"Gooooood morning Ye-xiong, time to wakey wakey chickens clucky!"
Oh, good heavens.
"We're both gonna help out a bit with the rice fields," Wan Yu sing-songed, shaking Ye Xiyang by the shoulders. "Come, let's eat a bit."
Ye Xiyang, "......"
Kill him.
"They're transplanting the rice from the nursery, don't you want to see little baby rice? They're still tender with round cheeks and—"
"Please, stop talking." Ye Xiyang raised one hand, but he couldn't quite reach Wan Yu's mouth. An impish grin spread on Wan Yu's face.
"It's a beautiful morning! Don't you want to see geese? Cranes? The sun rising above the mountain peaks? Get your feet into wet and sloppy mud? Feel the soreness in your entire torso and waist from bending too much? It's all a beautiful part of new starts and birth and life."
Ye Xiyang flopped back to the mat, resigned.
___________
It turned out that Wan Yu had from the start volunteered himself to help out to pay for their stay, but he did not need to drag Ye Xiyang into this. The couple were surprised to see Ye Xiyang there, what with his much more regal bearings, but Wan Yu waved it off.
"I wanted to introduce him to the common life. Don't mind him, he's from a good sect."
The couple's two children couldn't help but steal glances at Ye Xiyang; the older son wasn't even old enough to have spring dreams, and the younger daughter looked to be about five or six, so they weren't exactly subtle. The awe and curiosity in their eyes was plain as day. Ye Xiyang looked too much like he was contemplating Wan Yu's murder inside to care though, as he ate the simple breakfast. Wan Yu turned to the father.
"How's the situation here, by the way? Anything we need to know? No need to worry about us not knowing anything, I've done this before."
Old Qin nodded. "Ah, yes… Well, we just moved out the fingerlings. We've been planting, but we're behind schedule, it might not be a good harvest this year… That heavy rain caused another flash flood. Old Jiang and Old Shen and their entire families have to fix their houses."
The window of optimal planting time was only oh-so-big, and transplanting required a lot of manpower. Losing a family or two in the effort was no small thing, especially at such crucial timing.
"We'll do our best to help in the fields," Wan Yu promised. "Even if we had to move on soon."
Old Qin shook his head. "What are you talking about! You're guests, cultivators no less! I was mighty surprised at what my wife told me yesterday. But bless, some are truly good-hearted."
Wan Yu laughed and changed the topic to ask about the area.
"Oh, we send our rice to Qunan," Old Qin said, some pride in his voice. "One of the better ones. The governor even made visits every once in a while. On good harvests even the Xue family in Qunan purchase ours to feed their family! But ah, you know, this past few years… But no matter. We are still doing our best, and it damn well showed."
Wan Yu blinked, tilting his head. "Wait, Qunan? Is it that close?"
Qunan was a town of culture, at first a village that was taken over by the less flamboyantly rich once the bigger city nearby, Yueyang, became too expensive for them to build more residences. In fact, Yueyang was the city that housed Vermilion Sun Sect itself— as the sect grew bigger and more prominent and the governor hundreds of years ago yielded to its influence, more and more of the land became sect property and the value of land there shot through the roof. It wasn't as bad now, but it was too little too late; smaller satellite towns had cropped up around it like spring bamboo after rain, and Qunan just happened to be the one that took off. It was now a town of music, culture, bazaars and open discussions at tea houses.
There was a very good chance the Vermilion Sun group from the nighthunt might pass by there on their way back to Yueyang.
Old Qin nodded rigorously. "Just follow the road out of the village and you'll come to an intersection connecting to the main road in 3, 4 hours. Then it's about three days if you're walking. There are inns along the way. Most of them are folks from here too, you see."
Then the conversation turned to cultivating fish, and Ye Xiyang tuned them all out, Wan Yu especially. The bastard.
When they headed off to the fields, sunlight was but a mere suggestion on the grey sky. Ye Xiyang lingered a ways away from Wan Yu, who chatted some more with Old Qin, then came over to drag Ye Xiyang down to about a third down the terraced mountainside, a bamboo pole with bundles of rice seedlings tied onto both ends slung over his shoulders. Ye Xiyang could see several men already at work with their ploughing oxen, tilling the long curve of wet land. Men, women, young, old, all of them were descending with handfuls of seedlings to transplant, bent over in the mud.
