been invented some time in the 18th century.
Jiang Cheng knew his and his sister’s bond was unusually strong. It made them formidable cultivators — Jiang Cheng tackling combat while Jiang Yanli watched his back from afar — but sometimes their connection would falter in odd ways. Jiang Cheng would forget to guard his left side in battle, instinctively trusting that someone else was by his side. Or he and Jiang Yanli would get stuck in these feedback loops, sending emotions back and forth with no way out.
They were never meant to be a dyad. There may never have been a cultivator trio before in recorded history, but they’d been determined not to let that stop them. There was always supposed to have been a third mind in their bond, balancing the two of them out and pulling them out of their own heads with teasing comments and flashes of stunning, irritating brilliance that neither Jiang Cheng nor his sister could achieve, as much as it galled Jiang Cheng to admit that.
Sometimes Jiang Cheng thought he could feel it in his mental landscape: that cold, echoing absence where Wei Wuxian’s mind should have been, like a bare apartment stripped of furniture.
If only Wei Wuxian hadn’t skipped town before they could complete the Bonding Ceremony. If only Wei Wuxian hadn’t decided to share the glory of creating the first cultivator trio in history with the wrong siblings. If only Wei Wuxian hadn’t abandoned his old family for a new one.
Lan Qiren cleared his throat.
Jiang Cheng sighed. “What has my brother done now?” Maybe if he sped Lan Qiren up, they could be done with this conversation and go home.
A-Cheng, Jiang Yanli chided him. Even mentally, her voice was quiet.
Lan Qiren’s face soured at the reference to Wei Wuxian.
“The conference that Dr. Su will attend is the International Parapsychology Association. The IPA is a small and insular academic community. They would recognize most outsiders — especially cultivators — on sight. Only someone who is already known to the IPA has a chance of stealing this artifact undetected.”
“And let me guess.” Jiang Cheng sighed heavily. “Wei Wuxian is one of its members.”
“One of its founders,” Lan Qiren confirmed with a sniff. “He split with the organization leadership several years ago, but he still attends their annual conference.”
“With all due respect, if you believe that my brother and I hold enough sway over A-Xian to convince him to work with you…” Jiang Yanli’s voice was firm, but inside their bond, her mind was awash with a dizzying mix of grief and wry humor.
As if anyone could ever make A-Xian do something he doesn’t want to do.
You could, Jiang Cheng replied, and Jiang Yanli’s mind went so quiet that Jiang Cheng suspected she was shielding it from him.
“I have no illusions that Wei Wuxian can be reasoned with,” Lan Qiren retorted. “However, I believe that the nature of the artifact will persuade him. We believe it is a fragment of the amulet that Wen Ruohan used to kill your parents, as well as…” Lan Qiren trailed off, seemingly uncertain about how to categorize Jiang Cheng’s own encounter with Wen Ruohan’s amulet.
Lan Qiren wasn’t the only one.
By all rights, Jiang Cheng should be comatose right now — or worse. He still had no explanation for why he had managed to recover from the psychic attack that had torn through his parents’ minds, along with a whole courtyard of Jiang cultivators.
While Jiang Cheng’s attention had caught on Lan Qiren’s reference to this ongoing mystery, Jiang Yanli was instead thinking of their parents — of honoring their memory by protecting innocent people and destroying the object that had killed them.
Jiang Cheng personally thought his mother, at least, would be far more motivated by revenge than anything as altruistic as what his sister was imagining, but he supposed it amounted to the same thing either way.
And Lan Qiren was certainly right about one thing: Wei Wuxian would certainly be interested in getting his hands on that amulet.
The bigger problem would be getting it back.
***
Wen Ning was in the lab with Wei Wuxian when they got the call.
Well, they called it a “lab,” but it would be more accurate to call it a “shed,” albeit a heavily retrofitted and magically warded shed. It also stood 50 feet from the house. When they’d just been starting out and living together in a series of tiny apartments, Wei Wuxian had lost their security deposit one too many times for Wen Qing to allow him to work in the same building they slept in, once they had enough money to buy something of their own.
Wen Ning worked part-time with Wei Wuxian as his lab assistant while he was finishing his college degree, although he doubted he was as much help as Wei Wuxian insisted he was.
“Your mind is so nice, A-Ning,” Wei Wuxian always said. “It helps me think. Like white noise. Or whale sounds.”
If Wen Ning was a different kind of person — and if he wasn’t so intimately attuned with Wei Wuxian’s sidelong way of expressing himself — he might have taken offense at this. As it was, he was just glad to be helpful.
