Nethys has read the files about Wei Wuxian. 

Actually, Nethys knows about every single detail of Wei Wuxian's life, because he's omniscient, but he has, like, also read the files.

THAT'S WORSE.

Nethys is going to have such a good time. He can't wait for Wei Wuxian to become Chaotic Neutral so Nethys can drop some cleric levels on him. Only if he's earned it though, but Nethys is sure that he will. There had better be six major revolutions in magical theory by the time Wei Wuxian is twenty-two.

Otolmens is SUSPICIOUS that CERTAIN OMNISCIENT DEITIES did not exactly choose the EXISTENTIAL-RISK-MINIMIZING people to yank over to Golarion to solve the Worldwound problem. 

No, but he picked the one that maximizes cool theoretical magical discoveries, which is more important. 

IS NETHYS AWARE THAT YOU CAN'T MAKE ANY THEORETICAL MAGICAL DISCOVERIES ON A LIFELESS BURNT CINDER

Well, not with that attitude.

Doing guard duty gives you a lot of time to spend staring out into space thinking about your life choices.

For example, Wen Ning spent a lot of time thinking about his life choice to betray his family in order to help the boy he'd been in love with for a year. Wen Ning had spent much of that year entertaining himself with fantasies that Wei Wuxian returned his affections and someday they'd meet at a night-hunt and Wei Wuxian would heroically save him from a monster but not before Wen Ning got a picturesque injury that made Wei Wuxian confess his love for fear that he'd never get another chance, because Wei Wuxian didn't know that Wen Qing was the best doctor in Qishan and could save Wen Ning from even the most horrifying injuries. However, once Wen Ning had actually spoken to Wei Wuxian again, it had been suddenly and acutely obvious to him how stupid his fantasies were.

It was the most important moment in Wen Ning's life, because no one was ever nice to him, but it was completely unmemorable to Wei Wuxian, because Wei Wuxian was nice to people all the time. He thought of Wen Ning no more often than he thought of the bartender at his favorite tavern. Maybe less. Wei Wuxian really liked his drink.

The worst part, Wen Ning had decided after many nights of rumination, wasn't the murder threat. Wen Ning could forgive a murder threat; after all, Wen Ning's family had just killed Wei Wuxian's entire family. It was the look of blank incomprehension when Wen Ning shared his name. It was one thing to be someone Wei Wuxian hated; it was another not to be thought of at all.  

To be honest, Wen Ning might not have continued betraying his family after this revelation, except that he'd already started and it seemed very awkward to change his mind about it halfway through the treason process. 

Wen Ning didn't kill anyone from the Sunshot Campaign, because he was very possibly the most cowardly cultivator in the world, even considering that the world contained Nie Huaisang. That is why he was assigned to guard duty at the Wen Clan's least interesting fortress; when they tried to put him in battle, he didn't. Couldn't. Something just stopped him from killing people.

Wei Wuxian didn't return the no-killing favor. Wei Wuxian killed Wen Ning's meditation teacher, and the woman who'd separated him and Wen Chao whenever she saw Wen Chao bullying him, and the man he brought healing herbs to when Wen Qing had extras. And then he harnessed their bodies as fierce corpses and sent them to kill Wen Ning's cousins and uncles and aunts.  

It was hard to take offense. This was what war was. But Wen Ning couldn't stop thinking about how if he hadn't saved Wei Wuxian, then Wei Wuxian would be dead, and Wen Ning's meditation teacher and the woman who saved him from bullies and the man he gave herbs to and innumerable cousins and uncles and aunts would be alive. Presumably this is why you were not supposed to commit treason, even if the person you committed treason for was kind to you.

But if Wei Wuxian was dead, he wouldn't smile at Wen Ning, and Wen Ning wanted very badly for Wei Wuxian to smile at him again. 

Wen Ning wasn't a very good guard, so he didn't notice the hole swallowing him up. 

Wen Ning arrives in a beautiful garden, with an old man smiling at him and pouring him a cup of tea. "Hello! I'm Erastil. Lawful Good god of farming."

