𝒜 𝒲𝒾𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇'𝓈 𝒫𝓇𝑜𝓂𝒾𝓈𝑒

Chapter 1- Family

          Lotus pods decorate the glistening sea of black waters under the moonlight. They swim and dance with their pastel, rosy petals twirling around in a ballroom dance along with the gentle currents of the icy lake, lightly nudged by the night breeze. I look to the side to see him sitting there, chin tilted up to the sky, admiring the moon as I am now. He looks like he's thinking of something, but knowing how he shies away from sharing his emotions out loud in front of others, I'm choosing not to bother him about it.

          "Second Young Master Lan?" a small voice asks.

          My husband lightly stiffens next to me, looking down and putting on his business-as-usual resting face. The sparkle that was momentarily in his eye is packed up for later. It is rare for him to take it out of its box when others are around anyway. He is only so vulnerable with three people, and I am one of them. He's so professional, I can't help but to admire since I have no face at all. As I sigh, watching him speak to a junior disciple, I rest my back against the wooden planks of the small boat we were previously snuggled up to and entangled in. Lan Wangji, with his long hair as dark as the night waters of Yunmeng, stands up and exits the boat, turning around once more with sympathetic eye contact followed by a swift turn of the heel. I nod as a means of understanding, and with that he walks along the Lotus Pier docks with some of the GusuLan disciples that have come to play with the YunmengJiang sect's juniors. The junior Lan disciple and the five-or-so integrated Lan and Jiang junior ducklings surrounding Lan Wangji stare wide-eyed at the master, in awe at his grace as they explain something to him that I am unable to hear.

          Hmph, I used to wonder how people could admire him in such a way, since he was always so cold to me when we met at age fifteen, but that was before I knew him as the love of my life. Now in our mid-thirties, matured and adults, I know who he is to me. He is my partner in cultivation. He was my first for everything, and I know he is my last. I want our hair to whiten together. We made a vow, after all, three times we prostrated to commemorate this.

          We never dreamed that our originally unlikely friendship would deepen to an unbreakable romantic partnership—or at least I didn't—but I am glad it did. At first, it was difficult for a few reasons:

          The first reason was my loss of memory after I died and was brought back by Mo Xuanyu's body sacrifice, which caused me to ignore my beloved's feelings for so long. The next reason is our different paths in life. Hanguang-jun, the almighty righteous god of the cultivational world, a member of the 3,000-rules-enforcing GusuLan sect, could have never loved a monster like me: the corpse-wielding, Ghost General sponsoring, Yiling Laozu and destroyer of the once-renowned pioneers of the cultivational path to righteousness—right?

          Well, he shouldn't have been able to in everyone's eyes including my own, but he somehow did and still does. He never once left my side, even when my crimes caught up to me and I met a fated death. He never once stopped loving me. Not even when he carried me away and hid me after the legendary battle at Nightless City, where I unconsciously yelled at him to "get lost!" repeatedly, not knowing I was harming the man I would later marry. Not once did Lan Wangji, Lan Zhan, Hanguang-Jun, my cultivational partner, ever stop treating me like I hung the stars in the sky for him, and not once have I wanted to hang the stars in the sky for anyone else as much as he.

          "Ahem. Young Master Wei? Wei Wuxian?"

          I must have fallen asleep. My eyes flit open to reveal a young man in his late teens or early twenties standing before me. His robes are white and he wears a headband decorated with a cloud ornament in the centre. His hair is long but pulled back in a sleek ponytail with two long sections of hair that dangle around his jawline. He wears a bright smile and has an innocent face. A-Yuan!