"The way it ought to work is how it works among the Lan. It's a reciprocal relationship. It's not like-- business, or trade. We take responsibility for the people in our lands, we protect them, we keep them safe, and they give us tribute and honor. Of course if a village has a hard year or a famine we would never demand tribute from them, just as when the Cloud Recesses were burned they continued to send us tribute. But a village can end its relationship with us if it stops carrying out its portion of the duties. The Lan go on nighthunts throughout China, but we specially prioritize our own lands. We will take care of the peasants in our lands first, even if all they have is a routine fierce corpse or ghost and there is some more fearsome and glorious monster elsewhere."

"Is that importantly different from what I said?" Nelen asks.

"It's totally right except the way you said it makes him feel like he's talking to a barbarian."

"...is the commentary from Sect Leader Wei helpful?"

"Yes, very much so. Social delicacy doesn't translate very well," apologizes Nelen, "bluntness gets across a language and culture barrier much better."

"The way it actually works is-- with great cruelty. The peasants give tribute out of fear, not out of reverence. The cultivators don't take their duty to protect the common people seriously. They fight monsters that will bring them glory, even if a simple fierce corpse is causing more harm and the glorious monster is minding its own business in the mountains. They kill peasants for displeasing them, instead of overlooking minor faults as a gentleman does. They-- are unchaste."

"They rape people or make bastards they won't care for. The Lan are super into virginity but Zewu-jun is not going to make that face about sex that, you know, everyone liked."

"Okay. So when the peasantry has more power to keep cultivators away this will cause serious consequences for many cultivator sects, though possibly not yours in particular," says Nelen.

He is thinking about protecting the peasants and he is thinking about his own attitude towards virginity and both of those lead, inevitably, to Jin Guangyao, Jin Guangyao who loved him and who cared about the peasants more than most cultivators and who raped his own father to death and who killed his sworn brother and who died for Lan Xichen and how do those things fit together, how could he ever make sense of them--

"I don't think we can refuse to include the peasants on this basis, but do you think we could workshop a way for Vanda Nossëo to give substantial gifts to all the sects in recognition of their years of service, and then maybe humbly ask that they try teaching some of our people cultivation techniques in case it can work for non-natives and send those students with tribute to accompany their requests for consideration...?"

Words are happening and he's supposed to... say something... in response to them... but his brain keeps slipping over them and instead thinking about how much a-Yao would have wanted to meet the aliens, and how ashamed he is that after all of this time he still thinks of him as a-Yao.

"...What are the options available for... easing grief? Your powers are certainly greater than ours and it might make Sect Leader Lan more able to consult."

"- there are medicines that can help, if you metabolize things like normal humans do or in some straightforwardly modified way like 'faster'. There are some magics that can work on mental and emotional processes, I can list off the magic songs that do that and their details?"

"I think we'd be interested."

Nelen pulls up a list. "Mind affecting songs include - about a dozen variants on 'happiness', and - calm, sleep, sleep specifically aimed at pleasant dreams, courage - there's one intended to delay grief until an opportune moment but it looks like it was originally developed for use in combat, I don't know if it'd be appropriate here - skipping sleep, resilience, equanimity - that one is in beta development so it won't work as well or have effects as well-documented as the others."

"Hm. Calm, I think, or perhaps a happiness variant particularly suited for discussion."

Nelen looks at Tarwë, who takes the phone connecting to Zewu-jun and sings into it; Nelen sound-baffles this so nobody else hears and becomes unnecessarily calm.

The sadness... dims, and is farther away. It's never really gone.

He bows. "My apologies, Masters." 

Tarwë puts the phone back. "It's no trouble," Nelen assures him.

He replays what they said and then he says, quietly, "but it's a lie."

"- what is? We do want to give people things, that's sort of what we're here for, and if certain framings about how we present wanting to do that will help..."

"You're not giving it in thanks for our years of service, you're giving it because you're powerful and you can. I-- would rather you give us gifts than enslave us or put us to the sword, but-- it isn't a thing we did."

"The attempts at cultivation lessons would be more genuine. It would sincerely be worthwhile to prospective students to be taught cultivation techniques in case they can learn them."

"...how is cultivation useful to people from the stars?"

"It's a new kind of magical power! A lot of people are always very excited to learn any learnable magical powers, some of them are bottlenecked on available teachers or safety screenings, and cultivation doesn't do exactly the same things as any other kind so it will be especially appealing to people whose tastes in learnable magic run more towards meditating and exercising than studying complicated diagrams."