43 thoughts on “A Long Road Chapter 10 up on AO3”

  1. Insert the “This is Happening” meme😀 After 10 long and beautiful chapters Wangxian are reunited💖💖💖💖💖

    Thank you so much I really needed this today. For some reason my otherwise chill family has decided that this is the year to pop off and be drama queens😑 Dinner is going to be fun tonight😧

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    1. I’m sorry. I guess no one in the family has any Xanax you can spike the turkey with? I kid, I kid, don’t do that. Don’t spike anything.

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

      1. Yeah no my family has always had high tolerence to any thing so even if I could spiking wouldn’t be a good idea. I’m just gonna keep an eye on the room and maybe bring out the cheescake early. That and have my fluffy foster kitten pics on hand.

        Liked by 5 people

      3. White mulberry leaf tea will reduce blood pressure (clinically verified), but I don’t think anything can make people less angry.

        Alas, my little brother is feeling under the weather and was not able to remember to brine the turkey last night. (He put the turkey in the water, and the turkey in the fridge, but… no salt or spices. Very impressive.)

        So he’s staying home and sleeping, and my parents and I are having an alternate lunch. I’m off tomorrow and Saturday, and so is my little brother, so we will have our turkey tomorrow.

        I am bringing the bag of songpyeon (colored rice cakes/dumplings with various flavors and fillings, supposedly half-moon shaped, eaten in South Korea for their version of the Mid-Autumn Festival, which is also called Korean Thanksgiving), which I have been looking for an excuse to thaw and eat. (It’s a big bag.) Probably we will drop some food off at my brother’s house too.

        Liked by 3 people

      4. Songpyeon. Um. I think they were in the freezer too long, because some of them were crumbly when they thawed out. They seemed to need sauces, or honey, or cinnamon and sugar, or something. Not as much taste as I’d expected, possibly because I didn’t steam them over pine needles (as directed).

        I think I’ll put them into a sweet soup. Fruit soup, maybe.

        Liked by 3 people

      5. Okay, the Internet consensus is that soup will make songpyeon dissolve into goo. So probably a lot of sauce, but not enough to be soup. Maybe like a pie, or a custard. I mean, it’s like a whole bag of songpyeon, and I’m not going to throw away perfectly good food.

        Maybe I need chocolate syrup, or caramel. I mean, there’s never a wrong time to deploy chocolate syrup.

        Liked by 3 people

    3. Hope things went better! *hugs* Unless you don’t want to touch, then I’ll stay hands off.

      If you want an interesting book series I’d recommend The Saint of Steel.

      When a god dies, who gets left behind?

      The paladins of the Saint of Steel were the holiest of killers, berserkers sworn to the service of their god. When the Saint of Steel died, the order ran mad, their minds broken by the loss. Years later, the surviving paladins of the order struggle to piece together new lives, new loves, and find their place in a world that will never quite trust them again…

      Yes I copy pasted the series description. It’s succinct! And while the paladins are all having a rough time of it, they’ve picked themselves up and dusted off and now they get to live. And I want to scream over the cliffhanger she left at the end of the third one. The one that recently came out.

      But she has a quirky style of writing and she’s fun with the banter. The characters are smart, and each has their niche. It’s interconnected with at least two other series, one of which I am equally anxious she continue. I’ve never found a deficit from not having read any of the others but it creates a richer experience.

      So. Hope things went, smoother?

      This too shall pass. It may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  2. Eeek! So many moving parts just collided together, and Lan Wangji can’t even think right now, and then the object of his affections just showed up from a tree branch. In a place he shouldn’t have been able to get into. Again. Here’s hoping this meeting goes better than their first.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

  6. I am impressed yet again at how much room you kept to be surprising after all the excerpts!

    I also really enjoyed the moment of being weirded out by realizing the significance of Rolan not objecting to the consideration of welcoming the nice necromancer.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    1. I try to not give more than half, and preferably only a third, of what’s going on in the excerpts. Plus you get to see the whole thing after I’ve edited it! Which often adds important little bits.

      And heh. Heh heh heh….

      (Rolan is having Thoughts about, Valdemar needs to remember that Good Is Not Nice.)

      Liked by 4 people

      Reply

      1. Okaaay, yes, not the same thing, but he is both nice and good to a number of people when the opportunity arises so I stand by my adjective for the time being. 😀

        Liked by 3 people

  7. Re: the usual lore of xianxia, almost everybody supposedly has a “spiritual root” or a “kind of body” that is oriented towards certain elements or types of cultivation. And that includes demon bodies/roots, ghost bodies/roots, celestial bodies/roots, totally non-magical bodies/roots, and so on. Blah blah blah geomancy blah astrology blah fate blah gods and clans blah.

