There might be a good explanation for this.  If there is, Wei Wuxian still deserves to be hit for starting trouble will understand Jiang Cheng taking the precaution.  If message spells are not going to a person when they ought to, the person might not be there.  That this is either a doll of some kind or an imposter.  The Burial Mounds are to the west.  If Wei Wuxian had never been here-

Zidian sparks to life and Jiang Cheng sends it out to wrap around "Wei Wuxian's" body, pulling his arms against his sides and pinning them there.  It catches the blankets and extra robes Wei Wuxian covered himself in, resulting in an awkward wrapped bundle.  Zidian in this mode feels bathwater-warm and slightly buzzing in the few places not too insulated by the layers of cloth.  It's intelligent enough to shift as needed to prevent attempts to escape without being too tight, and the feeling is much like being climbed on by a purring snake. 

Once his quarry is fully immobilized, Jiang Cheng steps forward.

From his perspective, Wei Wuxian experiences something sufficiently like being shaken awake. (Usually people just knock on his door! But sometimes for various reasons they do come inside.)

“mmm I’m awake,” he mumbles out toward whoever it is. But, people who are taking steps to get him awake are usually pretty committed that he get awake. He opens his eyes. 

…Right, alternate universe! He hopes he didn’t crumple any of other him’s notes, oops. Aaaaand other Jiang Cheng got into his room without him noticing again. (Yes, yes, heads of household can go wherever in their household they feel like.)

”Sorry, Jiang Cheng!” (Ha, right one, A+ Wei Ying!) As it transpires, he cannot get out of bed and kneel - or get out of bed and stand - because he is tied up with Zidian. …Why is he tied up with Zidian? It’s not even hurting him. And he’s wrapped in a blanket, it’s going to be very hard to hit him like this!

Well, hey, no need to figure out how to ask when he’s getting punished! He knows that’s gonna stop feeling like a bright side very soon, but, this was going to happen sooner or later and at this point he’s been seeing the pros of sooner.

He'd cocooned himself enough in his sleep not to really leave any unisolated places. Moving, even wrapped in Zidian, shifted some layers of cloth enough to change that here and there. He can feel the buzzing and warmth through thinner layers. ...Aw, Zidian is being nice today. (Other Jiang Cheng is having Zidian be nice.) The purring snake effect is weirdly kind of nice, like being petted.

He tenses anyway. Can feel that. It's not that he's gotten new information! He already knew other Jiang Cheng had an other Zidian. If anything being tied up with Zidian should make it less likely he's going to be punished with Zidian. (So he's afraid of his (alternative universe) brother's horrible lightning whip. It's very reasonable to be afraid of horrible lightning whips. That's most of the reason to even have a horrible lightning whip.)

(No escape attempts to prevent here. He doesn't know anything about alternate universe punishment rules but he thinks he can safely bet that one's a universal.)

With Zidian occupied Jiang Cheng pulls out his sword.  His face is angry, and scared, and pleading.  His hand is steady.  Sandu glows a faint purple at the edges; it is not quite the same shade as the whip.

"Who are you?  What did you do to Wei Wuxian?  Anything you did to him, I will repay it tenfold."

He thinks back to all of the things that he should have taken as clues earlier.  Wei Wuxian needing multiple hints before calling him by his name.  Acting deferential and subservient like Wei Wuxian was supposed to but never did.  The strange clothing, the unusual writing implements he had just thought was Wei Wuxian being his usual inventive self and making due with whatever he scrounged up in the Burial Mounds.  Failing to turn on the heating array to the point of choosing to bundle in too many layers of robes instead.  His flute was gone, replaced with one only superficially similar. 

Jiang Cheng imagines Wei Wuxian giving a good explanation and him feeling stupid about reacting this way.  He also imagines Wei Wuxian hurt or trapped somehow, waiting for hours as Jiang Cheng failed to notice the signs.  There's really no way this is going to end well.

The sight of other Jiang Cheng angry like that, and also pointing a (magic) sword at him turns out to be bare heart and nerve fucking scary enough that he almost tries to push back a few inches in the bed before being preempted by Zidian.