Gods! That was kind of terrifying. Most cultivators didn't think much about gods, except when they became gods, or when a god misbehaved and someone had to kill them. But Wen Ning thought that it was more likely that he was going to misbehave and this god was going to kill him. 

He stares at the god in abject terror. "This humble slave thanks you for your condescension, O Holy and Exalted One."

"Please sit down and have some tea."

...he obeys.

"Tell me, in your studies, have you heard of other worlds?"

Cultivation theory was never his weak point as a cultivator. Killing things was his weak point. 

"This worthless commoner has some scant and inadequate knowledge, O Holy and Exalted One."

"Excellent! I and a coalition of several other gods have transported you and some other cultivators to a planet called Golarion, which I am one of the deities in charge of. We've chosen all of you as our clerics, which means you get certain abilities. It turns out that cultivators are particularly powerful against demons-- not the thing you call a 'demon' in your world, a different thing. Demons are pouring into Golarion through something called the Worldwound, which might destroy the world. Your job is to head to the Worldwound, kill all the demons, and close it."

Wow! He is the worst imaginable choice for this! Hopefully they chose Sect Leader Jiang or Wen Chao to fill out the ranks. 

"This useless one will do his best, Holy and Exalted One."

"I am a god. I can read your mind."

...oh.

"And you don't have to use that kind of language with me," Erastil says. "'O Holy and Exalted One.' It makes me feel like Asmodeus."

"...yes, Erastil-gongzi."

"Am I doing a good job at being a human?" Erastil says earnestly. 

"...yes, Erastil-gongzi?" Wen Ning says uncertainly.

"I've been trying really hard to be normal!" Erastil says. "I was born a god, you know, I didn't ascend. But I want to be comforting to my followers. I want them to think of me as a father, not as a cold and far-off deity. It's very difficult."

"I can imagine, Erastil-gongzi."

"So I thought-- you don't have any expectations about what gods are supposed to be like! So you can give me honest feedback. Do I seem normal?"

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. 

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." 

He looks up. "You... stole an entire ship of cargo, when you were human?"

"I maintain that if they didn't want the guard they hired stealing their cargo, maybe they should have considered not being slavers." 

"Damn right. --How'd you do it?"

WELL. You see. It started when he took a job from a sketchy-looking man in an Absalom port pub, as one does... 

Wei Wuxian laughs at all the right bits. 

"One time, the biggest cultivator clan in China, the Wen clan, tried to make all the disciples of the other clans attend an indoctrination session and they kept making us read this annoying book about the wise sayings of the Wen clan? The Wen heir kept hanging around the back waiting for us to weaken the monsters and then he killed them and took the credit? And eventually I got fed up and I was like 'you know, a cultivator has courage in every deed' and Wen Chao was like 'who said some idiotic bullshit like that?' and I was like 'the wise ones of the Wen Clan. Look, it's right here in the book.' And then I got beaten bloody but it was worth it, you know."

"Oh, absolutely worth it, the look on his face must've been incredible-- you know, speaking of wise sayings of clan elders there was this time with the accidental smuggling ring--" 

Oh, does Cayden Cailean want to hear about Wei Wuxian's favorite shenanigan with Jiang Cheng, it all happened when the Nie clan was in town for a night-hunt--

It concludes: "and then Madame Yu thought I was at fault for all of it and I got whipped fourteen times and Jiang Cheng got away scot-free."

He would love to hear about Wei Wuxian's favorite shenanigans with Jiang Cheng, and is of the opinion that taking the blame for your co-conspirators is not only fair game but the honorable move. 

"And of course there's the time I ascended, but that's a difficult story to tell, seeing as how I was so drunk at the time I don't remember it--" 

"Oh my god what."

"Some friends and I were out drinking in Absalom-- same friends as the time with the smuggling ring-- and one of them said, 'Cayden, you know what'd be incredible, is if you went for the Starstone,' and I said 'that's stupid' and he said 'I dare you to do it' and the next three days are a blacked-out blur but, well, come three days later I was a god, and no one knew how myself included." 

The barbarian lands have an artifact you can use that lets you ascend to godhood????

"How does the Starstone work. Can I look at it? Are there books about how it was created?"

MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE

"That I cannot answer, seeing as how four people have ever seen it, and one doesn't remember and the other three won't say for love or money. Probably you can find out in the process of being my pick to pull to the world of Golarion in order to fix the Worldwound, which, incidentally, you are." 

If Wei Wuxian had thought about it, he would have realized that going to Golarion to close the Worldwound would probably interfere with killing Wen-dogs.

But Wei Wuxian has never thought through anything in his life, and there's a new world (!) with new magic (!!) and an artifact that lets you ascend to godhood (!!!) which is really interfering with his limited ability to think about the consequences of his actions.

"Badass. Drop me there, I'll summon up a fierce-corpse army, and your Worldwound problem'll be solved in a week. Ten days tops."

"Please don't do necromancy, it's bullshit but necromancy is Evil."

"What the fuck does that mean."

"Right! So, in Golarion there is-- a very powerful deity named Pharasma who thinks that all things need to be sorted on the axes Good versus Evil and Law versus Chaos-- if you add in Neutral on both axes that gets you nine buckets. Law is following rules, doing what you're told, obeying those higher than you in the hierarchy and commanding those lower than you. Chaos is freedom, doing your own thing, not treating anyone as better or worse than you unless they've earned it fair and square. Good is helping people, keeping people alive, making people happy and joyful, all that kind of thing. Evil is hurting people or being cruel or exploiting people or oppressing them, for gain or because someone told you to or because you think it's funny."

"That is far from the weirdest thing I have heard of a god being into."

He laughs. "I am Chaotic Good. This creates a little problem, because you are Chaotic Evil."

Wei Wuxian thinks about this. "...honestly, fair enough."

"I would like to drop some cleric levels on you-- cleric levels mean that I like you and I think if you get more cool magic powers you'll do more things I like. Nethys would too if you like him better-- he's True Neutral, he's the god of knowledge and magic and secrets. But the gods have agreed that we can only take clerics if they're within one step of us on the Pharasma scale, so I can't do it with you."

"...and if I do that I'll get nifty magic powers?"

"Yep."

No one has ever provided Wei Wuxian this persuasive of an argument for doing what he's supposed to before. 

"And all I have to do is not summon zombie armies?"

"Ideally you would also stop torturing people."

"Okay, but the Wen-dogs killed my entire family first."

"Wen Ning didn't."

"Wen Ning stopped people from killing my entire family. If other Wen protected the Jiang clan I wouldn't kill them either."

"The babies and the old people and the people who have never even met a member of the Jiang clan had no opportunity to. And Wen Ning has the exact same right to kill you for killing his family that you have to kill the Wen for killing your family."

"No, he doesn't."

"...why."

"Because I have a zombie army and he doesn't."

"...what if the Wen also had a zombie army."

"I would get an even bigger one."

...Cayden Cailean takes a different tack. 

"Look, if you're with me, I'm not going to ask you to be a different person than the one you are. I'm not going to tell you to pick your battles. I'm not going to tell you to drink less. I'm not going to tell you not to tell someone to fuck off if they deserve it. I'm not the Lan."

"Even the Lan let me kill Wen-dogs."

"The Lawful gods have all kinds of great explanations for why you should be the sort of person who predictably keeps their word and follows the rules and is-- predictable and legible to interact with-- and all that shit and I'm like, fuck that, if I'm going to be predictably anything I'm going to be predictably the sort of person who doesn't keep contracts with slavers."

"Or people who murder your family," Wei Ying adds helpfully.

"I'm not going to try to make you, that's not what I'm about or what Chaotic Good is about-- in the Lawful Good afterlife when you die they enlist you in the eternal war against Evil. In the Chaotic Good afterlife we tried to make a nice place for former mortals and you get to do whatever you want? And that's-- better as a way to treat people, because people aren't things, they aren't weapons for you to use in your war against Evil, they aren't sacrifices for you to preserve your family or clan or country at the expense of every individual in it. But it's better for the individuals too. If they're left to do what they want and become who they are, people are stronger, they're cleverer, they're more creative, they're better at making a world that's good to be in. And part of that is-- I'm not going to make you copy out the thousand precepts of Chaotic Good until you agree you ought to be Chaotic Good."