He knew that, as deeply as his sister loved Wei Wuxian, she struggled with her bond with him sometimes. They were too similar perhaps: two strong minds playing tug-of-war with the rope that tethered them together. But Wen Ning was never one for digging in his heels when he didn’t have to. He liked being pulled along in Wei Wuxian’s wake.
It wasn’t exactly white noise, but he did find it soothing — enough that he understood what Wei Wuxian had meant when he’d made the comparison.
“You know I get college credit for this internship, right?” Wen Ning asked Wei Wuxian today as he played Tears of the Kingdom on his Nintendo Switch.
“You’re doing great, A-Ning,” Wei Wuxian mumbled distractedly from his drafting table. “You missed a treasure chest, by the way. On your right.” (Wen Ning had long ago stopped wondering how he did that). “Wasn’t there a footnote about telepathy after stroke injuries in…hmm…maybe it was in Chapter Four…”
Wen Ning obediently went toward the treasure chest Wei Wuxian had pointed out. In the back of his own mind, Wei Wuxian’s thoughts thrummed along like a motorcycle, fast but controlled.
After another few minutes, a stray idea pulled at his attention for long enough to drag him out of his game.
“Lopez et al. isn’t what you’re looking for,” Wen Ning said. “You’re thinking of Anderson and Khan’s article, I think. The one that found no difference in telepathic ability between cultivators’ children and non-cultivators’ children.”
“Yes!” Wei Wuxian’s mind draped over him — a fleece blanket woven of enthusiasm and pride and gratitude, like Wen Ning had just cured cancer instead of vaguely remembered something Wei Wuxian himself had read three weeks ago. “A-Ning, you’re a genius!”
Wen Ning smiled faintly and turned back to his game.
Naturally, that was when Wei Wuxian’s phone started ringing. Wei Wuxian didn’t seem to hear it.
“Phone,” Wen Ning said aloud. When that didn’t provoke a response, he mentally shouted PHONE!
Wei Wuxian cursed and fished his phone out of his jeans pocket. Wen Ning caught a flash of terror before Wei Wuxian’s mind went abruptly, alarmingly blank as he fumbled to answer the call.
“A-Jie?” he blurted out. “What’s wrong? Are you OK? Is A-Cheng—"
“Everything’s fine,” Wen Ning heard Jiang Yanli’s voice say faintly through the phone. “I’m sorry to worry you, A-Xian. It’s just…we need your help.”
***
Jiang Yanli hadn’t heard her brother’s voice properly in several years. They texted occasionally, but A-Xian was so strange and skittish now that Jiang Yanli was always afraid to push too hard by asking for more. Once, years ago, just after A-Xian had left Lotus Pier, she’d suggested a video call and he’d disappeared for three months. So Jiang Yanli had to content herself with watching her brother’s recorded lectures on YouTube like any other fan.
“Put him on speaker phone,” A-Cheng growled from next to Jiang Yanli. She frowned at him.
“Be nice, or I won’t.”
“I’m nice,” A-Cheng grumbled.
“Is that A-Cheng?” came A-Xian’s tinny voice through the phone that she still had pressed to her ear. “Put him on speaker phone.”
Jiang Yanli hid a smile as she obliged. A-Cheng gave her a dirty look, able to feel her amusement through their bond anyway.
“Can he hear me?” Wei Wuxian’s voice filled the room. “Hi, A-Cheng! This is such a funny coincidence that you called, because I was actually thinking the other day that—"
“We need to hire you for a job,” A-Cheng interrupted.
“Oh…” Jiang Yanli didn’t need to be bonded with A-Xian to sense the resignation in his tone. An instant later, it was replaced with pure determination. “Of course I can help. What do you need?”
Jiang Yanli felt the spike of A-Cheng’s temper before she heard it.
“Just like that?” he barked. “No questions asked?”
“Uh. Yes?”
“Unbelievable!” A-Cheng bit out.
Her brother’s mind sometimes reminded Jiang Yanli of an ocean in the middle of a storm. The surface roiled with deadly waves — massive and crashing and uncontrollable — while the depths of his feelings were silent, dark, and almost completely inaccessible. But they were there. It just sometimes took a seismic cataclysm to bring them to the surface.
Right now, only Jiang Yanli could sense the oil-spill of grief that had been released within him, as he said: “You’re so full of shit, Wei Wuxian. Don’t act like you ever do anything out of the goodness of your heart. A-Jie and I know better.”
There was an odd scuffling noise on the other end of the phone, and A-Xian’s muffled voice said something that sounded like “A-Ning.”