Right. Well. Fuck. (...In retrospect he should maybe have thought earlier that if and when other Jiang Cheng realized he wasn't the right Wei Wuxian it would be very obvious to suspect he'd done something to the right Wei Wuxian. Hindsight is really 20:20.)

He considers (very quickly!) his chances of trying to keep pretending to be other him when other Jiang Cheng has guessed he isn't. No, that won't work at all. He wasn't even doing that great and he has no idea how other Jiang Cheng figured it out.

...He considers his chances of successfully pretending that he also hadn't guessed yet until just now. No, bad idea, not that.

If he makes other Jiang Cheng literally torture him for information, neither of them are going to have a good time, his Jiang Cheng will kill him (not literally), it won't help whatever's going on with other him or House Jiang at all, and Shijie will definitely be upset.

"I didn't do anything to him! He's wherever he was before, I've never seen him! I did get teleported here, it wasn't me, but it was from another universe. I'm Wei Wuxian, I have a you, sir," (it slips out with the 'you'. What is the correct title for your alternate universe brother who currently thinks you did something to his actual brother, he has no idea.) "and a Shijie. I'm sorry, I should have told you earlier, sir, I didn't know at first but then I shouldn't have pretended, I'm sorry."

Given that "Wei Wuxian" did not respond to being called out by revealing that his true form was a giant face-stealing eel and slipping out of Zidian, Jiang Cheng probably does not need his sword.  Sandu is kept up for the moment, just in case that is still a possibility and this is another lie designed to get his guard down.

"You're saying that there's another universe.  With a copy of Wei Wuxian, A-jie, and I, but different clothing."

Jiang Cheng's mind keeps coming back to the clothing.  Not surprising, given how much time he spends researching trends and making certain that he is properly dressed for the ever-shifting cycle of fashion.  (Or even without it.  Good looking clothing is its own reward.)  Powerful cultivators stay young-looking for a while.  It's possible that ...that... is just what everyone is going to be wearing in thirty years.

Which would mean that Wei Wuxian would have seen Jiang Cheng walking around in wildly outdated robes and not said anything?  How dare he be better dressed by future standards than Jiang Cheng!  Also how dare fashion standards drop that low - that looks like some kind of uniform.  No, that isn't important.  Wei Wuxian telling him a way to avoid real Wei Wuxian being executed for 30 years might be important, but there's no way of guessing if he's from the future or something more exotic.

Or lying.  There's no reason to assume that this is the real story.

Jiang Cheng approaches further, sword still drawn but angled downwards, posture ready to jump back at a sudden move.  With his other hand he lightly scratches at the side of Wei Wuxian's face with his fingernails, looking for the edge of some kind of mask.  Does anything seem wrong up close?

His eyes keep going to the sword. Not very useful of them - other Jiang Cheng is not going to be more or less able to stab him whether or not he's looking. But he has learned a new fact about swords, which is that they're so much more attention drawing when they're unsheathed and pointed at you.

Clothing?? Right that's what other Jiang Cheng will have seen so far, he hasn't seen the magic or the tech difference. "Yes, sir. And more people, sir, and other differences." This feels like a speak when spoken to occasion but he still doesn't want other Jiang Cheng to end up with the wrong idea.

He successfully doesn't flinch at all, go him. No sudden moves; he is as still as Wei Wuxian can make himself for whatever other Jiang Cheng is doing right now.

(Nothing seems wrong or unusual or different from what Jiang Cheng would expect if he touched someone's face.)

"Which differences have you noticed?"

While he's still there, Jiang Cheng grabs a few of the notes that look like they were made by the non-brush implements.  Then he walks backwards to a safer distance where he can skim their contents without being in range of an attack, and coincidentally "Wei Wuxian" can be less menaced by Sandu.  Do they seem to support his story?

Sharp sword: farther away from him. He likes this trait in sharp swords.

