Wei Ying takes Lan Zhan's face into his chubby hands.
"Lan Zhan, I don't know if you know this, but Jiang Cheng and ShiJie came to see me one day, after the whole defection thing."
"What defection thing?" Cangse Sanren says, in a tone colder than steel. "Who defected?"
"Um, okay, maybe I should start from there," Wei Ying turns his head to glance at her. "Even Lan Zhan doesn't know the particulars about that visit, but I suspect it was hot gossip everywhere by then. Despite its location, the Burial Mounds had their fair share of visitors back then, suddenly quite a popular place. Not only Lan Zhan came to see me, but Jin GuangShan was putting pressure on Jiang Cheng to bring me to heel, as it were.
"By then, Jiang Cheng was already establishing himself as a competent Sect Leader, rebuilding Lotus Pier slowly but surely. However, he felt he needed the support of the other three major clans. He didn't want to lose face with them and he was constantly reminded by Jin GuangShan that I was his subordinate who refused to act like it. We both knew that this was just an excuse for him to drive a wedge between us so he could secure the Yin Hufu for himself, but his motives didn't change the situation.
"So one day, Jiang Cheng came there. He looked around and was too shocked by what he saw. Uncle Four alerted me to his presence, and at first, I really thought he had come there to help. I hadn't seen him for so long, you know? Even when we were back in Yunmeng, I spent whatever waking hours I could away from home but we always saw each other at least once a day.
"But when I took his hand intending to lead him in, he stopped, giving me a strange look. I tried to pretend everything was alright, but at that moment, I knew. He demanded to know what I was doing, so I told him we were building a house. He asked about the others tilling the hard ground behind him, and I told him we were going to grow our own food. Over the bodies of dead cultivators, he asked. A mountain of corpses, he called it, wondering if the crops would even be edible. I told him that when people are hungry, they will eat anything. I realised then, that Jiang Cheng hadn't gone a day when he was hungry and didn't immediately get something to eat. A luxury, really. How could I expect him to understand our plight?
"He scoffed at our attempts to make that into a long term stay, to make ourselves comfortable. "So, you're really not intending to return to Lotus Pier?" He asked me, and then to make him feel better, I told him it wasn't far, and I could visit anytime I wanted. He might even have believed me. Then A-Yuan, who had a habit of grabbing onto people's thighs, locked onto his. Jiang Cheng yelled at him to get off. I had to tell him to speak nicely. He might have regretted his harsh words, but then he was always awkward around kids.
"He told me that the rest of the Clan Leaders thought I'd brought over an army of Cultivators, and that we were planning to take over the Cultivation world with my own Sect. Then he scoffed at all of the people he saw there, right in front of them, saying they were just a group of old, the young and the weak. Useless, he called them."
So much time had passed since these memories had happened, and yet the hurt in his voice is unmistakable.
"I had to tell him off again. How could he call them that? They were his seniors for the most part, and yet his conduct was severely lacking in manners."
"Privileged Idiot, taking after his mother." Cangse Sanren sniffs, feeling affronted on his behalf.
"But Mama, he swiftly moved on from that and asked me about Wen Ning. It was almost as if he had a list in his head of bullet points and he was going through them, one by one, just to be thorough. But he didn't care about them, and he might have cared about me, but I really think he was making a note of everything just so he could go back and present a detailed report to the others. Especially to Jin GuangShan.