"They have those?"

"Well, no. They can't even have 'be quiet' signs up in the libraries in the Chaotic Good afterlife, people would ignore them out of spite. The signs all say 'if you are quiet other people will have an easier time concentrating on their books!'"

"I don't care if people have an easier time concentrating on their books."

"It's-- possible you'll go Chaotic Neutral, get clericed by Nethys, and that's what you're going to choose. I'm Chaotic, I'm not going to stop you from choosing that. But I think you'd be happier if you were Good."

"I don't care about being happy. I care about making the people who hurt me suffer."

He shrugs. "If you cut it out with the zombies and mix it up with a little helping people who help you, Nethys'll be overjoyed to cleric you. --Can I give you a little advice?" 

"You have been doing nothing but for twenty minutes."

"Drink differently. The point of alcohol isn't to desperately numb the pain, that's-- misusing it? The point of alcohol is for joy and celebration and freedom. When you're drunk you can step away from the rules that bind you and see a different way of being. And the way you drink is only winding the chains more tightly around yourself."

"I'm fine the way I am. Thanks for the magic."

Lan Wangji is killing Wen. 

And then he is somewhere else, in a jumble of images and words--

--a poet tosses aside another piece of paper because it's not right, she can see the poem glimmering in her head but the words keep slipping out of reach like a fish in clear water--

--it's their wedding night and she's frightened, she's heard that this is supposed to hurt, that it's something men want and women endure, but her husband is slow and patient and kind and he touches her like she's precious and they find joy, together, in their marriage bed--

--a group of voices rising together in song--

--a wizard who invented a cantrip that protects your hands because his best friend, a nurse, always had chapped hands, love to the point of invention--

--a child seeing a painting for the first time and realizing that there is something beyond her world, that there is farming and spinning and cooking and childcare but there are also beautiful fragile unnecessary things--

--a person from Cheliax, a true believer in Asmodeus, who sees her neighbor's secret little shrine to Erastil so the crops will grow well this year, and she doesn't say anything, and she feels tremendous guilt at her weakness but something stops her whenever she thinks about turning him in--

--the leap in a dancer's heart when he does everything flawlessly and his body does exactly what he tells it to do and it feels like he's lighter than air--

--a father who smiles and says "I'm not hungry" so his daughter doesn't feel guilty about eating everything she needs--

--siblings and parents and friends and lovers and old enemies grown affectionate, love everywhere, undignified and unremarkable but stubborn as a weed, growing through every crack in a person's heart--

--sculpture and music and stories, clothing dyed bright colors and pottery with intricate designs because even the poor long for beauty, singing sea shanties to keep time on the boat or ballads as you fetch water--

--the goddess not of survival but of having something to survive for--

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."

"I don't know why you're interested in me, I have never done anything illegal in my life," he says automatically.

"No one who is suitable to be my cleric would admit to committing crimes. Pure as the driven snow, the lot of you."

"Wei-xiong* pressured me into helping him steal lotus seeds, I'm not exactly a criminal mastermind."

*honorific for a friend

"No, you're not a criminal mastermind, you're the spoiled second son of one of the most powerful clans in the jianghu. I cleric on potential."

"I DON'T HAVE POTENTIAL FOR ANYTHING!" he says, immediately breaking into tears.

"See? Trying to emotionally manipulate a god. You've mastered it already."

Nie Huaisang sobs.

"So I was hanging around Axis-- mm, I should back up a little bit, yes? So I snatched you into the world of Golarion, where all beings are divided into nine categories along two axes--"

"I DON'T WANT TO GO TO GOLARION!"

"Tough. I'm Neutral Evil, not Neutral A Nice Person. --As I was saying, nine categories, two axes. Evil is being out for yourself. Good is being a priggish little bitch who's too prissy to get their hands dirty. Law is rules and order and systems, Chaos is freedom and disobedience and structurelessness, and caring about either of them too much is stupid because then you might decide to be Lawful or Chaotic instead of rich."

Sob.