That's a very broad question! He's just going to go with how his Jiang Cheng likes his reports until told otherwise. (...Nothing like giving an account while tied up with Zidian and held at swordpoint to make one appreciate more usual ways of giving account, like on his knees with his hand stinging!) His Jiang Cheng likes his reports concise so he can ask more if and where he wants; does not like being rambled at. 

"I think we have more technology sir, and you have power use we don't." Is he supposed to mention all the etiquette and dom-befitting-actions stuff? Nope he is so absolutely not touching the second one. "Etiquette's different sometimes.

Different events happened? Here than where I'm from, sir, I don't know about the other way yet."

(More things he should have thought of earlier: if he suspected him of, for instance, doing something to the right Wei Wuxian, other Jiang Cheng would probably not be polite about not reading his notes! He doesn't think he wrote anything terrible? Just going to have to hope he didn't doodle 'prison breaks are awesome' while falling asleep or something like that.)

(Wei Wuxian's notes are in fact devoid of celebrations of prison breaks. Assuming Jiang Cheng can make out Wei Wuxian's personal-notes handwriting, he can read what very much looks like someone who has no idea how talismans or any cultivation demonic or otherwise works (but does seem to have some ideas about how something not completely dissimilar is expected to work) attempting to figure it out entirely from local Wei Wuxian's notes and the contents of this bedroom. There are some doodles in the margins - Wei Wuxian in more weird robes riding a sword (not even slightly in a manner anyone actually rides swords), a sketched figure Jiang Cheng won't recognize saying 'you're a genius Wei Wuxian'. Some scratchpaper level math, including notation he may not recognize.

From notes to doodles, modulo the different writing implement, everything looks exactly as though it could have been made in his Wei Wuxian's hand.)

"Was one of the differences you getting taken in by the Lan instead?" Jiang Cheng says without thinking, tone irritated and insulting, not looking up from the notes.  The phrasing reminds him of Lan Wangji, on the rare occasions that man spoke at all. 

Jiang Cheng knows that to speak concisely and with as few words as possible is elegant, but it isn't Wei Wuxian.  Jiang Cheng has seen Wei Wuxian in worse situations than merely tied up and held at sword-point, talking everyone's ears off and making grand sweeping gestures all the while.  Not that Jiang Cheng condones that behavior, nor does he want to give the other Wei Wuxian lessons on how to pretend to be Wei Wuxian, so he shouldn't say anything more.

He is more than capable of reading Wei Wuxian's messiest and most casual handwriting, he's just in the habit of complaining about it anyway.  His eyes linger on the assumptions about magic.  With real Wei Wuxian possibly being okay, he focuses on the fact that these are Yunmeng Jiang techniques.  Alternate universe Wei Wuxian or not, this person is not a member of the Jiang sect!  Given that he did so only when Jiang Cheng personally set him into a room containing the notes and all but ordered him to go through them, he can't say anything about that, either. 

Given that the notes aren't, say, attempts to master Wei Wuxian's handwriting, or fake repeated lines that some kind of mimicry monster could produce, this narrows down the possibilities.  And the conclusions about talismans are, he will grudgingly admit in his head, brilliant on the level that only Wei Wuxian makes even if some of the base assumptions are off.  Jiang Cheng takes far better notes and would not be able to make connections like this with them.  When he needs a second hand to adjust the papers, he puts away Sandu.  Zidian alone is enough.

"You think you can walk in here, read about our proprietary techniques, then provide so little information of your own?  I wanted an explanation, and that was at best the table of contents for one.  Start with the different events."  With one of them tied up, etiquette is out the window already.

?? If he had his hands free, he could check his forehead to make sure he hasn’t suddenly materialized a ribbon, but he’s pretty sure he hasn’t! (And he saw that picture of Lan Zhan so it’s not that Lans here actually all wear music camp uniforms.) He’s already mentioned shijie!

“No, sir. House Jiang took me in, sir.”

(He cannot even slightly pull off what Lan Zhan does. And can mostly only pull off submissive eloquence if he’s either doing locutions or quoting something.)

