They pour out of the wound in the world like blood and more-than-blood, they are overwhelmingly many; they are of [ontologically basic chaos] and [ontologically basic harm]; they are immune to lightning and to poison and difficult to damage by fire or acid or cold. They are, furthermore, well-known to the people of this world.

But killable with Hensheng, which he currently has wrapped around his arm. 

(He is a very weak cultivator. But perhaps he is the only cultivator who has had son of a whore spat at him while he lay bleeding at the bottom of the stairs, and so he is the only cultivator who is hers.) 

Yes. Yes, they are killable with Hensheng, and yes, he is hers; Meng Yao's father, she notes with some pride and some disgust, didn't deserve him. 

What does this mean?

It means exactly what it sounds like, sweetheart.

This comes with a distinctly affectionate tone, like if a mountain or a meteor shower were somehow also your aunt. 

...It doesn't matter if Meng Yao's father deserves him (--a flash of he kicked me down the stairs--), Meng Yao's father is his father. It had been Meng Yao's error to arrive near Jin Zixuan's birthday. He would do better in the future. He was a loyal, filial son who treated his father with appropriate respect, as his mother taught him. 

Calistria does not care about loyal, filial sons. Calistria is the goddess of everything that loyal, filial sons are not.

And, she adds, Jin Guangshan mocks Meng Shi. Calls her a stupid whore who thinks he ever cared about her, or would ever take in their son.

The words comes with a vision, a memory-- Jin Guangshan's face as he says it, twisted in contempt-- and Meng Yao knows that Calistria would lie but she would never lie to someone who is hers. 

Meng Yao loves his mother. Meng Yao loves his mother more than he loves anyone in the world. No one is allowed to insult Meng Yao's mother. (Jin Guangshan said he loved her-- Jin Guangshan said that he would leave his bitch wife for her, if he could-- Jin Guangshan said that Meng Yao was wanted, was desired, that he would be a great cultivator like his father-- and he mocked her behind her back for believing it-- he humiliated her, he took her face-- Meng Yao can stand torture, can stand starvation, can stand everything those prissy cultivators have never endured, as long as he saves his face--)

It was not Meng Yao's fault that his father kicked him down the stairs.

Meng Yao politely petitions to be allowed to return home to investigate this and, if Calistria's allegations are true, arrange for Wen Ruohan to torture his father to death. 

He cannot be sent home for reasons that are, frankly, beyond Calistria's control. Grabbing him was expensive enough.

But--

Well. Prophecy is broken, and nothing is certain.

But Wei Wuxian, the hero of the Sunshot campaign, is here on Golarion, and without him the campaign is probably going to lose. And -- as head of the Jin clan -- Meng Yao's father will face the consequences with or without Meng Yao's involvement.

Calistria is the goddess of revenge. She knows. You're welcome, Meng Yao.

Thank you, Calistria-guniang. 

Wei Wuxian is doing an experiment. He is doing an experiment to see whether fierce corpses maintain skills from their previous lives, and he's doing this experiment on the corpses of a few of the concubines from a minor branch of the Wen clan. If asked, he would say this is because he wants to see them dance sexily. In reality, it is because they were used by some ill-disciplined soldiers from the minor clans before being killed, and this built up a nice healthy amount of resentment so he knows that it's not just that they're too weak.

(The disciplines of the major clans would never rape the concubines. This is not because the Wen-dogs don't deserve it-- they deserve everything they get-- but because a major-clan disciple wants to marry a woman with strong cultivation who can handle her own sword in a night-hunt, and if you come to the marriage bed without your virginity intact she's liable to cut your balls off.)

Wei Wuxian is doing a second experiment. This experiment is on how long a person without a golden core can survive getting all of their calories from alcohol. It has been three days so far, which is a personal best.

Wei Wuxian keeps a few of the prettier and more resentful corpses, as research assistants, before sending the rest into battle. He can control them as easily as he can control his own hands. There's very little difference, these days; his hands feel like they belong to someone else. 

His vision is blurring and wavering in front of him. He needs to learn how to see through the fierce corpses' eyes, he thinks, so he can keep working.