"Anyway, I was hanging around Axis, the Lawful Neutral afterlife, because I'm allowed there, because they can't prove I've done any crimes and they can't punish me unless I've broken the rules. This is how being Lawful makes you stupid, incidentally. So I overheard something about a bunch of gods working together to grab people from your world because you have special powers to kill Chaotic Evil outsiders-- it's not really overhearing, it's a godthing too complicated for your puny human minds to understand, but 'overhearing' is close enough for government work-- and then I decided to take advantage and see if there was anyone I wanted to grab. And there you are!"

"Oh, I don't know, I don't know, I just don't know--"

"Very strange," Norgorber says politely, "how someone with hands as dexterous as yours and feet as fleet as yours somehow loses all his physical abilities as soon as it comes time to pick up a saber. And very strange how everyone in the Nie family qi deviates, and at such young ages too. I don't think a Nie has ever cultivated to immortality. Odd, for such a illustrious family. I wonder what you'd find, if you looked at everyone who had cultivated the saber... Would they all, I wonder, die young?"

"You were wasted as a cultivator."

"I want to be wasted."

"And that's why I like you. --You're True Neutral. You can only keep the little abilities I'll give you to help you on your way if you stay within one step of me, so True Neutral, Neutral Evil, Lawful Evil, Chaotic Evil..."

"Are you going to tell me what those abilities are?"

"Ignorance is a spur to creativity. --You go to an afterlife based on your alignment. True Neutral is the Boneyard, which is solid. They let you go to any afterlife from there so you get some time to consider your options. For you, I'd suggest staying True Neutral. Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil are good if you're definitely going to wind up on the top of the heap but they suck if you're on the bottom, which most people are; Neutral Evil kills the weak straight out, Chaotic Evil is more likely to torture them, which one you prefer is a personal choice. Lawful Evil is great if you negotiate a good contract and get to be the one doing the torturing and having the slaves instead of the one who is spending eternity as a paving stone, but the contract devils have been negotiating things for thousands of years longer than you have and they're better at it than you are. Still, always an honor to Me when one of my guys gets a good deal. Lawful Neutral versus Chaotic Neutral is another personal choice, but I personally recommend Lawful Neutral for you, you like luxury and don't strike me as the sort of person who wants to turn into an eldritch horror. The Good afterlives are all terrible because you have to be around Good people for eternity, I would rather be devoured to be quite frank, but Neutral Good is worth a special mention. They petition for every soul no matter how strained their argument is, and sometimes people who are definitely my guys wind up there. It's better company because you have other Evil people there to take the edge off, and it's always great to con Good Itself into getting you a nice afterlife."

"I'M GOING TO STAY HERE UNTIL I DIE?"

"Also, because you're my cleric, you read Evil to Detect Evil. You might want to think of an explanation for that!"

And then six teenagers land on a mountain. 

There is a being and it doesn't have thoughts. It is intermittently aware that one had things like "a name" and "a family" and "a location in space," but this knowledge has been swept away by the inexpressible burning agony. It once, it thought, had preferences, but now it has no preference other than not being hurt. 

This is the worst hangover he's ever had. Why is there screaming. 

MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT--

OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Okay. So, his head hurts, and there is screaming, and the screaming is making his head hurt more. 

Where is the screaming.

Sect Leader Lan is screaming?

Okay. 

Wen Ning has a solution to screaming. He is pretty sure. It is called... acupuncture?

Okay. So the first step is putting his hand in his pocket and getting out the needle. And the second step is finding Sect Leader Lan. And the third step is moving closer to Sect Leader Lan-- ow ow ow, he doesn't know if movement or being closer to the noise is worse-- and then the next step is finding an acupoint.

The ones in the neck are easy. Hard to miss. 

And then there is blessed silence. 

"Hello!!!!!"

Why.

There is a three-foot-tall, unnervingly skinny humanoid with spindly fingers and bright blue hair.

"I saw a big magic thing happening over here and I decided to check it out!"

Why is this happening.

Owwww.

He just made the noises stop and now there are more noises. Is there no justice in the world.

"Do you want to talk about cross-plane comparative ethics?"

DOES HE LOOK LIKE HE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT ETHICS.