How was he supposed to know there were proprietary techniques! He knows the answer to that is going to be ‘do not in your self-willfulness conceal things from and lie to your (alternate universe) dominant, and also don’t impersonate his brother.’ Well he’s definitely not getting away with it at this point and couldn’t have really thought he would for any length of time; it probably doesn’t really matter what ‘it’ exactly he’ll be getting his beating(s) for. (He’s really working up a collection here! They wouldn’t have so many to get through if other Jiang Cheng had just punished him last night!)

“Sorry, sir.” Hey, great, he got a more specific question! Telling you what they do want when they tell you off; always great when doms remember that part. (Not knowing what he was supposed to be doing is not usually his problem, but it is totally his problem now! One of his problems.)

“…I didn’t break anyone out of prison, sir, and I live with House Jiang. And I didn’t invent anything with power use, sir.” Yet! But he is getting on that one! Other him didn’t even have the benefit of two worlds’ power systems so he’s really got some catching up to do here! If he’s about to be spending a lot of time at walls or whatever it is they do here, he is spending all that time (…that he isn’t spending being whacked for being terrible at standing at walls) on power analysis. (Maybe he should apologize to his recitation tutors. Though it’s not like they were thinking of alternate universes when they told him to memorize boring things he could look up in a book!)

Jiang Cheng takes a seat at the desk looking closed off and formal, shifting his arms so his sleeves fall symmetrically and straight.  His guest can remain tied up for the moment.  Other Wei Wuxian might still be a threat and there's no way of arranging him into a sitting position without untying him that wouldn't involve a lot of awkward limb wrangling and fabric getting caught under them in the attempt, even if Zidian is smarter than a mundane rope.  Besides, there is something upsetting about Wei Wuxian reacting to Jiang Cheng like he's his mother - someone to be avoided rather than talked into following his schemes.  There's a petulant part of him feeling momentarily smug about making Wei Wuxian lounge rather than kneel.

He hadn't been serious when asking if he was of Gusu Lan and is thrown off to have had it taken as a legitimate question to be answered. 

With only a list of things that haven't happened, it sounds like a past Wei Wuxian somehow sent to the future.  That wouldn't explain having more technology or different etiquette, though.  How long ago would things have had to diverge before those would change noticeably?

"You mentioned power usage being different.  What differences have you seen so far?"  Just because he's skimmed through Other Wei Wuxian's notes doesn't mean he can glean the differences through the underlying assumptions.  Wei Wuxian could have, but Jiang Cheng is not as smart as Wei Wuxian.

That's familiar enough to be almost homey!

...He's not getting let out for a while, is he. He attempts to wiggle himself into a somewhat more comfortable position, ideally not-annoyingly enough that he doesn't get too told off for it. 

Being tied up where the dom’s decided you’re gonna be is pretty much the same idea as kneeling really! It’s not like he’s being dragged struggling. Wei Wuxian is not feeling very lounge-y right now, but not in a way that would be improved by kneeling. (Mostly it's Zidian. And he's going to guess that the 'remember I have this horrible lightning whip' is totally intentional.)

He can absolutely answer that question! Where he's from, people can't jump twelve feet, and they don't have single use paper artifacts or whatever that was, and they don't have writing symbolic instructions for power effects. And they don't have the energy given off by the dead thing. And, would other Jiang Cheng like a bunch of technical descriptions and theorizing about power qualities and attributes and flow, about half in jargon only some of which he's ever heard before and half in enthusiastic informal metaphor? Because he's about to get that! Zidian is going to need to do slightly more work than previously as Wei Wuxian forgets his position and attempts to gesture before being preempted again.

Jiang Cheng utterly fails to understand the jargon.  Knowing he can't get much out of the technical terms, Jiang Cheng stops focusing on the words and instead listens to the rhythm of Wei Wuxian's voice.  It's so familiar, though he hasn't heard his Wei Wuxian speak like it in so long.

Zidian's hum gets louder when pushed against too hard.  That's the only response Wei Wuxian's squirming gets from either the whip or its master.