Good thing Wan Yu had lent his clothes— at least he could recognize quality fabric and showed some damn respect. But he sure couldn't extend that respect to Ye Xiyang himself, who was the Supreme Leader of Frozen Dragon Sect, one of the oldest in jianghu and one of the richest. Unbelievable.
Wan Yu led them to a somewhat quiet half-finished terrace and beckoned Ye Xiyang closer, before just stepping into the quelch of the mud. Ye Xiyang took a deep breath, let out a tired exhale, and joined him.
“Don’t look so lifeless. Here.” With that, Wan Yu handed him a handful of seedlings. “Plant each of them about, huh, 1 chi apart. Gotta give them enough room to grow. Here, like this.”
Several more people came over to join this area of land, and some of them stole glances at them. Wan Yu was too busy showing Ye Xiyang the ropes, though, and had gone on with his own lane as he kept an eye on Ye Xiyang, making sure he got it.
Ye Xiyang did. He wasn’t stupid.
It wasn’t long before he got into the rhythm, and needed another bundle. Wan Yu was grinning as he grabbed them both another handfuls— “A change of pace, no?”
Ye Xiyang pointedly did not reply.
It was probably the physical cultivation of their bodies and training for one-minded focus, but the two of them continued on without a pause for hours, barely registering the sun that slipped ever higher. Before long, with the help of half a dozen others, they finished this terrace and could move to the next. When Wan Yu turned to him, his grin was toothy, wide and sunkissed.
One of the younger kids had been running around up and down bringing bundles of seedlings from the nursery. Wan Yu took two that had been placed on the field and, with practiced mindlessness, handed one to Ye Xiyang. The sun was well on its way to its tipping point. Several of the villagers were starting to flag, energy depleting from the labor, but Wan Yu only seemed to be brimming with energy.
“How are you still so… energetic?" Ye Xiyang asked as they went back to planting. He himself wasn't tired yet, just in need of stretching out. But even then, he wouldn't say he was feeling particularly bountiful with it.
"I'll let you in on something, Ye-xiong," Wan Yu said, "but being a constructive part of a functioning community? Nothing could be better. Being part of the village and the things that made it thrive? Feels good. Great. What you do, it's for everyone, and what everyone else does is also for you. We're all in this together."
His smile turned bittersweet for a second. "It only becomes mundane and uninteresting when you haven't seen everything fall apart."
Having traveled like he had, Ye Xiyang supposed that Wan Yu's perspective made sense. Community efforts did have its effects— the almost simmering excitement of the Wolf Guard after taking out Three Tenets Sect that had, for years, disturbed the people in their territory. The tinge of happiness in the records of the Immortals who gave themselves to the Slumbering Dragon at the peak of their cultivation, so that they may aid their descendants generations in the future. The glimmer of faraway joy he remembered feeling when he was a child and his shifu was away during Winter Solstice, and Ru Ge had relented and allowed him to join everyone else in making noodles and cakes for the festival.
"You have a point," Ye Xiyang admitted. "I suppose we, at our cores, do need to be a part of something. Otherwise, we wouldn't have as many groups and societies as we do, and as few lone immortals in seclusion."
Wan Yu's eyebrows rose in surprise.
"...I am a sect leader." Ye Xiyang rolled his eyes. "One lone leader a sect does not make."
"All right, fair, fair. Wait, what do you guys plant then? Wheat?"
"Wheat and grains, yes." The two of them went to a new lane. "Berries, the ones that could be domesticated. Fish farms."
"Huh. So the local food is…?"
"Noodles with steaming hot broth is popular. Buns with berries jam." Ye Xiyang wiped the sweat off his forehead with his wrist. This heat was positively murder for him, but he wasn't so tired he would call quits in front of Wan Yu, nor was the glaring sun bad enough he would be lightheaded. "Fish or berries porridge. Rice isn't a new addition by any means, but we are too proud of having survived on our food and land to fully adopt it."
"...The food sounds good," Wan Yu sighed wistfully. "Cook some ba."
Ye Xiyang snorted.
It was too bad the man was in his condition that year— all his meals had been at best bland and at worst unpalatable, having been medicated and sprinkled with a dose of tranquilizer. He didn't get any of the sweets either, the candied berries and honeyed porridge, the spiced ginger drinks with rock sugar and milk. Ye Xiyang reckoned he would've enjoyed the sweet tendencies of the dishes at the Slumbering Dragon Mountains. Before sugar became an affordable product, things had been sweetened using fruits and berries, as honey too was often hard to come by. Nowadays, Ye Xiyang was so sick of the taste he'd grown to prefer anything but.
