Cultivation Retirement Plan (BL)

bgm: song of the wind

Three tragedies stood out in Nan Wuyue’s life.

First was his birth. His family was poor and it was a bitter winter night when he came into this world. The skies were devoid of moonlight, leaving the crude mud hut that was his home dark and unforgiving. Because of that, his father never noticed the blood pooling beneath his mother’s skirts until it was too late. By the time he found a doctor, her body was cold and the baby lying on her breast had cried himself hoarse with hunger.

He was given the name Wuyue (無月) or “moonless,” both because of the night he was born and how he’d killed his precious mother Qiu Xiyue. (邱夕月) 

His father fell to drink not long after that, leaving the baby to fend for itself. If not for the kindhearted auntie next door who raised him with her own daughter, he never would have survived past infancy.

When Nan Wuyue was only four years old, the auntie moved away and his father lost his job. The small family of two was forced to beg on the streets. Naturally, he used his son copiously for extra change. The young boy was remarkably handsome for his age and incited plenty of pity from passerby with his large, bright eyes. Some of the richer ones even offered to buy him off his father’s hands, but the man was shrewd enough to keep his main source of income closeby.

Unfortunately, a famine struck the country and charity became scarce. Simple things like bread became worth their weight in gold. At one point, people stripped the trees of bark, the ground of grubs and grass, just to fill their stomachs. Nan Wuyue was no exception, but he had always been a clever child. Once he managed to win a mantou from a kindhearted monk and bring it home as a surprise for his father.

Yet the man had been starved for so long his rationality was gone. He devoured the entire thing and demanded for more, refusing to believe Nan Wuyue when the child insisted that was all he had. He beat the boy within an inch of his life, leaving him stunned on the ground.

Nan Wuyue laid there for two whole days. 

On the third, his father approached him with a delirious look in his eyes, his mind hungry for meat. He had no knife, but found a large shard of pottery on the ground to be a replacement. Nan Wuyue was too weak to move and could only watch as the man clumsily tore his sleeve apart and took the sharp edge to his stick-thin arms.

The moment he cut was when the second tragedy struck. Nan Wuyue’s unconscious urge to live awakened the latent bloodline in his body and burned through his father’s hands. Screaming, the man ran off in terror before succumbing to his wounds. He died without an intact corpse, his hands reduced to ashen stumps.

As it turned out, Nan Wuyue wasn’t his father’s son at all. His mother had an unfortunate run-in with someone from the demon realm who took a fancy to her looks. He was the baby of that unwanted union. The first awakening of his demon bloodline all but exhausted his latent qi reserves. By some miracle he pulled through, but not before his father’s body had started to rot in the wilderness and attract the company of flies and vultures.

Nan Wuyue didn’t bother burying the corpse, but staggered off as soon as he was well enough to walk. For the next few years he struggled to survive on his own, surviving by the skin of his teeth in the streets and back alleys.

Then one day, he met a cultivator.

Perhaps fate took pity on his circumstances; perhaps it simply wanted to pull a massive joke. But the young disciple from Star Pavilion Sect who had gotten lost until Nan Wuyue showed him the way repaid his help with both food and coin. He observed that Nan Wuyue had a good foundation for cultivation and invited him to come to the next disciple selection ceremony for the sect.

Nan Wuyue followed his instructions and joined a crowd of hopefuls. There he was discovered to possess a rare mutated spiritual root. If Sect Leader Ye Xinglin had been present at the ceremony, he might have taken on Nan Wuyue as a disciple himself. But he had chosen to enter closed door cultivation and missed the chance. Instead, it was Mt. Jingting’s peak lord who stepped forward to request Nan Wuyue as his first ever core disciple. As he was a personal student of Ye Xinglin and cherished by his eldest senior brother, Ye Xinglin’s direct successor, nobody raised a fuss.

Thus, Nan Wuyue accepted Mo Yixuan as his shizun and embarked on the third and final tragedy of his life. He was truly a child then, having lived through hardships yet still hopeful for the promises that the future held. His shizun seemed so noble, powerful, and kind, even letting him stay in a private wing just next to his main residence at the peak of Mt. Jingting. Mo Yixuan soon learned to take care of maintenance and upkeep around the mountain as well, cleaning and cooking for the two of them. Although Mo Yixuan didn’t need to eat, he would occasionally try some of Nan Wuyue’s food and praise him for it afterwards.

Nan Wuyue was very content with those days.

Yet despite everything, his cultivation never improved. In fact, it even stalled and began to backslide. Five months into Mo Yixuan’s tutelage, his master began drugging him. A year later, Nan Wuyue was suffering from frequent pain caused by congested qi and other complications from simply cultivating incorrectly. His childhood experiences had made him isolated and reluctant to mingle with others; after accepting Mo Yixuan he simply stuck by his master and never reached out to his fellow disciples. Many of them felt that Nan Wuyue was slighting them and began to grow miffed, then insanely jealous of the supposedly pampered core disciple. 