"I will... get you a tent! And then we will talk about ethics!"

None of the teenagers is really in a position to track this happening, but there is darkness and silence and comfort and sleep, and the next morning Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang wake up to the smell of food.

Everyone else is asleep. Probably the best thing to do is to pretend to be asleep.

...Wei Wuxian is suddenly very conscious of the downsides of living on alcohol instead of food. He gets out of bed and leaves the tent, following the smell of cooking eggs and bacon.

"Hello! I'm Levrolurment! Do you want to talk about cross-plane comparative ethics now? I have been patient. I have been so patient. All day. Ten hours."

"Bacon first."

"Yeah, sure." He plates the bacon and puts it in front of Wei Wuxian. "That guy has a needle in his neck and I left it there because I didn't know if it was supposed to be there but maybe you should check it out?"

"It's not." He heads back to the tent and pulls the needle out of Lan Xichen's neck.

Pain pain pain agony pain--

WHY IS THERE SCREAMING

"Uh never mind I think it belongs there." He jams it back in in approximately the right place.

Lan Xichen is now unconscious.

"Why did that happen? The screaming, I mean, although I admit I'm also interested in why the needle stops it."

"Well, first I didn't have a headache and was in China, and then I had a conversation with the god of drunken parties who wanted me to party better and stop torturing people, and then he dropped me here in Golarion where I am supposed to kill demons, and then I had the worst headache I've ever had in my entire life. Apparently."

Levrolurment nods wisely. "That'll do it. Gods are nearly impossible for human minds to understand.""

Talking to gods gives you a headache! This is useful information for Nie Huaisang to have because Nie Huaisang is pretty sure that his continued longevity is best served by not being the chosen cleric of the god of crimes, actually. 

He gets out of bed and says, "where are we?"

"Golarion."

"The fuck is that?"

"I'm a gnome! And that's very rude. I don't go up to humans and say 'the fuck is that?' even though humans are way weirder than gnomes are. You do the same thing over and over again even when it is incredibly boring and almost none of you would pack up everything to investigate a plane-related spatiotemporal anomaly. Also you keep dying. You lose track of a human for just a few decades and suddenly they're dead. Very confusing species."

"What is going on?"

"We got teleported by gods to Golarion to fight demons. Apparently. --Not the demons on our earth. Different demons. But cultivators are still very good at fighting them."

"I don't want to fight demons!!!!"

"Not to make you lose all your face, Nie-xiong*, but I don't know what god would possibly choose you to fight demons."

*An affectionate name for a close but not very close friend; similar in connotations to "bro."

Nie Huaisang also wishes he didn't know the answer.

"I didn't talk to any gods! I was near Sect Leader Lan and then a hole opened up under him and I tripped and fell in!"

"You... tripped."

"Yes."

"You're a cultivator and you tripped."

"You don't need to make that face about it."

Levrolurment waves a hand. "Boring, boring, boring. I want to talk about ethics."

"Do all gnomes like ethics?" Nie Huaisang says, sensing a distraction from the uncomfortable topic of why he is in Golarion. 

"Most gnomes are wrong. Ethics is the most interesting thing in the world."

Visions of the Lan's thousand rules dancing in his head, Wei Wuxian says, "Is it."

"Yes," Levrolurment says, totally unable to parse sarcasm. "It's important to distinguish morality and axiology. We know that Good is moral and Evil is immoral. But that doesn't establish that we should take moral actions! Maybe when you have a solid theory of value it will turn out that it's best to be Evil. Maybe we should maintain the balance between Good and Evil, Law and Chaos. Maybe Chaotic Good is better than Lawful Good, or maybe we shouldn't care about the Law versus Chaos axis-- that's typically considered to be a Neutral Good position but some ethicists think that 'Pure Good' is a better name for the position. Maybe the alignment system is in fact totally orthogonal to value and there's something totally unrelated we should care about! Maybe the most important thing is to eliminate suffering so we should free Rovagug and destroy everything."

"Honestly, I think the Rovagug cultists have a very plausible theory."

"Are they going to do that? I live in everything!"