They both went back to planting, the sun now overhead like a leering gaze. The fields were a bit quieter now, as more and more went off to take a break and have a meal. Wan Yu, however, was still planting, and Ye Xiyang was unwilling to be the first to bring it up.
But then something was— he paused. “...Something was touching my foot.”
Wan Yu looked up, blinking as he wiped sweat off his eye. “What?”
Ye Xiyang lifted his left foot out of the mud. “It was som— No.”
“Oh. It’s probably a leftover fish.” After planting the seedling in his hand, Wan Yu started groping the thick waters around Ye Xiyang’s feet, the tiniest tip of his tongue poking out as he did so. Ye Xiyang, eye twitching, took a step back when Wan Yu’s head came dangerously close to smacking onto his thigh. “Oh, where’d it— got it!”
And so, with one hand holding a bundle of seedlings, he lifted a hand-sized fish out of the waters with his other one. It wiggled and squirmed in his hand, mouth round and making popping sounds, beady eyes occasionally making contact with Ye Xiyang’s.
Ye Xiyang, “......”
“Probably one they missed and just started thriving when people got panicky over needing to plant the late rice before it’s too late,” Wan Yu explained, throwing the fish to the footpath. It flopped over several times before floundering into the other field. “Tickles, doesn’t it?”
Ye Xiyang, “......”
“Watch where the hell you’re throwing shit,” a tart voice said from the side. The two of them turned to her— the kid, whose arms were crossed. “Anyway, they’re looking for you, saying it’s lunchtime. They won’t start without you two.”
“Just let us finish these,” Wan Yu promised, speeding up for the last few seedlings in his hands. “Okay, I’m done. Ye-xiong?”
Ye Xiyang held out his two empty, muddy hands.
“Aight,” Wan Yu announced as he walked out of the muddy fields. With a quick flick of his hand water washed off his hands and feet, then Ye Xiyang’s. The kid’s expression was a mixture of disgust at the blatant show of ability and approval, but then morphed a moment later when Wan Yu plucked off something from her rolled up sleeves as he passed by.
“Huh, what vegetable is th— whoa!”
“You!”
And so Ye Xiyang followed at a safe distance, his face the model of zen as he watched the kid pick up a bamboo pole and charge at Wan Yu halfway back to the village.
___________
Afternoon was much the same, except Ye Xiyang felt a lot more human doing so, having been actually awake before starting rather than half-asleep and tired. They cleared a lot— he wasn’t ashamed at all to say that they were probably doing the work of four people with their steady pace, especially given how Wan Yu would sometimes speed up and it would trigger Ye Xiyang into keeping up, and the next thing they knew they were alone in that field, the villagers having moved on to another as if to give them space.
“Feels good to clear that one part by ourselves,” Wan Yu said as the two of them walked to the river. The sun was near setting now, and everyone was dispersing, heading back home before they couldn’t find their way back— Wan Yu, however, had wanted to do some laundry before that, and so he dragged Ye Xiyang along with him. ‘It’s the clothes on you I need to have cleaned up,’ he’d explained. ‘And on me. The point is, I need clean clothes.’
“The last two hours was just you treating it as a boating race,” Ye Xiyang said, voice flat.
“Yeah, so? I deduct points for sloppy planting anyway, so it’s not like we were lowering quality, no?”
Unbelievable. And yet it worked.
The sky was dark by the time they reached the river, a wide, black thing snaking into the distance. Several trees dotted its length, growing in numbers the further they walked away from the village area— at some point, Wan Yu pulled out a night pearl to illuminate their path as dusk passed and evening descended upon them. After walking what must’ve been several li, Wan Yu at last deemed this stretch of the river acceptable for his laundry.
“In this darkness?” Ye Xiyang asked, eyebrows raised. Had Wan Yu’s night pearl been any lesser, they would barely be able to see the fallen log near the bank. But no, this night pearl was good. Wan Yu strung it up on a high branch, then pulled another to join— in the end, the two thing looked like twin moons dangling in the air, providing just enough illumination that Ye Xiyang could see the full spectacle of Wan Yu leaping straight into the river.
