In Parallelity, In Perpendicularity |XICHENG|

I | war of hot and cold

The night was rather cold, or at least that was all that Jiang Cheng could really think of coherently as he downed his sixth jar of wine.

He did notice he wasn't much made for the cold. Neither was he fond of it, really.

For a man whose heart burned with ice and whose relationships were enduringly cold, he sure had trouble keeping warming himself even with qi. Made sense when he'd been doing it for a long while now; He could feel his qi depleting from both trying to keep warm and trying to burn off any extra alcohol just so he could finish all the jars he'd impulsively taken out of the winery without getting too drunk he'd make yet another mess out of himself that would haunt his legacy.

Yeah. He'd had one too many bad decisions it would have driven any lesser man down a hole somewhere. He knew he wasn't much too, though, but when it came to thickening his face amidst a bad reputation, he could say he was getting much adept at it.

Notice how he said he was only getting better and not really the master of it.

No. Of course not.

He could never be the master of anything but greed, ignorance, and anger¹ for as long as that certain person was alive to be the first—of everything, at that.

Jiang Cheng laughed mindlessly at that. Then he uncapped another jar and downed all the content in one go even as his throat protested. It burned, and he almost wanted to gag, the taste of wine now numbed to him except for the bitter alcohol, but he managed to finish it anyway.

It reminded him of the first time he had had his first taste at the tender age of 9, so naive and curious and eager to please his A-Die that he had gone and drank one whole cup and thought it a feat to be proud of.

It wasn't.

His father had shaken his head in disapproval. His mother found out and had frowned at him so heavily it had been the first time he had tasted her disappointment.

Well. He was nine, and Wei Wuxian was already in Lotus Pier.

There weren't much good memories with his parents around that time, anyway. Not that there were much to begin with. He'd been too young for the good part of it to remember if there were any. A-Jie had told him there were, though, but he doubted it had anything to do with being a family than it had everything to do with A-Jie simply taking up spaces within the hearts of both their parents.

A-Jie was a beautiful soul, after all. It made sense even the feared Yu Ziyuan would have a soft spot for her.

Now, Jiang Cheng only wondered if they would ever hold the same soft spot for her son. A-Ling, that child, had his mother's eyes and cries but his father's everything else and his uncle's temperament.

So would they have loved this boy even when he wasn't more like his mother but instead more like his uncle—the other child less favored because, well, he was everything simply not much to favor?

Jiang Cheng huffed, placing the empty jar down as he glanced up the darkening sky.

That child, he thought, finally found out, too, that his uncle is everything the rumors say about him.

Thus was his unrest for the night.

It wasn't something that had been planned well nor communicated with.

It had solely been Jiang Cheng's impulsive decision. Really. And he could admit as much. He would have explained, though. Perhaps not then, but soon. He was willing to do that. But—

Jiang Cheng sighed.

He just wished the boy respected him more.

"Study in Gusu," he remembered telling the brat who, in turn, had gawked at him with big eyes before shouting words of refusal, as he had expected.