Nan Wuyue’s terrible cultivation state only heightened their misconceptions that he was lazy and wasting his talents. During the one time he was invited to spar with his martial brothers, he embarrassed himself so thoroughly that they thought he was screwing around with them. One thing led to another and a week followed where Nan Wuyue was consistently challenged and then defeated by all disciples who tried to attack him.

Mo Yixuan stepped in just in time to stop the violence from escalating any further, but the damage was already done: Nan Wuyue had been thoroughly humiliated and his useless reputation exploded through the sect, earning him the disdain of disciples and peak lords alike. It spurred him to despair and further desperation. He pushed himself to work harder, train faster, and beg his master for help, never suspecting the man was feeding him lie after lie behind his sweetly poisoned words.

In the original timeline, Nan Wuyue had played the fool to Mo Yixuan’s fiddle for eight long years before he came to his senses. He fled Star Pavilion Sect with his body in the midst of breaking down, but the peak lord chased him in hot pursuit. The second threat to his life finally awakened his half-demon bloodline anew, allowing him to escape from the man’s clutches.

Of course, this meant that Mo Yixuan had the perfect excuse to paint him as a renegade and demand his capture for the good and pride of the sect. Nan Wuyue barely clung to life as he clawed a way out for himself in the demon realm. He discovered his father was the departed prince and first-born son of the current demon king. This prince had died in an unlucky face-off against Ye Xinglin himself when Nan Wuyue was just a baby, making Nan Wuyue next in line to the throne. For the sake of survival and revenge, he fully embraced his new role as demon prince publicly.

Not only did this fail to deter Mo Yixuan’s advances, but spurred them onto new heights. The man mustered his sect siblings and the Four Peaks Alliance at Star Pavilion Sect to ally with other righteous factions and mount an all-out invasion of the demon realm. At the very last battle, he even got the better of Nan Wuyue with a sword to the chest, though not before the demon prince stabbed him fatally in the back.

He had then found himself in the past, already on the road to ruin and too late to undo the choice of master during the disciple selection ceremony. He had charged through his first life so blind and desperate that his plans for the second were a mess too. Grinding Mo Yixuan down and eventually killing him had been his only goal, and now…

Nan Wuyue’s hands tightened around the rough broom handle as he swept the courtyard. Leaving the ice prisons had been a simple thing: Mo Yixuan only had to open the gates and let him free as they were master and disciple. When he stumbled on the way out, the peak lord had supported him briefly, but let go soon after. They returned to Mt. Jingting where life played out in a perfect copy of Nan Wuyue’s earliest, oblivious days at the sect.

He cooked and cleaned, using the rest of his time to train (correctly). Mo Yixuan had gotten Ouyang Che to prescribe him something to fix the damage to his roots, which were extensive but currently still salvageable. Besides that, master and disciple moved in their own circles, never touching or talking more than necessary. Once a week, they met for spars to exhaust Nan Wuyue’s qi reserves, though Mo Yixuan was slowly delegating the task to teams of outer disciples under his peak eager for a chance to prove themselves. The first group selected were the same bullying trio who had dragged Nan Wuyue to his master outside the Qi Refining Pool. They doubted Nan Wuyue’s skills, but were summarily humbled when the boy beat them to the dirt. With this, Mo Yixuan planned to erase some of the damaged reputation Nan Wuyue had earned in his past.

Fei Chenling regained consciousness one week later as predicted, but was so weakened that he immediately had Ouyang Che take over as stand-in sect leader while he focused on recovering. He refused to explain directly what had caused the backlash, only citing that it’d be under investigation and asked for a private audience with his own core disciple. Afterwards, he’d soaked briefly in the Qi Refining Pool for less than an hour before hastily withdrawing into closed door cultivation.

Jun Zhen’s monthly treatments would have to be supplemented with pills and other treatments in the meantime. Fortunately, Mu Yelian and Ouyang Che had long prepared for this possibility and were more than ready for the task. They along with Mo Yixuan also took on the responsibility of checking in on their martial brother in rotating shifts with the Mt. Luojia disciples.

Meanwhile, the Four Peaks Alliance remained silent. The next big event was the Inner Disciple trials in one and a half months, so most of the peak lords were preparing their candidates. This gave Nan Wuyue some time between training to observe his new shizun and pinpoint all the subtle differences in his personality. For one thing, Mo Yixuan treasured silence and solitude. He still carried himself with grace but was clumsier in other areas, such as fighting and dressing himself. There was a skeleton flower hairstick that he dutifully wound in his hair everyday in a half-hearted updo and refused Nan Wuyue to touch. He rose much earlier than the original Mo Yixuan just to meditate, train, or oversee Nan Wuyue’s practice time, then whiled away his afternoons simply thinking or staring at the clouds after Nan Wuyue brought him tea. 

