"There We go. Well done. You can stay out of the bag, and gaze upon Us all you wish, though I suspect that your fathers would prefer that this be a private conversation: perhaps you could stand with Wen Ning or Lan Wangji?" 

She nods and continues to look at the emperor expectantly.

"a-Su, just because the Chief Cultivator gives you a present whenever he sees you, and Sect Leader Jin gives you a present whenever he sees you, and Sect Leader Lan gives you a present whenever he sees you, and Sect Leader Jiang gives you a present whenever he sees you, doesn't mean you'll get a present every time you interact with a powerful person."

a-Su looks skeptical.

"I mean, actually, a-Su, not in the way that Sect Leader Jiang won't give you a present every time he sees you."

a-Su looks both skeptical and disappointed.

"Go stand next to your other fathers and Lan Zhan will have disappointed eyebrows for both of us once we're done having a meeting with the emperor."

a-Su follows this instruction with GRAVE disappointment.

Cultivators do things very differently. He makes a mental note to send a portrait of himself to Wei Wuxian's address, addressed to a-Su.

"Lan Wangji, I have taken no offense. You have clearly done your best to balance respect and the desires of a young child." Specifying who the young child is would weaken the point unnecessarily. "Wei Wuxian, We were discussing the merits of setting up an independent power bloc of demonic cultivators, distinctly educated from the cultivator clans, and making traditional cultivation viable for every distinguished gentleman's children, or perhaps even the children of the lower gentry if you can produce the bells cheaply enough, creating a third group of superhumanly powerful individuals within Our Empire." Tweaking Lan Wangji a little by allowing himself his natural projection seems harmless. 

Lan Wangji and Wen Ning rise.

You can't insult Lan Wangji's husband just because he's behaving unconscionably. Fortunately, the emperor is unskilled in Lan Wangji microexpression interpretation.

"Yes, Your Imperial Majesty. I intend to do that."

In a softer, quieter voice: "and do you disagree that this raises the risk of violent conflict?"

"Your Imperial Majesty, if I may be frank, the protection noncultivators currently have against cultivators is that we're all too wrapped up in our own internal issues to bother to slaughter all of you. Looking at the last four chief cultivators we've had, I'm not going to bet on this state of affairs continuing indefinitely."

"Why would the cultivators want to slaughter the people who provide them with radishes and alcohol?"

"If Wen Ruohan had decided that he cared about power over noncultivators in addition to power over cultivators, he could have killed tens of thousands of Your people. If Jin Guangyao had decided that his desire for revenge wasn't satisfied by burning a brothel with everyone inside, no noncultivator could have stopped him. Jin Guangshan, fortunately, kept his interest in noncultivators to being a serial rapist and abandoning his illegitimate children. And even if I had burned all my notes five years ago, if people know that demonic cultivation exists, they're going to be able to reconstruct it, just like how Mo Xuanyu reconstructed the ritual that gave me his body. Cultivators don't care about noncultivators because we grow up in a society that teaches us that only cultivators matter and noncultivators, from the least peasant to Your Imperial Majesty, are irrelevant. But there's nothing stopping, say, one of Your Imperial Majesty's ministers from researching demonic cultivation, and there'd be nothing You can do to stop him."

Everyone kept complaining about Jin Guangyao for the most minor matters, it was really quite mysterious, particularly with how justified the murder of his father seemed. "And yet you think it would be wrong to train a few members of Our Imperial Guard in demonic cultivation."

"I haven't said 'no,' Your Imperial Majesty."

...Wei Wuxian had...actually not intended that as a denial. He had just gotten side-tracked. This was the most dangerous man in China. "What would convince you to do so?"

"Don't torture people with it. Don't killing a bunch of peasants with it. Don't-- I don't know-- desecrate the bodies of your political enemies to humiliate their families? In general, do the amount of torture and killing and so on you'd do otherwise, or ideally less, but I'm not going to hold my breath on that one."

The insult will go, if not entirely unanswered, at least only responded to in the most gentle and polite form imaginable, and at least in a way that only Lan Wangji could even notice. "We will swear, on our honor and that of our ancestors, that any Imperial Guards you train in demonic cultivation will not harm anyone other than to protect Our person from immediate physical threats. They will not be sent on missions that take them from Our person. They will not torture anyone. Is that satisfactory?"

"Excellent. I'll train your guards, assuming that Sect Leader Lan thinks that this is a good idea."

A-Su is BORED. She is TIRED OF KNEELING. She fidgets. Even Uncle Qiren doesn't require so much kneeling.

Unfortunate: Lan Xichen is probably aware enough to insist that the guards not train their peers in demonic cultivation. "We are most thankful. We shall have three of our most mature present themselves to your household in a week if we do not hear otherwise."

"Returning to an earlier topic, why do you think cultivators have not engaged in mass slaughter of non-cultivators in the past, but may do so in the future?"

"Your Imperial Majesty, cultivators have, in the past, slaughtered or dominated noncultivators. I don't know if Your history books preserve this fact but ours do. The peace is fragile, and Jin Guangyao's concern for noncultivators may easily disrupt it. As we develop new cultivation techniques, the gap between a cultivator and a noncultivator grows larger. A few thousand years ago, a cultivator who could take on as many noncultivators as Lan Zhan can would have cultivated to the point that they don't care to do anything except sit on a mountain and dispense cryptic wisdom. This is no longer true. And anyone can become a demonic cultivator, if they're clever enough to reconstruct it. You don't have to be a member of one of the sects."

"So Our only option is to give as many people as possible cultivation, either traditional or demonic, and hope that you are able to prevent the sects from slaughtering Us and all Our people for the temerity."