Backlash Part 1

Chapter 40: The Jingshi

Wei Wuxian had been pacing back and forth in the Jingshi for hours already. He'd barely managed to sleep at all last night, constantly waking up and struggling to fall asleep again. He'd given up in the early hours of the morning, hardly able to keep himself still. Despite his best efforts he even ended up waking Lan Wangji early. Lan Wangji had tried numerous things to help Wei Wuxian calm down. He'd managed to help a little, but not enough for Wei Wuxian to be able to sit still comfortably. So now Wei Wuxian was pacing, at a slightly more relaxed speed, while Lan Wangji was filling the Jingshi with calming music.

Today they were going to be talking to Lan Xichen. Specifically they were going to tell him about the future, and try their best to convince him to let them prove it. Wei Wuxian really wished they had a better way to prove it. Even though empathy between two willing living people was relatively low risk, it was not without risks. Empathy was a very effective technique. The quality and quantity of information it could provide was second to none in information gathering techniques. Whether being used on the dead or the living it gave you the ability to directly observe events the subject had experienced. This even included events and details the subject could not consciously recall. Further no one had been able to fabricate or willfully alter the depictions seen in empathy as far as Wei Wuxian knew. He wasn't even sure how one would begin to try and go about that given the vulnerable state the subject of empathy was in. For all these reasons it could be considered the best of the information gathering techniques.

However, empathy was not readily used because of one important factor. It was dangerous. Empathy was a very simple technique in concept. The person performing the empathy would deliberately lower their natural protections. In terms of performing empathy with the dead you were either inviting the deceased soul to enter you, or forcefully pulling said soul into you. Whether you used spiritual energy or resentful energy to pull it in made no difference. The actual process of empathy was allowing souls of different people to bleed together without any barriers. In truth an intact soul was not even required in terms of receiving information. A person could perform empathy on a damaged or fragmented soul.

However, allowing your soul to mingle in such a way with another soul was inherently dangerous. With the souls of the deceased there was a risk of becoming possessed by the invading soul. Performing empathy on an unwilling subject opened up a risk that the unwilling intruder could damage your soul or their own. If the person performing empathy was not able to stabilize themselves appropriately there was the risk of contamination. This could mean the souls becoming so entwined during the empathy that they do not separate appropriately. Depending on the circumstances the practitioner might become contaminated by memories or personality traits of the deceased soul they hosted or vice versa.

These were all the reasons why empathy was not commonly used. It was a simple technique in concept, but unless the situation was dire and other methods had failed, most would not choose to use it. Wei Wuxian had used empathy many times. He had even developed strategies to reduce the risks. He had started doing this before he learned demonic cultivation, and honestly some of those techniques are what helped him in the later practice.

Wei Wuxian took a deep breath to try and calm his racing thoughts. Lan Xichen would be the one performing empathy. In all likelihood it would be completely fine. Wen Qing was willing, so she wasn't going to be trying to resist and potentially damage her soul or Lan Xichen's. She could choose to focus on a specific memory at the beginning to have them open to that one. After that it would be up to Lan Xichen to guide the empathy. Lan Xichen was a calm confident person, so really he probably should have an easier time avoiding unfortunate accidents than Wei Wuxian. Since Wen Qing was willing she and Lan Xichen both would need to drop their defences. A small simple use of spiritual energy would suffice to initiate the empathy, and everything should go smoothly from there.