It felt as if he was simply waiting for the world to end.

He was more ethereal than ever, exuding a quiet, muted serenity that sought to fade into obscurity. Nan Wuyue knew better than to disturb him, but focused on restoring their relationship to the cleanest slate possible. He even presented the lifesaving dragon pearl he’d stolen as a show of good faith, but Mo Yixuan only took a glance before telling him to keep it. 

What would have been a priceless gift for any other disciple felt like a slap in the face to Nan Wuyue. To him, the pearl was simply another debt on the ledger that separated him from this man with no desires. Ironically, the less Mo Yixuan paid him attention, the more Nan Wuyue was determined to prove himself worthy of notice.

“Shizun, today’s tea is Starpluck Green,” Nan Wuyue said courteously as he brought over a tray with teapot, cup, and handmade snacks to Mo Yixuan’s frequented viewing spot by the mountain peak’s edge. “It’s freshly harvested by the people in the valley below.”

Mo Yixuan gave the slightest of nods as he perused over the contents of a scroll. 

Seeing this, Nan Wuyue went on, “Thanks to Peak Lord Ouyang and shizun’s efforts, disciple will be ready to break through the fourth level of Foundation Establishment soon. May shizun test skills with me again when the time comes.”

“Alright,” Mo Yixuan agreed without inflection. This was part of his responsibilities to help Nan Wuyue grow stronger, so he had no objections. Still Nan Wuyue lingered, waiting until Mo Yixuan finished sipping his tea and glanced over. “What else?”

“Does shizun like the tea?”

“It’s fine.” Mo Yixuan always gave the same answer, but Nan Wuyue didn’t mind.

“Disciple has paired it with Cloudflake Pastries to heighten the flavors of both,” Nan Wuyue went on. He was much more formal with his speech now, not daring to offend Mo Yixuan a bit. How much of this was sincere or affected, only he himself knew.

Mo Yixuan looked at the plate of white, thinly-sliced rice wafer pastries lined up neatly in a row and raised his eyebrows slightly. In the modern world such precision was only seen with machines, but Nan Wuyue managed the same perfection with only his bare hands.

“Did you use aura manipulation for this?” Mo Yixuan asked curiously.

Nan Wuyue remained humble. “Yes. By honing my qi to a knife-fine edge, I was able to achieve a cleaner cut with each slice.”

“You’re improving quickly,” Mo Yixuan replied. “That takes a good amount of control.” Perhaps Nan Wuyue was actually one of those cultivation geniuses who were crippled by unfortunate circumstances. “In the past, I really held you back.”

“Shizun shouldn’t compare yourself with that man,” Nan Wuyue said quickly.

Mo Yixuan just waved carelessly at the air. It was easier to say “I” than “my other self” or “my original soul.” And just like how Nan Wuyue had withheld the details of his time travel, he never told his disciple about his origins from a different world. As with Ouyang Che, he simply allowed the other to draw his own conclusions.

Nan Wuyue watched as the older man delicately picked up a piece of pastry and brought it to his mouth. It had taken him longer to finalize the perfect combination of flaky sweetness that melted on one’s tongue as gently as a layer of frost. Eating one of these pastries was akin to tasting an actual cloud. His sharp eyes picked out the glimmer of light in Mo Yixuan’s eyes with satisfaction as the man was subtly affected by the superb flavors.

Cloudflake pastries lacked a strong presence on the palate, but they were a perfect fit for Mo Yixuan's preferences of simple flavors and light food.

“How is it?” Nan Wuyue asked next.

“Very good,” Mo Yixuan admitted. Then he shook his head. “Instead of wasting your time on these things, why not cultivate more instead?”

“Shizun once said that all things within the Way also exist without it,” Nan Wuyue cut in smoothly. “This too, is part of my cultivation path.”

“Being and non-being create each other. We work with being, but non-being is what we use,” Mo Yixuan murmured to himself. He suddenly sat up. “I see, so it can be understood from this perspective as well…”

Nan Wuyue shut his mouth as he saw the familiar tendrils of qi flaring out from Mo Yixuan’s body. Shizun’s enlightened to another cultivation principle again.

Besides helping him train and staring into space, this was Mo Yixuan’s most common state these days...

—

{extra}

Nan Wuyue:  Since I can’t be sweet to my shizun, I’ll serve him sweets instead.
Mo Yixuan: *eats snacks, levels up*
Nan Wuyue: .......
Nan Wuyue: The distance between us has grown again…

—

(modern) cloudflake pastries: