Way too untamed, way too wild

Inhabitants of the Burial Mounds

Lan Wangji was being attacked. He did not even know how it happened and there were already at least seven assailants on him, touching him everywhere and even trying to take his sword from him. He did not have any room to resist, he was surrounded too closely. His ears were hurting from the noise they were making and he could barely stand on his feet.

He was panicking for the whole of five seconds, until he heard the boy laugh heartily. He finally took in what was happening around him. Some horde of demonic cultivators this was! More like a nursery really.

The hands which were touching him were small and dirty, the fingers still wrapped in baby fat. The voices which were deafening him were high pitched and the words were slurred in the way only children talked. The grabby hands did not in reality want to take his sword away from him, they were inspecting it with curiosity.

There were children all around him, they were touching him, staring at him from a distance or hiding behind the boy he already knew, peeking out with wide eyes. He could not count them with certainty, they were moving around too much and his head was still spinning from the amount of misassumptions he had just made.

There was no way, these children were too young to know anything about such things as demonic cultivation, or cultivation in general. He could of course not tell for sure, but he guessed they were all between two or three and twelve or thirteen years old. Some were still toddlers really. But he could have been mistaken, it was hard to tell with how thin and dirty the children were, although they seemed better off than the boy himself.

Lan Wangji was completely speechless, only looking at the boy who had brought him here with a thousand of questions in his eyes, none of them however made it pass his lips. The said boy was still laughing rumbustiously as if he had not been even aware that no child should live in this kind of freezing and hostile place.

Until now, Lan Wangji saw no adults and he assumed that they were either gone somewhere or that perhaps, and this thought made his heart bleed for these small inhabitants of the Burial Mounds, there were none to begin with and the boy was the one taking care of everything. It certainly looked that way from how he was fussing over the children and how they were now swarming around him when he was patting their heads one by one and greeting them.

The boy was kneeling down in the middle of all the children and was now looking up at Lan Wangji, a wide smile on his lips and a somewhat mischievous glint in his eyes. "Lan Zhan, did you think that I was referring to the walking corpses when I told you I wanted you to meet my friends? No, no, no. Not anymore. Their company gets boring really quickly, believe me. These little ones are much more fun to play with." Then he added after a short pause, a little more seriously: "But they are also harder to take care of. That is why, thank you for the food."

The boy turned back to the children who had now started tugging at his clothes, asking what he had brought them this time. He put the package of food on the ground and opened it, spreading the different aliments all around for the children to see. Lan Wangji was now inexplicably ashamed of himself, the amount of food he had provided would have surely been sufficient for one person, but it was not enough for almost twenty hungry stomachs.

Although he could not have known that the situation was this bad for the boy, he still regretted not bringing enough for everyone. Just like the oldest boy, the children were very small and visibly malnourished. It was now all making sense why the boy was going to steal the food in the town every night, especially if he was really the one taking care of everyone here. Even though there were some fruits and other edible plants this deep in the Burial Mounds, he doubted that it was enough. Or healthy for them for that matter, he was sure that anything growing here must have long been poisoned and infested by the resentful energy.

The boy seemed not to mind the fact that he had only a little for everyone as he was distributing the food equally between them. The children were unexpectedly well behaved now, each waiting their turn to be given their very meagre portion and then getting up and going to sit a bit further away, munching on their food.

The boy stood up and looked at them with pretended sternness: "Children, how many time did I tell you that you have to give your thanks to the ones who helped you? This big brother here brought you all this food. Where is your gratitude?"

Lan Wangji wanted to reassure them that he had done it of his own will and that there was no need to thank him, but the children were all already back on their feet. They bowed to the best of their abilities, the youngest ones glancing around and following the older ones' lead, probably not fully understanding what they should do.

"Thank you, big brother."

Faced with their genuinely grateful faces, Lan Wangji could not do anything but to nod in response. "You are welcome."

The boy laughed again and clapped his hands, effectively attracting the children's attention back to himself. Lan Wangji was grateful for that, he was not too comfortable being watched as if he was a literal god in the children's eyes. The boy cheerfully prompted the young ones: "Good, very good, my little radishes. You are such good children. Now, finish your food."

The children sat down and continued hungrily eating, the food disappearing way too quickly for Lan Wangji's comfort.

After all of the children had their share – except for the boy himself which actually worried Lan Wangji greatly, he seemed to be the skinniest among all of them, probably often giving his own portion to the others –, Lan Wangji saw that there were two more portions on the cloth left, together with the bottle of milk. Seeing how young the children around were, he now had a distinct gut feeling that the milk was for someone even younger, there must have been a baby somewhere.

And sure enough, he confirmed the next moment.

"Wei Ying, you are back? What did I tell you about..." came a scolding voice from Lan Wangji's left side and he immediately turned his head to see the newcomer. In front of the entrance of a cave Lan Wangji only now noticed, there was a girl with a bundle of clothes in her arms and another boy standing next to her. From the looks of it, the girl was holding a baby.

The two looked like they were around the same age as him and the boy who had brought him here. Lan Wangji gave out a secret sigh of relief, at least Wei Ying – Lan Wangji's heart warmed a bit at the fact that now he knew the boy's name at last – was not all alone while taking care of the children.

It was the girl who had been scolding just a second ago, but her voice died out when she had seen that there was an unknown person in front of her. She was now scowling at Lan Wangji as she held the baby closer to her chest in a protective manner.