Way too untamed, way too wild

Injured

Lan Wangji watched the child going deeper and deeper into the Burial Mounds. For one reason or another, the air was getting clearer and clearer and the wind was also getting less piercing as they approached the mountains. It almost seemed like the Burial Mounds were the most hostile on the outskirts, at least from what Lan Wangji could see until now.

After another minute or two, the omnipresent dust stopped being blown everywhere and Lan Wangji could finally breathe freely again. Although the resentful energy was still all around him, it became less thick and looked less agitated. He estimated that they had been on their way, the child walking and him flying on his sword, for almost half an hour already.

Suddenly, the child staggered and swayed on its feet dangerously, grabbing its side with one hand. Lan Wangji reached out his hands, even though he was several meters away, he wanted to catch the child. But it was alright the next second, the child shook its head and half-straightened again. After another few steps, it kneeled down beside a strangely looking flat surface. It was black as everything in the Burial Mounds, but unlike the rest of the ground, it looked like it was a smooth surface.

Lan Wangji understood the next second. The child let go of its side and put his hands inside what Lan Wangji now knew was a sort of a water body. He would have never as much as gotten close to something like that but it seemed to not have been bothering the child at all. To Lan Wangji's utter shock, the child started drinking the disgustingly looking and for sure resentment filled water. To say it was bad for his body would certainly be an understatement.

Lan Wangji was conflicted; he did not want to scare the child away but he just had to warn it against drinking something like this. He had a bottle of a nice and clean fresh water in his qiakun pouch, he could offer the child to drink that instead of this poisonous one. He already started descending from the skies when the child did something which left Lan Wangji shocked speechless again.

The child removed the robes on his upper body and Lan Wangji could see that there was blood on his side, the one he had been clutching before. It was bright red even from this far away, it must have been a pretty fresh wound, one that probably did not yet scab over. Or alternatively, it could have just opened when the child had been moving around so much. Lan Wangji watched in horror how the child scooped some more black water from the pond and started cleaning its wound.

A sudden realization made Lan Wangji's heart hurt. What if it had actually been him who had injured the child this badly? He had thought he had had a good control over his sword whenever he had been attacking the cloud of resentment, but it was not impossible that he had, albeit unknowingly, managed to get one good hit. If he really was the reason the child was now swaying dangerously again, he had to help it, immediately.

Without another second of hesitation, he descended down and dismounted his sword. He wanted to approach the child carefully so he would not scare him away, however, it prooved to have been unnecessary. Just as he had landed, he had no time to say anything, only catch the now unconscious child before it hit the ground.

He immediately noticed that the child was a boy. His facial features were however not those of a young child as he had been assuming; be it because he had been way too thin or because he had been walking around scrunched down into himself, Lan Wangji had been mistaken about the boy's age. Looking closely, it seemed like he was only a little bit younger than the Second Jade himself.

Lan Wangji did not stop at the fact and he simply laid the boy down on a flat surface where he would hopefully not be too uncomfortable. He got out his water bottle and started cleaning the boy's wound immediately. The gash in his side was quite deep and painful looking, its edges were clear, it must have been a sword wound after all.

He paid attention to what his hands were doing, he did not want to think about how he had injured someone innocent, which would be the case if the boy was just a victim of the resentful energy and not the demonic cultivator of course. Once he was finished applying emergency medical herbs, he bandaged the wound the best he could. He had never been too apt at treating injuries, he had to take the boy to see a doctor, ha was afraid that after the disgustingly smelling water got into it, it could get infected easily.

He tried to pick the other up and carry him but the boy's eyes flew open suddenly and he stilled for a fraction of a second. Then he focused his eyes and saw that there was someone near him, they became twice as big and he flinched away. A tendril of resentful energy rose up from the ground and the next thing Lan Wangji knew, he was flying away from the boy.

He hit something hard with his back and had his breath was knocked out of him. His vison was blurry for a moment as he was trying to breathe again, stars were dancing in front of him and he lost the child from view for a while. He quickly shook his head and his vision finally cleared. When he focused on the spot he had been sitting in previously, it was empty.

The child was once again gone to who knew where. He did not hesitate for a second, run towards where his sword had landed and got into the air in desperate hope that he would be able to still see the boy from up above.

When he had been treating his wounds, he had also examined him to the best of his abilities. He had opportunity to feel a true demonic cultivator's qi, and the boy's was very different, albeit not completely. Normally, he would expect that the resentful energy inside the cultivator's body would be raging and protesting against their will, that was why demonic cultivation held so many risks and was extremely dangerous.

The boy's qi however was peaceful, coexisting with the resentful energy inside his body as if they never went against each other, as if it was obeying the child willingly. The way the resentful energy was behaving around him could almost be compared to how spiritual energy did when it came to proper cultivators.

How it was possible, Lan Wangji had no idea. What he knew for sure however was that he had to convince the boy to answer his questions, it was the first time the cultivation world had seen someone manipulating the resentful energy without apparently no backslash. Or perhaps there were consequences after all, but Lan Wangji's medical knowledge was too small to discover them. Preferably, he would like to bring the child back to the Cloud Recesses with him, he could not live in this kind of place anyway.