Putting the existence of resentful energy in a list with jumping and talismans is strange.  His mind keeps coming back to it.  "Do you mean that you don't have methods to use resentful energy, or that it doesn't exist?"  Because the phrasing seemed to imply the latter, but that is impossible. 

He jumps a bit at the first louder hum. Zidian: apparently now deputized to tell him off for not keeping still! …He can’t deny that that is very practical and a nice and friendly way to use Zidian (as they go), really. He thinks he still kind of prefers Jiang Cheng doing it himself. But he’s gotten the message thank you sir, sir’s lightning whip! He will try to keep his squirming to below causing-louder-humming levels. (He will not necessarily always succeed in this, but louder humming will be promptly followed by (at least temporary) cessations of squirming - also the only sign of any of this thought process that Jiang Cheng might notice.)

If resentful energy is that energy given off by the dead/unburied that it isn’t a good idea to touch directly or something like that then nope they don’t have that at all.

After hearing him ramble about cultivation theory for a while Jiang Cheng is convinced that this is in fact a Wei Wuxian.  He doesn't call Zidian back to his hand yet since Wei Wuxian seems to be normal gesturing and not attempting to escape.  Wei Wuxian will get him back later, no doubt, but he wants to get through the conversation first before it gets derailed. 

(The increased noise is merely a side effect of Zidian automatically reacting to the movement by putting more energy into its coils so it can thwart a possible upcoming escape attempt.  That it acts as a warning to the wielder that the captive might be trying something, or the captive that they're moving too much, is a bonus.)

"How?  If resentful energy doesn't exist what would cause your undead to rise and attack, or create monsters?" 

Not to mention what this would mean for normal spiritual energy, but he isn't feeling confident enough about his knowledge of the underlying theory to try guessing.  He wishes he understood what other Wei Wuxian had been saying earlier in his theories, and then he'd already know the differences.  His Wei Wuxian should be here to do this!  Understanding cultivation like this was Wei Wuxian's job.

He is not attempting to escape! That is not one of the ways of making things way worse on himself he generally engages in, and that instead of household members who’d drag him back to his brother and then police who’d drag him back to his brother there’d be household members who’d super better not see him and then people who want to execute him and also apparently undead and monsters, is not making it sound like a better idea!

…They also don’t have those things! Either of them!

(…Is that why everyone has/is supposed to have swords? Well, hooray that they’re doing the version where dominants and submissives get to have the swords. He wonders belatedly why other him got personally opposed to having one. Though if resentful energy is what makes undead and monsters, and other him plays resentful-energy-controlling flute music, that sounds like it should work perfectly well! And also sounds really awesome. He wants to learn the magic flute music. (Benefits of magic flute music: he can already play the flute, which is much more than he has with respect to swords!))

That does neatly solve the issue, but now he feels stupid for having made a guess and not been right.  He draws back slightly, shifts back to proper posture from where he'd begun shifting to something more relaxed.

"What does the Jiang sect do to earn money in your world?" Jiang Cheng asks.  For clarity he adds, "In this world, cultivation sects are paid to stop supernatural problems like monsters or curses."

Jiang Cheng can't imagine that any Jiang Cheng could be anything but a cultivator, but cultivation alone isn't a service that anyone is going to pay them to do.  Not unless cultivators are all street performers in the other world?  Which seems unlikely, and given how he's already feeling embarrassed he isn't going to try guessing any more.  He's just going to ask questions, get answers, then try to figure out what to do with them. 

He has no idea what he did this time! Or didn’t do. This is the problem with interuniverse doms.

Right, sect, they have disciples here because they’re a sect. His brain puts together the (guess at) the picture of the world - sects teach their disciples ‘cultivation’/the local power use, and then then the sects use that to solve power-type problems and that’s what they get paid for. (Alternate universe partial matching is weird.)

“- House Jiang’s not a sect in my world, sir.”

He is so not the submissive for this question.

