That's nice. Lan Wangji kills monsters with swords.

--his moments alone with the guqin, not practicing scales or learning musical cultivation but simply playing for the joy of it, the precision of his fingers against the strings and the music that he makes--

--a bright smiling wild boy who takes all the rules that Lan Wangji has governed his life by and doesn't so much smash them as treat them like cobwebs, something he can dismiss with a brush of his hand--

--a song that two people have ever heard, a song named Wangxian--

Wei Ying is infuriating. 

--three months searching for Wei Ying hoping desperately that he would live, knowing that there would be no more reason to be alive if Wei Ying's smile were taken out of it--

--the bright shining wild boy grown cruel and isolated, and Lan Wangji doesn't have a word for it other than demonic cultivation is dishonorable because, really, there's nothing wrong with torturing the Wen-dogs is there, they're the enemy, but he knows in his heart that something is very very wrong and it tears him to shreds--

Mn.

Every year, every village that worships Shelyn makes a rag doll called a zonzon doll, and they give it gifts and apologize to it about the wrongs they've committed in the year, and share happy memories with it, and teach it about kindness. 

And every year they send it into the wilderness, in the hopes that it will find its way to Shelyn's brother, who once was Good and is no more, to teach him to be good again. 

(There are any number of beings who are Evil and will, metaphysically, never be Good. Shelyn doesn't see why she should be concerned with metaphysics. That's what love is.) 

(In spite of everything, Zon-Kuthon still has a little spark of love for Shelyn in his heart.)

Lan Wangji doesn't make dolls.

Lan Xichen continues to carry all the books of the Lan Clan with him in a qiankun bag sewed to his robes; it is soothing to know that they're there, and (he thinks) if he is captured they'll lose regardless, so there is little point to keeping the books separately. But the books aren't what he's been reading in spare moments. No, he's leading a war, and so he's been reading Sun Tzu: 

Amidst the chaos of a sea of flags in the battlefield, order must be maintained. Even when the view is unclear, adherence to an army’s formation will ensure it cannot be defeated. Yet, disorder can arise from order, fear from bravery and weakness from strength. Orderliness can be fostered via coordination, bravery via the impetus of a situation and strength via training.

He had never quite realized before how much coordination was involved in fighting wars. He was the First Jade of Lan, with high cultivation, skilled with a sword and a bow, but these days Shuoyue remained sheathed. He busied himself with troop movements, camp locations, guard rotations, staffing of hospitals, and always and everywhere food. Food, Lan Xichen had discovered, was very important for fighting wars. He could only imagine how important it would be if half his army wasn't capable of inedia. 

Nie Mingjue grew bored easily by this sort of detail. As far as he was concerned, "strategy" meant figuring out where the most Wen were, and "tactics" was charging at them with sword drawn. Lan Xichen viewed his childhood friend with fondness, and left him to lead the troops into battle. Lan Xichen missed Meng Yao, who loved maps and charts and account-books with the passion that Lan Xichen reserved for the xiao, and who had a perfect memory for which commanders had good instincts, which were too brave for their own good, and which had powerful families and so had to be assigned to some location where their honor could be intact without them having a chance to do much harm.

And-- Lan Xichen would be honest-- he missed the deftness of Meng Yao's fingers and the softness of his skin and the delightful pleasures he had introduced Lan Xichen to, ones Lan Xichen had never before thought of, that were not forbidden by the thousand rules of the Lan Clan, perhaps because Lan An had never thought of them either. Lan Xichen had, in his turn, introduced them to Nie Mingjue, but it was not at all the same. At night Lan Xichen had many exciting anticipations of the war being over so Meng Yao and Nie Mingjue could cooperate in making them more... exquisite. 

Lan Xichen was bent over a letter, writing this humble servant is surely mistaken and meaning fuck you asshole, you promised us two hundred strong cultivators and where the fuck are they, when a hole in the floor opened and he disappeared.  

Lan Xichen was nowhere at all. 

He had the feeling of his mind being picked over by some kind of incredibly powerful entity. The entity sees Lan Xichen; where the entity looks, thoughts that were blurry and inchoate and unclear click into focus. 

Disciple and master; parent and child; elder sibling and younger sibling; husband and wife; friend and friend. The inferior owes the superior deference and obedience; the superior owes the inferior guidance and a deep concern for their well-being. The rites are performed as they have always been. Names are used correctly, and language is precise and describes reality as it is. The laws are enforced with justice; the weak are treated with humaneness. 

You set your soul to rights, and it sets your family to rights; you set your family to rights, and it sets your sect to rights; you set your sect to rights, and it sets the cultivation world to rights; you set the cultivation world to rights, and it sets all of China to rights. Order spreads outward, as if guided by an invisible hand. Lan Xichen can't set up laws that apply to everyone in China, but if he obeys his elders and others obey their elders, then order simply forms. If he performs the rites as he is supposed to, it makes up part of a vast system the parts of which Lan Xichen doesn't see and can't understand. 

The entity approves. 

Lan Xichen basks in the warmth of the entity's approval. To be understood, things that he has never thought of himself--

The entity draws out what Lan Xichen thinks of merchants. 

