This is really exciting news! And encourages her to do things like meditating more.

Out of all the things he can't do because of being bedridden supervising meditation is not one of them. 

Meditating with daddy is so much more fun than meditating alone, for some reason; she puts a lot of the time she would've spent copying if she was being less sneaky and smart to good use hanging out with daddy and trying to form a golden core.

It will still take time, but less. He gives her detailed feedback on her progress.

That helps a lot!

Her teachers are pleased with her progress but would also like to gently lean on her to follow the spirit of the law instead of rules-lawyering so much. 

Hmmmmm... Nah.

Sigh. 

The healers, when she goes to shadow them, are better at getting her to actually follow rules, generally because healers-area specific rules have specific reasons having to do with patient health which any given healer is willing to expound upon, at length, at the slightest provocation. 

Rules with really good reasons are okay and make sense, so she does follow those as best she can, but only when in the healers' area.

The healers are satisfied with this and get along with her a lot better than her regular teachers. 

Excellent!

Her father slowly recovers. He plays the guqin for her more often. 

That's good! She really likes listening to him play.

She keeps up her friendship with Lan Jingyi, but - doesn't really seem to have other friends. And she seems to be getting more restless as she ages, getting bolder with breaking rules, talking of wanting to explore more and more.

He notices. And what he doesn't notice, Brother tells him. 

Three years after he brought A-Yuan home to Cloud Recesses, he takes her and leaves. 

He goes night-hunting. People give him odd looks for bringing a child along, but he is perfectly capable of protecting her, and his reputation prevents people from objecting openly. He teaches her according to what order she wants to learn things in, and plays for her in the inns at night. 

She says goodbye to Lan Jingyi before she leaves, and promises to bring him lots of cool stories, and even to write sometimes.

Night hunting is SO COOL!!! She wants to learn ALL about pacifying the dead, and stabbing the ones who won't be pacified, and talismans and the like... She also has a lot of questions about the other cultivators they see, and their cultivation methods, and about the history of the places they pass - she's an incredibly curious and bright kid, though not one with a large attention span.

She loves not having the Lan Sect's rules. Loves loves loves it. (She does obey safety rules on night hunts once those are properly explained to her.) 

She makes quick friends with village children, telling stories of places they've traveled and playing very loud, very rambunctious games with them. She laughs a lot, and the sharp edges she'd been developing slowly smooth down - she seems far less prone to anger or sadness now.

Oh good. 

He brings her back to Cloud Recesses sometimes, between hunts, but never for long, never long enough for the adults around her to start nagging her in earnest, but long enough to check in with Brother and resupply and let her catch up with Jingyi in person. 

She enjoys talking to her Uncle, too, as well as her friend, telling grand stories of all the cool things her dad's doing, and everything she's learning, and how fun night hunts are...

Sometimes in towns they pass through there are storytellers who treat Yiling Laozu as a monster to scare children with. Lan Wangji always death glares at those.

That makes her really unhappy, but she mostly keeps quiet, sulking.

When A-Yuan is ten, they run into Sect Leader Jiang, Sandu Shengshou. Lan Wangji gives the man the cold shoulder as much as possible and, when he absolutely has to speak to him, tells A-Yuan to tell him things instead of doing it himself. This clearly pisses off the Sect Leader enormously, which is gratifying. 

She's heard some things about Sect Leader Jiang so takes quite a bit of delight in relaying her dad's words as obnoxiously as possible.

This pisses him off a lot but he does not actually hit a child or Hanguang-Jun about it. 

She sticks her tongue out at him whenever he's not looking.

A-Yuan is the best child ever. 

She is!!! (She is not, exactly, a humble child.)