They - own stuff, and have and invest in business interests, and sponsor people with Gifts and power use capacities, and more owning and investing and sponsoring... (And he hopes other Jiang Cheng is not about to ask him for a detailed financial report because he does not even slightly have one.) (He can give a very detailed account of a random assortment of things he happened to be around, do work for, read about, listen to someone talk about, or be yelled at for disrupting, but he is guessing other Jiang Cheng is not looking for one of those).

Jiang Cheng would very much like to know more about other universe Jiang Cheng's business!  Judging from the tone Other Wei Wuxian used, he isn't going to be any better than Jiang Cheng's Wei Wuxian at explaining the details.  It isn't likely to be important.  Not unless one or both of the Wei Wuxian find a way to teleport between worlds on purpose, after which he can just ask the other Jiang Cheng himself.

He is momentarily distracted by the horrifying thought that there are two Wei Wuxians.  One is already more than he can keep in line!  Not that his Wei Wuxian wants anything to do with him, and is officially not Jiang Cheng's problem (even though he will also always be Jiang Cheng's problem whether either of them likes it or not).  This Wei Wuxian seems more tractable.  (Why?  What did he do wrong, to make Wei Wuxian run away?  Is the other Jiang Cheng a better brother than him?)

So, other Jiang Cheng makes money by lending it and getting it back, either with interest or in something worth more than they paid.  That level of explanation will have to do for now.

"What are Gifts and power use capacities?  So far everything you've mentioned is about what your world can't do." 

Now he knows more things this world doesn’t have. At least about Gifts; it’d be pretty hard to have Gifts and not know about it. Is power use capacities the kind of thing it makes sense at all not to have? No yeah sure he can see it (can see all sorts possibilities and he bets he hasn’t thought of all of them!) But also could be it’s just the concept they don’t have (yet). (He can’t remember how exactly the history went in his world.)

- so you know how sometimes power pools in stuff, and 

(no Wei Ying that was not the question right now!)

Ah, sorry sir. Gifts are when someone can do basically one specific power-enabled thing, and they don’t have to learn it or work on it it’s just something they can do. The part of his world House Jiang is in has less of that than some other places but they still have some. Sometimes they’re really straightforward like ‘healing better than other people’ or ‘breathing under water’ and sometimes they’re kind of weird.

In his world there’s some power uses that anyone can learn if they can get through all the learning, and there are some that only some people can learn no matter what anyone else tries to do about it. Power use capacity is what they call the ‘can’ part even if someone hasn’t actually done it yet.

People with unique powers...

The memory of a hand reaching out towards him flashes through his head.  Intense tearing pain, sudden weakness and emptiness that feels like a black pit capable of pulling him in where he could never get out. 

Jiang Cheng covers for his momentary loss of composure by checking the door.  It was still slightly open since he hadn't expected to take more than a minute when he'd entered.  He shuts and locks it.  It's fine.  Wen Zhuliu is dead, and Jiang Cheng isn't thinking about him at all.  Obviously he doesn't think anything dangerous could come through a door in the heart of Lotus Pier right now.  Jiang Cheng is paying attention to the present, and to dangers that exist in the present.  Like his disciples wondering where he is and showing up and thinking that the Yiling Patriarch is in Lotus Pier.  That's worth keeping the door shut to avoid. 

He still has to respond.  Right.

"There are people with skills no one else has, but that has more to do with techniques being kept secret."  At least so far as Jiang Cheng knows.  With the Zhao sect long gone and the looted libraries of Nightless City providing no information, the mystery of Wen Zhuliu's powers is unlikely to be solved.  "Non-cultivators never have anything like Gifts and there's no reason to assume cultivators are different."

"Assuming that the cultivator's golden core is strong enough and isn't malformed they're able to learn any technique.  As well as anyone with hands can learn a musical instrument, at least.  Talent and competence varies."

Jiang Cheng knows that he should be thinking of further questions but is still feeling a bit thrown-off by his memories.  He lapses into silence expecting Wei Wuxian to think of some brilliant insight and start chattering about it.