"Most of them are too full of existential misery to do anything except drink and cry and write atrocious poetry, but some of them occasionally come up with a plan and some adventurers kill them before they get much past step two."

"Okay, but is step two 'destroy everything'?????"

"There are monsters that can destroy everything in China too."

"Those are also upsetting!"

"I am an empirical ethicist," Levrolurment says, "which means I go around asking people questions to figure out what they should value, and now I want to ask you questions to see what you value so it can inform my theories. You're from another plane and you've never talked to anyone from this plane, so it's really an invaluable opportunity to study what value looks like under different cultural conditions!"

"I don't want to answer ethical questions. I want to kill demons."

"Do you know what this is?" Levrolurment says, lifting up his hand. A ring glints on it.

"...no?"

"This is a Ring of Tongues. There isn't an open market for them, because they're so rare, but I doubt a farmer could afford it even if she saved for centuries. A Bardic friend made it for me sixty years ago."

Nie Huaisang, who carries a fan that costs half a year's income for a villager and his wife and that has no magic other than its beauty, is distinctly unimpressed.

"--Hmph. Adventurers. At any rate, this ring's magic allows me to speak any language, and no one else you will encounter has it unless you're lucky enough to run into a high-level adventurer. If you don't want to communicate entirely in pantomime, you will let me escort you to Lastwall and then tell me about ethics."

"I could just stab you."

"My ring is keyed to my alignment! Do you really think anyone in your little party is True Neutral? It is probably the least common one. --And you definitely are not if you're threatening random non-adventurer gnomes with murder when they are proposing a simple mutually beneficial trade."

Wei Wuxian, who knows perfectly well he's Chaotic Evil, makes a face.

Nie Huaisang is True Neutral but does he want to let on to anyone that he knows this fact, no he does not. 

"You can take us to Lastwall. What's a Lastwall."

"Lawful Good... country? Sort of country? I think countries are conventionally assumed to be less single-minded than Lastwall is. It's Iomedae's. It's full of paladins and clerics and miscellaneous adventurers whose approach to doing good is stabbing things which are evil. Mostly orcs and undead these days, but they also have the second-largest contingent at the Worldwound, behind Cheliax. You're close enough to them that I assume your gods were trying to put you there."

"They could have just put us where we were supposed to go!"

"Plane Shift is hard even if you're grabbing people from somewhere in the same metaphysics."

"And they grabbed me for no reason! I don't think much of this operation."

"Why not Cheliax?"

Levrolurment makes a face. "It's a Lawful Evil country run by the forces of Hell."

Visions of being a paving stone dance in Nie Huaisang's head. "Lastwall! Lastwall sounds good."

"If it gets us to killing monsters faster."

"Asmodeus is awful. Take it from someone who used to work for him."

"...but you're True Neutral."

"Asmodeus is probably the biggest funder in the ethics space. All the slaves in Hell give him lots and lots of money, and he pours a bunch of it into Cheliax to fund wizarding schools and so on, but he has enough cash to drop grants on any reasonably competent ethicist in Absalom who's willing to make the case that true value is eternal service to Asmodeus, or failing that backstabbing your way up a hierarchy or beating your wife when she disobeys you."

"You think it's good to beat your wife for disobeying you?"

"Of course not, I think the correct alignment is Chaotic Good."

"Then why the fuck did you take Asmodeus's money?"

"I wanted a Ring of Tongues."

"True Neutral."

"...Are you sure I can't run him through with Suibian," Wei Ying says to Nie Huaisang.

"Don't murder him!!!! He has bacon!!!!"

"You know, I can see why Cayden Cailean likes you."

Wen Ning wakes up and wanders out. 

"Which god picked you?"

"Uh. Erastil?"

"Oh, good, tell the murder-happy teenage cleric of Cayden Cailean over there that he shouldn't kill me."

"I, um, think Wei-gongzi can commit murder if he wants to?"

"All of you are useless." 

"It's good to see you again, a-Ning?"

"It's good to see you too, Wei-gongzi."

Oh, Wen Ning is stupid in love stupid in love. 

"Wen-dogs treat you all right?"

