#song lan

silvysartfulness

Chapter XXXVIII - One Can Be My Teacher of Heaven Has A Road But No One Walks It is up! :D

He had studied with many teachers throughout his life, knowing when to set pride aside to accept instruction from those more experienced than himself. Taught how to move his blade, perform the rituals of spiritual cleansing, seeking and understanding scholarly wisdom at first. Then the humbler everyday things it turned out you needed to know as a wandering cultivator on never ending roads – making shelter, telling the edible plants from the poisonous, cobbling together a broken shoe enough to keep walking to the nearest town to get new ones...

Enlightened masters and talented friends, young and old, gentry and vagrants - they had all been among his past teachers, and Song Lan had approached all his lessons with the same focused, solemn determination.

This should be no different.

Shouldn't.

Setting out to master any new craft was always a challenge, after all – intimidating, toilsome, even painful at times. You had to blister before you calloused, no skill grew out of nothing, mastery only won through tenacious dedication. He knew that. Wasn't afraid of the challenge, the work needed.

No, not of that.

I can learn, he had assured Xingchen, desperate to cleanse that look of forlorn horror off his face, and he had meant it. Could, would learn to do anything and everything that Xingchen needed - become what he needed.

He could learn.

Shivering, closing his eyes for a brief moment, Song Lan drew a slow quiet breath, cast one final look at his restlessly sleeping companion, and went to see Xue Yang.

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Happy New Year, wonderful people! Let's end/begin the year with a bang, as it were!

Working on this story, and the incredible encouragement and support you've given me along the way is the one thing that's kept me afloat during these clusterfucks of pandemic years. I'm so grateful to you all!

It's my hope that reading about these losers' miseries may have helped alleviate yours a bit too. 💚

May 2022 be a better one - for all of us.

xuenyan

i just think hes neat

veilchenjaeger

In honour of the exchange fic crunch I’m currently stuck in, have some basic Song Lan character traits that I am unreasonably attached to and that are based on canon evidence, but since this man has 10 minutes of screentime it’s not like there’s definitive proof:

• Boring. Whenever he tells someone about his day, they’re asleep five minutes later. Has opinions on tupperware. Irons his socks. I could go on.
  
• Guilt™
• Tries really hard. So hard that it sometimes circles back around and he doesn’t actually do anything.
• Resting bitchface. No, he’s not about to kill you, that’s really just his face.
• Then again, will not pretend to 1) care about 2) agree with your elitist aristocratic opinions. Will not ruin your party by fighting over political disagreements like certain other cultivators in black, but also won’t be making smalltalk. Probably isn’t at your party in the first place bc he politely declined your invitation.
• Someone has to make the Excel spreadsheets for the revolution and it’s going to be him.
  
• Loses all his brain cells when he sees a pretty boy.

spookykittenwrites

Yi City squad and journaling habits, rated by level of reading quality, inspired by a convo with @ilacion 

Song Lan: blunt half sentences that are extremely to the point. He keeps track of moon cycle and placement, location (when they’re near a city) and that’s about it. Meticulous notes on what they’re hunting, though. Would be dry as sand to read 2/10

Xiao Xingchen: flowery in every sense of the word… flowers doodled in the margins, it’s all written in super flowery language or literally poetry, he presses flowers in between the pages as well. The flowers pressed are labelled with where they were gathered but not in any logical way, like, there’d be a peony pressed with “Xue Yang looked beautiful in the dying light of the sun, the moon hung above us only barely visible through the maples. Zichen stoked the fire and smiled softly at the song of night birds. A willow nearby rustled in the wind.” No dates or locations, only vibes. 6/10, only because you’d never know it was a journal and it would end up in some rare books collection somewhere labeled as poetry.

Xue Yang: an actual journal! It’s clear and detailed, well-written and fairly organized. Unfortunately, he keeps his research and personal journals in one book so you’ll never know whether the “I had to put another one down today, these things keep getting out of hand. My new knife is very effective, though I need to find a new whetstone.” is about work or his personal life (and you don’t want to know!). 8/10 for readability, but you’ll wish you hadn’t.

A-Qing: she has an incredible memory and doesn’t need to write things down to remember them, never mind that it would ruin her disguise as a blind girl if she was carrying around a book. she does, however, use essentially shadow marks to tell other people who to steal from when someone rich is rude to her. 10/10 for saying fuck the system.

a-force-dyad-in-space

I'm working on a gifset atm and I noticed this little interaction during the shot where WWX and XXC talk to each other, so have some impromptu SongXue 😋