He left us, Jiang Cheng’s mind howled. Jiang Yanli felt a headache spiking in the back of her own skull. And now that he’s gotten everything he wanted, he’s pretending to care about us again? How dare he.
Jiang Yanli had no reply to that. She wasn’t angry like A-Cheng was, but that didn’t mean she’d done a better job of coming to terms with her brother’s absence. She knew there had to be a good reason for it, but the fact that A-Xian hadn’t trusted her enough to explain it to her…that hurt. And she couldn’t pretend it didn’t, not in her own mind.
Instead, she sent a soothing mental hum toward Jiang Cheng’s side of the bond, trying to smooth down some of his more tangled emotions. Her headache abated slightly.
“A-Xian, we wouldn’t bother you with this, except… it’s the Yin Amulet. The Lans think they’ve found it.”
There was a crash on the other end of the phone.
“A-Xian?”
“I’m fine!” A-Xian said, his tone artificially bright. “Just a small setback in the experiment I was running! All part of the wonder of scientific discovery!”
There was the sound of urgent whispering and then the clatter of a wooden door slamming shut.
“OK,” A-Xian said. He’d lost his carefree attitude, and his voice now was as sharp as a scalpel. “Tell me everything.”
A-Cheng was still fuming too much to speak, so Jiang Yanli found herself responsible for explaining everything that Lan Qiren had told them.
A-Cheng didn’t interject until the very end.
“You’ll retrieve the Yin Amulet at the conference, but A-Jie and I will be outside the whole time. So if you’re thinking of…”
“Thinking of what?” A-Xian asked harshly. “Running off with it?”
Jiang Yanli winced.
“We’re you’re backup. To protect you if something goes wrong,” she attempted to clarify, but it was too late.
“Don’t act like it’s so ridiculous,” A-Cheng scoffed. “Everyone knows you’ve been looking for it.”
“So have you! So have the Lans!”
“Yeah, but did the Lans abandon their family to bond with Wen Ruohan’s relatives the minute the Yin Amulet went missing, almost like they knew something about it? Did the Lans immediately quit cultivation work forever to go to grad school?” (A-Cheng’s face screwed up with disgust, like Wei Wuxian had admitted to joining an organized crime ring instead of an institution of higher learning). “Did the Lans start publishing papers on telepathic network theory, which is the exact area of research that created the Yin Amulet in the first place?”
There was a worrying silence on the other end of the line.
“A-Jie?” A-Xian’s voice was quiet. Jiang Yanli was suddenly struck by the memory of the first time he’d called her “A-Jie,” five years old and so hesitant, like he thought she might tell him off for it. “Do you feel that way too?”
“A-Xian is a good person,” Jiang Yanli hurried to say. “You’d never do anything unless you thought it was right. But you don’t have to do it alone.”
“Right,” A-Xian replied, even more quietly than before. With a sinking heart, Jiang Yanli realized that whatever A-Xian had hoped she’d say, that hadn’t been it. She just wished she knew what the right thing was.
***
Lan Xichen strode through the public hallways of the Cloud Recesses toward the large conference room, Lan Wangji by his side. Through their bond, Lan Xichen could feel his brother’s confusion. They only used the large conference room when they were meeting with clients, entertaining notable cultivators whom Lan Qiren wanted to impress without making it look like he was trying to impress them, and conducting mission briefs for large operations that involved too many cultivators to fit in the small conference room. But none of these options seemed very likely today.
When Lan Qiren had tasked him and Wangji with finding the Yin Amulet, he’d emphasized the importance of secrecy and discretion. Not even other the Lan cultivators knew what they’d been working on. The fact that the Amulet had ended up under the Jins’ control (relatively speaking) had only made his uncle more paranoid about doing anything to tip off Jin Guangshan in advance.
Who could Lan Qiren have possibly trusted enough to bring in on this mission?
A simple enough question to answer, once we’ve entered the room, his brother noted with a hint of amusement from where he was standing behind Lan Xichen, waiting for him to turn the handle on the conference room door.
As usual, Wangji constructed his thoughts into a complete sentence before transmitting it deliberately to Lan Xichen through their bond.
Lan Xichen had never heard of anyone else who was able to maintain such strict control over the ideas and feelings that they communicated through a telepathic bond. Wangji seemed to have mastered a trick of separating his own mind into layers. Although he rarely shut Lan Xichen out of his mind entirely, he had a near-perfect ability to filter out anything that he didn’t want Lan Xichen to hear.
Lan Xichen was a talented telepath in his own right, but he was certain that whatever information Wangji received from him still came with an unpredictable blend of emotion and half-formed, subconscious impulses.