Ye Xiyang, “......”
The river must be pretty deep— Wan Yu was swimming, he could tell, because his head bobbed up and down in the current. Then he disappeared into the inky darkness for some time before resurfacing, then made his way back to the banks.
“Ah, and white fish and water is reunited at last,” Ye Xiyang narrated. Wan Yu kicked his feet and swum over, reaching out to grab his ankle. Ye Xiyang took several steps back, contemplating stepping on the hand that continued to wiggle its fingers at him like a still-living squid.
“Glub glub,” Wan Yu said. “Want to eat human, glub glub.”
Ye Xiyang, “......” All right, he was done entertaining this man.
Choosing instead to pick up a sturdy branch to whack him with at a safe distance, Ye Xiyang watched as Wan Yu climbed out of the river and pulled off his hair tie, shaking the water off his hair. Disgusting. Personally the worst dog Ye Xiyang had the displeasure of coming across. “Aren’t you here to do laundry? Get to work, peasant.”
Wan Yu let out an open laugh as he took off his sopping wet robe in a split second and swung it out like a whip— with a loud, sloppy crack the fabric shot out and wrapped around the branch Ye Xiyang had in his hand, flinging it into the air. The accuracy with which he’d done that was no less than what Ye Xiyang displayed with his fan Fractal Frost, which meant that he was a lunatic enough to practice whipping with his wet clothes. Then, with a smug, boyish grin, he jumped to catch the falling branch, landing on a rock with all the grace of damp laundry falling off its line. His shirt was thrown off to the banks, landing with a loud squelch.
He waved the branch around in a sword form, settling on two fingers held in front of his chest as his other hand kept the branch pointing steadily forward. The night pearls illuminated the grin and sharp determination in his eyes, white as moonlight.
"Aight, get stripping Ye-xiong, I need to get back to laundry before dark."
"You dare treat a sect leader like this, huh?" Ye Xiyang said, voice low and tinged with danger. Wan Yu gave him a defiant stare in return.
"Yeah? What are you gonna do? You've already worked the fields at my behest."
...Indeed. Ye Xiyang had played along far further than he would've otherwise. And the disquieting thought was. Well. If he imagined someone else doing this to him, bar Shi Ma— Ru Ge would never—, he would’ve had them sent to the mines. Again and again this 19 years old pushed at his boundaries, prodding and making a mockery out of it.
And yet Ye Xiyang let him.
With a twist of his foot, he leapt forward.
Wan Yu met his first blow with a laugh, the branch diverting the energy off to the side as he leaned back, curve smooth as an eel. Chest stuck out like that, it was easy to see his ribs pressing dunes into scarred skin. It wasn’t just skin and bones, though, as Ye Xiyang was soon reminded— his wiry arms met Ye Xiyang’s sturdy ones blow for blow, each block clinical and without hesitation, even with his still-healing left arm. The honeyed brown of his eyes had hardened into amber with focus, and the way the cool light reflected off them made Ye Xiyang draw a sharp inhale.
“You’re a menace,” he told Wan Yu. Another laugh.
“Aren’t I?” Then he leapt back into the waters, feet quick as he hopped on its surface several times to reach the other end, and then the two of them rushed forward to meet each other in another exchange of blows.
The night pearls hanging on the trees bobbed in the air as the force of their moves sent shockwaves across, bending fields of grass and rice like a gust of night breeze.
It wasn’t a long session. Wan Yu was good, but playing around with the water also meant he spent his qi on useless things, and it wasn’t long before he started laughing again, going silly as his energy flagged. Nearing the end, his footsteps lost its coordination, and he swayed too far off to the side in a dodge. Ye Xiyang took the opportunity to slam him against the tree, and kept his two fingers pointed at his chest. Wan Yu let out another breathy laugh.
“Shit, oooh fuck, my back hurts,” he wheezed. “Okay, okay, let’s get back to laundry.”
“Coward,” Ye Xiyang said, moving back. Something smacked Wan Yu straight on the face— the robes he’d asked for. Another chuckle burst out as he took it off his head. When he looked up, Ye Xiyang was gone.
This chapter was so fun. Farming and swimming lol with YX just confused as to why he's putting up with all this
He just doesn't understand yet that he's acquiescing to all this because he got attached LOL poor sucker
Thank you for reading!