There is not much point lying to please someone who can literally read your mind. 

"You seem like one of the immortals, Erastil-gongzi," Wen Ning says. "If I met Baoshan Sanren, I can imagine her talking like you."

Erastil looks incredibly pleased. "Thank you! --Can we do some human talk? Have you thought of getting married to anyone?"

"No, Erastil-gongzi, I've never met anyone I wanted to marry. And I'm too young to marry anyway."

He purses his lips. "Oh, you are quite a young human, aren't you? They all look the same age to me."

"Yes, Erastil-gongzi, I'm fifteen."

"I'm married!" Erastil says. "Marriage was such a clever invention. I'm very proud of the humans for it. My wife is the goddess of agriculture."

"That's a very important job."

"Let's see here, let's see here-- I'm supposed to provide a bunch of information because you're not a disaster and I'm one of the non-ascended gods who's best at talking to humans. Abadar is very hard to talk to," he says, as if it's gossip. 

Wen Ning questions this claim that he is not a disaster!

"Wen Ning, in order to be a cleric of a god, you have to share a certain similarity of mindset with the god. What do you see around you?" 

"A... garden?" Wen Ning hazards.

"My realm is the Summerlands. All of Heaven is devoted singlemindedly to the eradication of Evil. We will not rest until the last Evil being is destroyed."

Wen Ning really doesn't see the relevance here. 

"Everywhere in Heaven except the Summerlands. In the Summerlands, people farm and live in villages and walk along quiet rivers."

"...oh."

"I am the god of seeing an eternal war and deciding to step away and start a garden."

"I love gardens."

"And you are going to be a wonderful cleric of Erastil." Erastil smiles. "So! Wen-gongzi. Here's how your cleric spells work--"

Meng Yao misses Lan Xichen.

The flowers are in bloom in the Wen clan's garden. Lan Xichen could tell him which they were and recite some ancient poem about their blossoming that was also a compliment to Meng Yao's beauty and grace. In an ordinary relationship, Meng Yao would have been panicking if that happened, because he knew no poem to respond with, and everyone in the conversation would know it, and in fact probably would have specifically recited the poem in order to humiliate him with his inability to respond. But Lan Xichen is incapable of humiliating anyone. In his soul, there is only kindness.

Kindness is lacking in Nightless City.

The man before him is screaming and crying and begging for mercy. It's pathetic. Most of his body is intact. This isn't even one of the Jin that Meng Yao wanted to get his revenge on.

He casually breaks the man's finger, because he's in a bad mood, and the man's embarrassing noises are making it worse. "The Nie," he says casually, "have the face to wait until I've pulled out my more... special equipment... before they begin to beg."

As far as Lan Xichen is concerned, Meng Yao is an agent on the inside of the Wen clan, smuggling out information in order to help the Sunshot campaign. This is about 70% true. Maybe 60%, a man does have to watch out for his own interests, no matter how lovely Lan Xichen's smile is. And Xichen would hardly thank him if Sunshot lost and Meng Yao lost his position in the Wen court, now would he? In that situation, Meng Yao will be well-placed to ensure Xichen's safety and that of his silent little brother. It is only practical.

As far as Wen Ruohan is concerned, Meng Yao is his pet torturer of vicious creativity and unquestionable loyalty. This is true except for the last two words. Meng Yao is loyal to his mother, his father, Lan Xichen and, last and least, Meng Yao, and Wen Ruohan has done nothing to make the list.

Meng Yao is about to order the man to be dragged away so that he can have some quiet to hear himself think, when a hole opens in the floor and he is somewhere else.

He arrives in something that looks a bit like a temple, and a bit like a brothel. It's well-kept, with comfortable fabrics, lighting dim enough for an atmosphere of secretiveness but not so dim you have to squint to see, low harp music from somewhere. 

Outside the windows a wasp the size of a horse buzzes, in a not particularly threatening manner.

...Well, that's new.

He kowtows, because kowtowing is always a safe default action.

A sense of brushing against something overwhelming, like trying to drink from a waterfall, and a blur of things that are somehow formatted wrong, like trying to send a report as a symphony except on a much more massive scale --

-- in Osirion a nineteen year old woman's husband beats her so she poisons him, mixes the dose carefully so it looks like a heart attack. A seventeen year old girl, barely a year from her wedding, steals all she can of her father's money and runs away to Absalom --

        -- "I'll kill him," says someone, holding her friend, "do you want me to kill him, I'll do it, I will fucking kill him for this" --

-- advice for fertility, advice to prevent miscarriage, followed backwards, knowledge passed down in secret from aunt to niece and from friend to friend --

             -- if you are careful and quick and clever and good at what you do then nobody will hurt you ever again --

   -- if you mistreat a streetwalker in any Kyonin city (if you throw the son of a whore down the stairs) (if you insult Meng Yao's mother) you will pay --

...that is not the way the gods or demons or ghosts think. Gods used to be humans, except for the ones that used to be animals or plants or rocks, and they think the way humans do, just extraordinarily more powerful--

It is something else. Something fundamentally alien. And the world she's showing him-- he knows, on some level, it's not his home-- it is the world that not-gods like her come from--

He stands and looks at the wasp, this being the closest he can do to looking the not-god in the eye. She doesn't want him to kowtow. She is vastly more powerful than him, but she is not a god or an emperor or even a Sect Leader; this is a conversation between equals. 

There is a wound in the world. There are many wounds in the world, but this one is more literal than most. Out of the wound in the world pours [resentful spirits], or something similar to them.

Meng Yao is a cultivator. 

And -- 

              -- the girl in Osirion poisoning her husband whispers Calistria protect me --

         -- in Kyonin children of mothers very like Meng Yao's own, children very much like Meng Yao grow up educated and well-fed --

     -- in Absalom a woman leaves her child at a temple --

                       -- if you insult Meng Yao's mother you will pay --

  -- does Meng Yao understand?

...he understands. 

It is not a request for kindness or mercy. It is not "you were hurt, so you should help those who were hurt like you." Meng Yao has never been moved by those arguments, and he senses this not-god, this Calistria, is not a god who is moved by them either. (He senses, also, that there are gods who are moved by such things, and none of them will ever take on Meng Yao as a-- cleric? He is not Lan Xichen; he cannot afford to be sad about this.)

It is a deal. A deal conducted between equals, for all that the not-god is alien and powerful and far greater than he. (The gods who were once human, and who think like humans, demand supplication. Calistria, who is not a god and who does not think like humans at all, would never ask for such a thing from him.) She will give him strength, to protect himself, to protect Lan Xichen and his mother and his father, so they are well-fed and safe, with soft clothes and warm beds and the little luxuries that make life worthwhile, and so that they have good reputations and thick face and no one can humiliate them and get away with it-- and strength so that if those things are torn away, he can make the ones who tore them away pay. She has given this strength to others before. Her word is good.

And in exchange... she has her own goals. He senses within her discussion of the wound on the world that the not-resentful-spirits are offensive, that they sully Calistria's good name, and that her own opposition to them is not altruism, is not a desire to keep the peasants safe, but is vengeance. 

He silently requests more information about these not-resentful-spirits.