    So if WWX was born with a ghost body or a ghost spiritual root, he would always have had the potential to cultivate resentful energy without harm, just like people with demonic roots/bodies could cultivate demonic stuff — even though exposure to resentment or demonic energy or ghosts would normally be Very Bad for one’s health, cultivation, survival, etc.

    And even if WWX is a rare sort of person, there would probably be others who would have the same rare type of body or type of spiritual root, and who could also learn his techniques.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

  8. Oh, echoing the Ghost Path vs inherently bad stuff, in the theme of “not all necromancers are bad” when one defines necromancer as magic-user who interacts with the dead– had a late night thought that there’s a BIG difference between using what is there, and creating a thing.
    Cannibalism– in emergencies, eating the dead, vs killing someone to eat them no matter how emergency it is.
    Stabbing people- to fix a problem with them, dangerous but very honorable; for recreational purposes, no.
    Dead-and-death-magic– dealing with what’s THERE, vs calling up the spirits of the dead, very justifiable division.
    (could do further division on the theme of summon/control spirits vs talk/ask them for stuff, like prayers to the saints, but doesn’t support the theme as well unless one goes into the dark energy warping the ghosts’ will, so you’re REALLY dragging on the Resentment not the ghost.)

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    1. *Nod* That’s what that bit with Talia and Rolan and “combing through a burnt village” last chapter was about. From the very first time Wei Wuxian brings it up, he never wants to add to the resentful energy. He just says, “well, it’s there – is there something we can do besides banishing it and the resentful ghost to oblivion?”

      I’m not sure, but I think that in canon, the only person whose spirit he deliberately summons back is Wen Ning. And from all we can tell, Wen Ning very badly wanted to come back and protect his people.

      Liked by 4 people

      Reply

      1. I’m trying to piece together a good guy necromancer… in a setting where your magic forms you… so this is *very* helpful.

        *******

        Ooof, now picturing Win Ning as the anime-or-saint-story classic where someone is alone, and falls– and the Person Who They Later Find Out Is Dead grabs their hand and drags them up where they’re supposed to be.

        Only mostly dead, after all….

        Liked by 5 people

      2. If it helps, think of crows, vultures, foxes, etc. All of them are scavengers, picking up what’s left after something bigger or natural disasters came through. If you have idiot warlords come crashing through your village… I could see a good-guy necromancer arising to deal with all the problems!

        Liked by 4 people

      1. ??

        If you’re asking about Nerf, that’s a brand of soft padded toys you can hit things (and often people 😉 with. Otherwise I’m not sure I understand your question. ^_^a

        Liked by 3 people

      1. *snorts good-naturedly* Not like it was difficult to guess – I literally had that damn intro playing through my head, the instant I saw the title!

        (And for added facepalming, the “main character” even has the same number of syllables in their name!)

        Liked by 3 people

      3. Unfortunately, APNSD is one of the very few iterations of the franchise that I actively hate – something that not even “13 Ghosts” or the second half/version of “Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo” were able to accomplish.

        (In a nutshell, I found the blatant and over-the-top Flanderization to be outright insulting, particularly when it came to certain characters.)

        Liked by 3 people

      5. I’m still trying to process the revelation that “Scooby Doo is really the Dobie Gillis show,” and that “Buffy is even more the Dobie Gillis show.” I never even watched the Dobie Gillis show, except by mistaken channelsurfing on occasion, so….

        Liked by 2 people

  11. I’m not sure I buy the Buffy narrative.

    Dobie and Scoobie make a bunch of sense.

    Dobie, per wiki, starts in highschool, then a brief stint in the Army, then university.

    Scoobie, some young adults with a van are driving around the country for some reason.

    So, together they make as good a backstory and situation for a party of adventurers as anything.

    Throwing a dog in makes more sense than a fifth human.

    Timing might be right for a Fall of Delta Green campaign. I think upstate New York might be the part of the Great Lakes Region closest to being in the traditional Lovecraft Country?

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  12. Lan Wangji has just been hit with realization after realization. And of course, he is still reeling from the last one when Wei Wuxian decides to say hello.

    I hope they both manage to mostly keep their feet out of their mouths and make themselves mostly understood during their conversation. I have no hope of no-foot-in-mouth disease or misunderstandings since LWJ isn’t the best communicator and in his own way neither is WWX.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s