...how does he answer that. "Very well, except for the part where you were slaughtering my entire family and turning them into a horrifying fierce corpse army?"

He serves himself some bacon. 

While he's eating, Levrolurment catches Wen Ning up on current events. 

Once he is caught up, Wen Ning says: "we've all been chosen as clerics, except Wei-gongzi, because he is Chaotic Evil."

"He's Chaotic Evil? That explains a lot. Mostly the murder threats."

"--and I don't think Nie-gongzi is a cleric. Erastil-gongzi didn't mention him one way or the other."

"I tripped."

Yes! Tell Nie Huaisang about clerics! Dispense the secret cleric knowledge! "Ignorance is a spur to creativity" his ass.

...it is oddly reassuring to have someone involved in this project who is worse at things than he is. 

"You know, the idea that Chaotic Evil people constantly threaten to murder people for no reason is generally considered an offensive stereotype. Most Chaotic Evil people are fully capable of restraining themselves and only committing murder when it advances some sort of goal and they won't get caught by all of the Good people who I assume are sleeping in that tent."

"Maybe I don't care if Hanguang-jun murders me."

"You are so worrying. I hope Lastwall has a cleric of Shelyn on hand to talk to you about this."

"Wen Ning is a cleric," Nie Huaisang says, because he really wants to find out what the fuck his cleric powers are in a plausibly deniable fashion. 

"We can spontaneously channel qi now," Wen Ning says, "and use it to heal living beings and harm fierce corpses. Except for Meng-gongzi because he's also Evil, he channels demonic energy."

"Meng Yao gets to be a cleric and I don't?????"

"You have to resonate with the god who chooses you to be a cleric. The gods who resonate with you are Nethys, god of magic, and Cayden Cailean, god of parties, neither of whom is one step from Chaotic Evil. Meng Yao resonates with the goddess of revenge and lust."

"Ha. Lust. Because he's the son of a whore."

"I have suddenly gained a very clear understanding of why Meng Yao resonates with the goddess of revenge."

"Why are parties a Chaotic Good thing. Night-hunting is Good. Eating boring food like the Lan do is Good. Obeying your elders is Good. Parties are not Good." 

(Levrolurment has started taking notes.)

"I want to be able to channel demonic energy! That would be so cool."

Wei Wuxian thinks that this situation is not his fault for torturing people but Pharasma's fault for being so confused about parties.

"Erastil-gongzi said that you might also get magic powers, Wei-gongzi!"

"Yeah, yeah, I know, if I stop torturing people and summoning zombie powers then Cayden will cleric me."

"Divine energy is very dangerous for mortals to interact with. Clericing allows them to interact with it safely. But you aren't a cleric, and you were plane-shifted by Nethys and then had a long conversation with Cayden Cailean. So Erastil-gongzi thinks that something very weird is going to happen to you probably."

"Like, no one knows what my powers are?"

"...they will probably be in some way themed around Nethys or Cayden Cailean, and also come with painful and inconvenient side effects?"

"Cool."

"Erastil-gongzi said that we have to pray every morning for our spells, and we should let our gods pick for now because they'll know better than we do what we will need. But the most important one that all of us have is Tongues, which lets us speak and understand any language."

"...oops."

"I don't have Tongues"-- maybe-- "we need to keep him so I have someone to talk to!"

Um. Probably he should say something about this? Murder seems bad?

But Wei-gongzi might be angry at him. 

To Wen Ning: "you are the worst cleric of a Good god I've ever heard of."

Yeah!!! Why is this Wen Ning's job!!!

"Also I think they brought you over here for a reason and if Hanguang-jun kills you for randomly murdering people then that would be bad!"

"It was a joke. Come on. I only murder Wen-dogs."

That's not better!!!!

"Personally, if I were a Good god, and I were organizing a multigod coalition to bring people from another world so that they could accomplish some aim of Good, I would not include two Chaotic Evil people. I would honestly not hire Chaotic Evil people for any kind of sensitive project. I find the decisionmaking here incredibly questionable."

"Wei-gongzi is a genius?"

Lan Wangji emerges and silently serves himself some bacon. 

"Mn," he says in agreement to Wen Ning's statement.