All right, what should he share-- "The subject of bastards puts me in mind of little Lan Sizhui."

Let's get them some information about whom they're dealing with in Sect Leader Wei. 

"Oh? Who's that?"

"Well, that's just the question, isn't it? Hanguang-jun shows up out of nowhere one day with a child not even old enough to have formed his golden core yet.* Says he's from a minor branch of the Lan, one that had fallen on hard times after the Sunshot campaign, so the Gusu Lan-- the main branch-- took him in. But when people asked around about it, there's no branch from which Lan Sizhui could have possibly come!"

*This is one word.

"Huh," says Ligaya, interested but not scandalized.

"The odd thing is that Hanguang-jun is very morally upright. The Lan clan is the most morally upright of all the clans-- they have a thousand rules and most of them follow them, they don't drink and they're vegetarian and they are merciful to defeated enemies and they practice all the arts and they go to bed at nine every night-- and Hanguang-jun is the most morally upright of the Lan. They say he 'goes where the chaos is'-- he doesn't night-hunt monsters that are safe and bring glory, he night-hunts the ones that are harming the peasants most, even if it is a simple fierce corpse. So, I ask you, how can he have gotten a woman with child? Even if he were unchaste, against all the rules of the Lan clan and of honorable behavior, surely he would have cultivated to retain his semen."

"So it's understood that all those things are correlated?" Ligaya inquires, stirring the picklepot.

No shit, they're correlated, people who can control themselves to follow the rules of the Lan can also avoid impulsively knocking a girl up, and people who want to be good people are more likely to do good people shit than Nie Huaisang, who has never felt the impulse.

"Oh, I don't know anything about moral philosophy. --So everyone thought that Lan Sizhui was Sect Leader Lan's child-- that's Hanguang-jun's older brother-- he is the sort to fall in love with a woman and have a child with her, and if he did he would of course do his duty as a father and raise the child. It's not like he had a wife to interfere."

"I take it there's no sign of Lan Sizhui's mother."

"None at all, unless you count-- but I am getting ahead of myself. So a young cultivator sacrificed himself, removing himself entirely from the cycle of reincarnation, so that the Yiling Patriarch could possess his body and kill his family."

(Internally, not letting them see: I'm sorry, Mo Xuanyu.)

"And what do you know but Hanguang-jun falls in love with the Yiling Patriarch! They get married!"

"Is the translation glitching on gender again, it's known to sometimes do that," says Escan, "or did I just forget how reproduction works, that's also possible..."

"Well," Nie Huaisang says judiciously, "if a man killed fifteen thousand cultivators last time he was angry, then when he announces that he's married another man the wise gentleman takes a broad-minded attitude."

"No, no, of course they can be married," says Ligaya, "Escan was just wondering what this had to do with where Lan Sizhui came from, since on most planets reproduction requires two complementary sets of reproductive organs, and she wasn't sure because on her planet babies spontaneously appear for no reason instead."

"Well, that's the point, isn't it? Perhaps the child is Hanguang-jun's after all. If there is one thing we can learn from him marrying a terrifying mass-murdering necromancer, it is that his sexual and romantic choices make no sense at all."

"Oh, I see," says Ligaya. The picklepot is done; she decants it into a bowl for him and borrows Tuturio's prestidigitator to clean out the cooker.

He takes his first bite of foreign food. What does it taste like?

Vinegary and savory! Picklepot is an Amentan food and one of the standard things to pull out when someone wants exotic multiverse food; humans can eat it all safely but he won't recognize any specific vegetables or meats in it.

"This is excellent."

"Glad you like it!" says Tuturio. "It's from my planet! Not my country, but still."

"Now," he says, "I would be frightened if I were Hanguang-jun and I were married to the Yiling Patriarch and I brought home a bastard. --Everyone agrees the Yiling Patriarch is the wife," he adds as an afterthought.

"- is the Yiling Patriarch not a man after all?" asks Escan. "I thought we just covered this -"

"Is there some reason to believe the Yiling Patriarch is prone to domestic abuse?" inquires Ligaya.

"--what's domestic abuse?"

"Maltreatment of one's family members, especially spouse or children - hitting, rape, throwing things, screaming a lot - I ask because it sounded like you were implying it would be reasonable for Hanguang-jun to be frightened of his husband? Which would be the sort of thing that might indicate that. It's not very unusual for someone to be very dangerous in only one of the spheres, domestic or public, and quite harmless in the other."

He's not even pretending to be confused about this! This is legitimate confusion!

"...of course your wife is going to hit you if you bring home a bastard and her cultivation is high enough? Also, can married people rape each other...? That doesn't even make sense. You're supposed to have sex with your wife."