Hanguangjun- The Waiting

Infestation

It took a few hours for the medications to wear off. Wei Ying was currently in an adjacent room, lying on a bed that reminded him of the Lan Institute. When he opened his eyes Christopher was whispering to Lan Zhan. 

"Lan Zhan," Wei Ying called out. 

"Wei Ying, how do you feel now?" Lan Zhan asked in concern. 

"What happened?" Wei Ying asked. 

"The sedative you were given to keep you calm during the session took too long to wear off," Christopher answered. "We were a bit concerned," he insisted. 

Lan Zhan looked at Wei Ying with more guilt than he had felt in the past four thousand years. 

"Do you remember anything from the session?" Lan Zhan asked. 

"I remember up to being saved from the Xuanwu cave. It was all familiar to begin with. What was once a dream, however, is more of a memory now. You were an a$$ in your last life. Why couldn't you smile? What happened afterwards? Why did you stop the session?" 

Lan Zhan looked concerned. "Do you know what happened after that to Wei Wuxian?" he asked in a grave voice. 

"You mean from the Lan Records?" Ian asked. 

Lan Zhan nodded.

"Yes, I read the Story of WangXian cover to cover. It was such a tragic love story. I never figured that it was our story," Ian joked. 

Lan Zhan looked at him with hurt in his eyes. 

Wei Ying smiled wider. "I know the fact that you remembered before me must have been a bitch. Waiting must have been even more painful. But I am here now. You are here now. We have time on our hands. We won't fuck it up this time..." 

Lan Zhan cuts him short. "I don't want you to remember everything." Lan Zhan stated. 

"Why not? You clearly remember everything," Wei Ying insisted. 

"You experienced more pain in the twenty years of your life than I experienced in all the years afterwards," Lan Zhan demanded. 

"You're forgetting your pain of loneliness and the burden of moving on for the sake of your sect, " Ian said with a nod.

Lan Zhan didn't respond. A heavy silence hung in the room.

"Now about the session, " Christopher interrupted after a while. "Do you remember dabbling in Yin energy at any time? " He asked.

Ian shook his head. "I had an idea about utilizing resentment as a source of energy, but I didn't know how to control it. I was pretty satisfied with my cultivation path." Ian recalled.

"Hanguangjun, with how the situations stand now do you think we should exercise caution when dealing with the undead elements?" Christopher asked. 

"What do you mean by undead elements? Are the walking corpses here in New York too?" Ian asked. 

Lan Zhan turned to his now legal husband. "Yes, they are here too. The spells are holding for now but the appearance of fierce corpses isn't uncommon, leading to massacres in various crowded areas," he explained. 

"Then we must do something," Ian suggested. 

Lan Zhan shook his head. "The Yin energy recognizes your soul as the grandmaster of demonic cultivation. But you aren't him. You are a different Wei Ying," Lan Zhan pointed out. 

"Are you afraid that I will be targeted?" Wei Ying asked. 

Lan Zhan gave a curt nod. 

"Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, why do you worry so much. I have the Stygian Tiger Seal. It listens to me, obeys my command. I have always had Chenqing and you know how Yin energy heeds its command. The only thing that I am yet to command is Suibian. But I have won several medals in archery in school. I even have a gun license and I know how to use a rifle. I am probably better equipped than the previous Wei Ying was." Ian assuaged. 

Lan Zhan looked at Christopher and signaled him to go ahead. Christopher took out a remote and pointed at a screen behind them. There a news of a subway stampede was being aired. Dozens of people had been killed leading to blood splatters staining an entire subway station. "The government is terming these incidents as terrorist attacks but only a few know that the real cause are fierce corpses. Generally walking corpses are known to be relatively fresh ones. However even corpses with rotting flesh are being animated nowadays. Some of them are filled with gases and explode on the slightest provocation. These explosions, though not deadly, disrupt the public life leading to such incidents." he explained. 

"How are they being animated and what can we do to stop them?" Wei Ying asked, turning to Lan Zhan. 

"We suspect that the Yin Cultivators have decided to come out of hiding. If that be the case then they will soon demand world domination. Peace as we know it will cease to exist," Lan Zhan informed. 

"Who are these Yin cultivators? Where did they originate? As far as I remembered I couldn't recall anyone having successfully cultivated Yin energy and lived," Ian recalled. 

"It happened a few years after you died. I didn't witness it firsthand. A group of cultivators surfaced who dabbled in Yin energy. They had raided the burial mounds after your demise and collected your notes and inventions and put them to use. They worked under Jin Guangshan and primarily tasked with recovering the Stygian Tiger Seal. I had asked Zewujun to spread the rumor that the Stygian Tiger Seal was destroyed along with you. It wasn't until a boy named Xue Yang succeeded that Yin cultivation gained momentum. Over the years they were often criticized as practicing witchcraft till they all went underground. But now that the walking corpses are appearing everywhere we can assume that the yin cultivators had only gone underground to gain momentum. Now they have improved their craft and causing havoc on the world," Lan Zhan explained. 

"I need to go back. I need to remember. If it were my notes and my inventions that started all this then it is time that this all be put to an end," Ian decided. He turned to Christopher with determination. "When can we resume?"

"We need to give your body a week's rest before we restart. The drugs used are mostly narcotics. If used too frequently they can impact your nervous system," Christopher pointed out. 

Ian nodded. "Then what do we do in the meantime?" 

Lan Zhan eyed Wei Ying accusingly. "We continue with the breathing exercises and the qi building. At the same time, I want you to focus on your external senses as you interact with the environment," he insisted. 

"I do have some parts of my memories back. I know how to achieve cultivation. Though if I remember correctly, a reason why my cultivation level was higher than my peers was because of the level of humiliation I suffered in the Jiang house. That taught me detachment which was a very important part of building my core," Ian recalled. 

Lan Zhan nodded. "There is another way that is more effective than detachment." Lan Zhan commented. 

"Really? What is that?" Ian asked. 

"Acceptance. Opening yourself up to the elements helps in qi accumulation," Lan Zhan informed. 

"You can't do that alone. You need a cultivation partner to filter the qi," Ian pointed out. 

"And now you have one," It was Lan Zhan's time to smirk. "It's time we started practicing dual cultivation."