For instance, right now, Lan Xichen was certain that Wangji could feel his own mild, self-deprecating amusement at getting called out for his hesitation.
Without further ado, he turned the doorknob and entered the room to find —
“Lan Zhan!” a bright, familiar voice exclaimed from the other side of the conference room, and —
Lan Xichen’s mind exploded with sensation.
It felt like he’d been snatched from a serene mountainside and dumped directly into the middle of a pop music concert. Lan Xichen had years of practice at controlling his own outward reactions, but even he couldn’t help but wince and stumble a little at the barrage of thoughts and feelings that had crashed over him, too intense to categorize or understand.
“Zewu-jun, are you alright?” The words were soft — Jiang Yanli, registered some distant part of his mind that wasn’t too busy howling in overwhelmed confusion — but they were enough to knock Wangji’s filters back into place.
Even after the abrupt return to mental silence, Wangji’s final, agonized Wei Ying? rang through Lan Xichen’s ears.
Wei Wuxian’s smile faltered at whatever expression he must have seen on Lan Xichen’s face, but it widened again as Wangji nudged Lan Xichen out of the doorway to enter the room himself.
“I didn’t realize you were involved in the Yin Amulet mission too!”
“We found it,” Wangji said evenly, with absolutely no hint in his voice of the mental chaos that Lan Xichen had felt just seconds ago.
And to Lan Xichen: Xiongzhang, please take a seat. Uncle is waiting to start the meeting.
Lan Xichen glanced at his uncle, who was indeed seated at the head of the conference table, staring very intently at the far wall and doing an excellent job of pretending that the rest of them didn’t exist.
“Ah, of course you did!” Wei Wuxian chirped. “I should have known! It had to have been someone absolutely incorruptible — someone who wouldn’t be tempted to steal the Amulet for themselves — so who better suited to the task than Lan Zhan?”
“Thanks a lot,” Lan Xichen heard Jiang Cheng mutter from his spot at the conference table — where he was seated as far from Wei Wuxian’s as possible.
“Let us begin,” their uncle said, with a reproving frown at his nephews for holding up the proceedings.
Lan Xichen obediently sat down and then immediately tuned his uncle out. He and Wangji had been the cultivators tasked with finding the Yin Amulet in the first place, so he already knew most of what his uncle was explaining. And if he did miss anything, apparently one of the two other cultivation teams recruited to retrieve the Yin Amulet could always fill him in later (The fact that his uncle had reached out to the Jiangs and the Wens, of all people, was one of the few things Lan Xichen had not known in advance. He and his uncle were going to have words — very filial and respectful words, but words nonetheless — after this meeting was over).
Instead, Lan Xichen focused inward on his mental connection with his brother. He gave his side of their telepathic tether a little tug — a wordless are you okay?
In return, Lan Xichen received a series of thoughts that bore the unmistakable and visceral sensation of a bullet-pointed list. Lan Xichen had long ago stopped wondering how Wangji was able to convey Microsoft Word formatting telepathically.
- Uncle’s plan for Wei Ying to infiltrate the conference and steal the Yin Amulet is sound:
- Wei Ying is the foremost living expert on telepathic cultivation in general, and the Yin Amulet in particular.
- Wei Ying’s presence at the International Parapsychology Association conference will not draw undue suspicion.
- However, Wei Ying is also vulnerable in several key respects:
- The Jins know of his interest in the Amulet. They will be suspicious of him from the start.
- Wei Ying no longer practices cultivation.
- He no longer has the protection of a Great Sect.
- Therefore, I propose that Wei Ying be accompanied by someone who can protect him.
- This will increase his chances of retrieving the Amulet successfully. It is essential to the success of the plan.
- Uncle must agree.
- You must persuade him.
Apparently even Wangji couldn’t hide everything he was feeling, no matter how many times he indented his lines.
Lan Xichen sighed, but he made sure his primary thought was one of reassurance. Wangji only ever asked him to intercede with their uncle if it was something he wanted desperately — so desperately that he was afraid he wouldn’t find the words to convince their uncle himself.
Lan Xichen had only ever said ‘no’ to Wangji once. He still regretted it.
And so, even though he personally thought it would be a terrible idea to send his precious baby brother to a secluded location with a brilliant and unscrupulous researcher who’d stop at nothing to get his hands on one of the most dangerous artifacts in the world, and who’d already broken his brother’s heart once…Lan Xichen put on his best diplomatic smile and raised his hand.
“Uncle,” he said aloud. “Can I make a suggestion?”
At least Lan Xichen would be able to sense if Wangji got into trouble.
Probably.