Wei Wuxian likes working, because when he's working he's not thinking, and nothing good at all comes of thinking. When he thinks, sometimes, he remembers things that happened before the war. He remembers nothing from before he came to the Jiang clan, which is a mercy, but his mind has not been so kind to him about afterward. He remembers swimming at the Lotus Pier, being the best at talismans and swordfighting and the dizi and everything else you put in front of him, nighthunts with Jiang Fengmian, sneaking into the kitchens to beg soup from Yanli, being whipped until his skin peels off because of thus-and-such infraction that was really Jiang Cheng's fault, and every single one of those happy memories has over it the tarnish of never again never again never again. 

When he is luckier, he remembers the Burial Mounds instead, the hands grabbing at him and snatching bits of sleep when he can and the taste of a half-rotten leg. He doesn't like eating anymore. No matter what it is, it always tastes like corpse.  

When he is very very lucky, he remembers the searing pain of having his golden core removed. But that's all right; it was for Jiang Cheng, and if nothing else Jiang Cheng is okay.  

Wei Wuxian is not sure what day it is, or in fact if it's day rather than night. He rarely leaves his tent. Sometimes someone tells him that it's time for battle and he leaves his tent and pulls out Chenqing and begins to play, and this is the only time he's happy, a fierce radiant destructive joy. Instead of two hands or six he has a hundred a thousand ten thousand, and every one of them is devoted to one goal and one goal alone, destroying each and every one of those Wen-dogs, torturing them and making them hurt the way that everyone he loves was hurt. 

He doesn't see Yanli, because she'd worry. He doesn't see Jiang Cheng, because he wouldn't understand. After the war is over, it will be all right. They'll be the Twin Prides again and they'll rebuild Lotus Pier until it was greater than it ever was before, and he won't have to work and there will only be happy things behind his eyes and he will eat Yanli's food until instead everything tastes of lotuses.  

For right now, he drinks, and he works, and he waits until he is ready to kill. 

And then the earth opens up under him. 

He's in a tavern.

The walls are of warm dark wood; there's a fire blazing merrily in the hearth. There are broadsheets tacked proudly to the walls, WANTED FOR REBELLION and WANTED FOR SMUGGLING and BRAWL AT POET'S RECITAL: THREE POLICEMEN BITTEN. The whole place smells like wood and cooking meat and yeast. There's a low murmur of conversation, enough to make the place feel lived-in, although there's nobody here.

Well. Almost nobody.

There's a man behind the bar, leaning forward against it. Bronze-skinned, wearing chainmail, with a rapier at his hip. He looks remarkably like some of the men on the WANTED posters, though not all. 

Nice.

"Hello, gongzi," Wei Wuxian says to the man. "You have some wine?"

"Mead, beer, cider, whiskey, mezcal, or moonshine." He looks Wei Wuxian up and down. "But first you look like you could use some food, I think." 

"I'm fine."

"Mmm." The venison soup doesn't seem to come from anywhere in particular. It just sort of happens. "Want to sit down?" 

...all right, that does in fact smell amazing. 

Wei Wuxian sits down and eats the soup, which is pleasantly spicy. 

The man behind the bar is smiling.

"So, a few things. --name's Cayden Cailean, incidentally."

--It occurs to Wei Wuxian that this guy is a god.

Well. Fuck gods. He is Wei Wuxian, son of Cangse Sanren, and Baoshan Sanren is his shizun. He's killed a god before and he'll do it again as soon as he's eliminated all the Wen-dogs. 

"Nice to meet you, Caicai."

"Oh, I like you already," says Cayden Cailean, grinning.

...Maybe this god needs killed less than most of the category. 

"What kind of god are you? Martial god, civil god, elemental master...?"

"God of bar fights for a good cause, standing on principle even when it's a dumbass move, and drunken dares. But if you said martial god you wouldn't be far wrong." 

"I wish they had you in China, maybe I'd endow a temple."

"Well," Cayden Cailean says, and gestures vaguely to the WANTED posters, "probably for the best, I don't go in for temples much anyhow."