He has another ‘what did he say’, this time in a completely different way, because that’s Jiang Cheng’s ‘having a personal encounter with the fact that deciding to just not be distressed by pretty awful stuff doesn’t really work’ reaction (not the kind of reaction most anyone would notice, but Wei Wuxian gets to be a different sort of exception here) and covering for it, and Wei Wuxian does not know how talking about Gifts and power use capacities that don’t even exist here would cause that.

He’s just going to guess the usual previous owners of the horrible lighting whip and the title Master Jiang were involved here, because that’s usually it. Maybe there was something about learning the local power uses.

Unfortunately, the only thing Jiang Cheng dislikes worse than having a break in composure is his submissive brother seeing him having a break in composure. No reason to think this one is different about that, or that it’ll help much that he’s not the right universe’s submissive brother. So the best thing to do is going to be the same thing, which is pretend he didn’t notice.

He casts around for a way to pretend he didn't notice and comes up with a very genuine one. "What's a golden core, sir?"

...Does he have asking-questions allowances? He doesn't does he. (Though other Jiang Cheng is telling him things now, which is nice!) "Sorry, sir. Can I ask, sir."

New alternate universe rule, he should get to borrow other him’s allowed-to-ask-questions. Though maybe other him doesn’t have that standing anymore, because prison break. Or maybe he didn’t to begin with, if other Jiang Cheng had different priorities on ‘telling him he can ask stuff every time is annoying’ and so is dealing with him forgetting that part about half the time. 

Well, his goal here was pretending-not-to-notice, so, probably he still has that covered.

"Their existence isn't a secret," he says, tone sharp because Wei Wuxian is not being helpful.  Jiang Cheng knows more about golden cores than just that they could be destroyed but that keeps rising to the top of his mind and there's no distraction to bury it under.  He gives in to the impulse to focus energy in his hands to prove to himself that he can.  It's still there.  The result is a bit of purple light.

"A spiritual organ formed through meditation and specific exercises, capable of creating and storing large amounts of spiritual energy as well as letting us see the energy."  His voice feels flat as he recites that, and he wonders if it sounds wrong too.

"Tell me more about what your world has."

Sharp tone is not surprising here, however well he might have done pretending-not-to-notice! ?? at the contents - he’s glad this one’s not a secret, but if other Jiang Cheng is implying he should have gotten that information elsewhere and not be bothering him with the question, then he would like to point out that he is tied up on the bed and previously was told not to leave the room! (He totally does not point this out, go him.) “Sorry, sir, thank you, sir.”

Unhelpfully for himself, Wei Wuxian has one association with purple light at Jiang Cheng’s hands. He tenses into a flinch - no that doesn’t make sense, other Jiang Cheng cannot be calling up Zidian he is literally tied up with Zidian right now. His heart should stop doing unhelpful things. Also that must be a local power use thing ooh what’s other Jiang Cheng doing. (…Could they do reprimands or even punishment with power use here? He’ll take some reprimands to see that!! Unless it’s like Zidian he doesn’t want any more of those (stop that his heart rate!) But, alternate universe power! …Well other Jiang Cheng does not seem to be doing anything to him with the purple light right now.)

Ooh, see the energy, that’s so cool he wants that! …He puts what other Jiang Cheng just said together with what other Jiang Cheng had said right before that. No, that can’t be right. Can that be right? No other Jiang Cheng had definitely said that if someone who did the golden core thing’s golden core is strong enough they can learn any technique. 

?!?!!!!! Holy shit, unification convergence, holy shit 

“You have the unification convergence?! 
- sir”

- no Wei Ying, other Jiang Cheng doesn’t like this topic right now and you just got a direct order about what to talk about! “Sorry sir sorry sir!” But, but, unification convergence!!!! Shut up Wei Ying!! Do you want to talk about ?!possibly unification convergence?! to specifically other Jiang Cheng specifically right now or do you want more chances of finding things out and to spend more time on alternative universe power and less time at walls, because you only get one of those! He wants to talk about possibly unification convergence!!

“Sorry, sir.”

…This sounds like a great time to tell other Jiang Cheng about electricity. Electricity 101! Lightning! No don’t think more about Zidian Technology! Their world has a lot of technology using electricity!