Well, they're parasites, aren't they? They contribute nothing to society. Peasants grow food, and cultivators defend the people from ghosts and demons, and craftsmen make tables, and the emperor governs them all wisely and well, but merchants are really entirely unnecessary for society. Moving stuff around does not produce wealth. 

Thousands of peasants, starving, because the crops failed and there was nothing for them to eat, while elsewhere fruit rots on the vine for lack of anyone to take it. A plague sweeps through the land while the doctors go hungry in a plagueless region. 

A man who has grapes and needs a plow, a man who has a plow and needs a horse, and a man who has a horse and needs grapes, and they go around and around and around because none of them has what the other one needs.

A leatherworker makes jackets while children go shoeless, not because of any cruelty but because he doesn't know what they need.

And-- a merchant brings the fruit and saves the peasants from starvation, a merchant buys the grapes and the plow and the horse and gets them all to the people who needs them, a merchant pays the leatherworker for the shoes and not the jackets and the children are shod and their feet do not bleed. Prices, a means of coordination as beautiful as relationships and rites, connecting that which is valuable to those who value it, and no individual has to know where things ought to go. 

--oh.

A cultivator fills her qiankun bag with rice and flies on her sword and there are no famines, ever again, the peasants use their savings from the good year to cover food for the lean and no one ever has to starve--

The peasants don't give the cultivators tribute but pay for services rendered, and the cultivators don't hunt a powerful but solitary demon for glory, they exorcise the ordinary ghosts and kill the ordinary fierce corpses that are killing the children and breaking down the fences--

The wealth of the Lan Clan, not in gold and silver in vaults, but put to work, as ships and smiths and fertilizer and looms and the press, wealth that is created and not just stored, fertile wealth, wealth that has children as a prosperous family does--

It seems that they have been doing things quite wrong. 

He requests more information about this new way of doing things. 

Scarcity and choice and opportunity cost, marginal analysis, markets, comparative advantage, gains from trade, supply and demand, market equilibria, elasticity, preferences and utility, budget constraints, productivity, monopolies, international trade, public goods, market failures, efficiency--

More please. 

Human capital, growth, knowledge accumulation, debt, interest, investment, optimization, externalities, competition, fiat currency, optimal savings, insurance, present value, futures contracts, risk and return, portfolio theory, the efficient market hypothesis-- 

He wants more, more, more. 

(Subconscious in his mind is the idea that he needs this for the good of his sect; it has never occurred to Lan Xichen that he might not rule.)

Game theory and signalling and voting and bargaining and transaction costs and collective action and price theory and political economy and-

And before he returns Xichen to Golarion, Abadar sends him an image of Wen Ruohan, gently nudged in the direction of fair trade, of contracts which benefit all sides; of the Lan clan rebuilt, strong and prosperous, all of the Lan cultivators safe; of the books sewn into Lan Xichen's robes placed in Lan Qiren's offices and copied into Abadar's vaults, so that the knowledge so many Lan had died to preserve would never be lost. 

When you make a deal with Abadar, he always leaves you better off for it.. 

Nie Huaisang does not like wars. He has never been much of a man for glory or honor, and as far as he's concerned the Wen should stop killing people so he can go home and paint fans and play with his birds.

But no one consults Nie Huaisang about matters of geopolitics, and so here they are.

Nie Huaisang has devoted himself to the prospect of survival with a level of grim determination that would be surprising to anyone who had ever seen him wield a saber, go on a night-hunt, or indeed do much of anything that he doesn't want to do. He has faked innumerable undetectable maladies, arranged for himself to be assigned to guarding caravans on the safest routes, and initiated a dozen boys into the wonders of sexuality before leading them to the conclusion that if he, Nie Huaisang, went off to battle then he might die and they would never get a blowjob again.

Nie Huaisang is tired of this. It takes effort. Nie Huaisang has never before done anything requiring effort and it is just as awful as he always thought it would be. 

Right now, Nie Huaisang has attached himself to Lan Xichen to fetch him tea and confidential documents. To Nie Huaisang's mind, this strategy has four fundamental merits:

1. The First Jade of Lan is one of the most talented cultivators in the world. 
2. While this is the case, he is spending his time not in battles, which kill people, but doing paperwork, which has never been known to kill anyone. 
3. He is a warm, generous, and patient man, unlike Nie Mingjue, who has a distressing tendency to yell about bravery and the duty of the Nie when he notices what Nie Huaisang is up to, or worse be calmly disappointed. 
4. Lan Xichen is an absurdly, unreasonably beautiful man and Nie Huaisang is optimistic that he can add him as Boy Initiated Into The Wonders Of Sexuality #13, although the fact that he doesn't drink is a problem.

And so Nie Huaisang happens to be nearby when a hole spontaneously opens up under Lan Xichen. He is far away from the hole to begin with and running in the other direction, and then it literally warps into a sort of ellipse so that it catches him and he falls in.

This is very unreasonable. 

--and suddenly Nie Huaisang is in a cave absolutely glittering with treasures, gold and silver and jewels, books and artworks and strange alchemical artifacts-- 

"Morning. I'm Norgorber, god of crimes."

"I didn't know crime had a god."

"Criminals pray, don't they? Very devout people, criminals. 'Oh god oh god oh god please don't let them catch me fuuuuuuuuck Norgorber help they have dogs' is my liturgy."