Wei Wuxian Unknowingly Left A Headache Behind For The Jins

Wei Wuxian unknowingly left a headache behind for the Jins

I vaguely recall reading something about how the Greek’s made concrete(?) being unknown for so long. This real durable concrete and no one could make it.

Oh they had the recipe. They did have that! But it didn’t work.

Until someone used ocean water. They did not say it was ocean water because back then it was so obvious what you used, no one bothered noting it down.

I say this because I want everyone to consider this in regards to Wei Wuxian and the notes he left behind. Not only are they a chaotic mess – because he goes off on tangents about farming, Wen Qing being mean, A-Yuan being adorable, suddenly it’s all about Lan Wangji again wtf, and then there is the various doodles of both amazing art and insulting caricatures – Wei Wuxian only is writing for himself. He’s not making a cultivation manual, he’s making notes for himself, notes on his experiments, notes that tie into what he knows already. He’s personally improving his cultivation, not building a means to teach others.

So just imagine Xue Yang cursing as he tries to figure out why the ghost whistles – meant to either drive away or beckon ghosts, an improvement on the spirit-lure flags and meant specifically to help keep the Burial Mounds safe for the Wen Remnants – don’t work. He follows exactly what Wei Wuxian put down, makes them out of bamboo he carves himself and paints with the right characters in blood, and they still don’t work. Because to Wei Wuxian, living in the Burial Mounds it’s very obvious that he uses the bamboo that grows in the resentful energy rich Burial Mounds.

Or Jin Guangyao, trying to figure out how he made the Ghost General for the thousandth time and getting nowhere because no where does it specifically mention that part of it involved how Lan Wangji was there playing his guqin with spiritual energy and how that interacted in a fascinating fashion with the resentful energy to pull back Wen Ning’s mind after a lot of previous rituals and experiments. The closest it gets to noting that is the five page gush over Lan Wangji’s visit and the meal he shared with him alongside A-Yuan.

Mo Xuanyu keeps his position in Jin Sect in part because he can actually figure out a good chunk of Wei Wuxian’s notes and organize them into mostly useful forms. But even he sometimes struggles to figure out something left behind. Like the blood lock spell – that protects something from anyone who does not share your blood, something even more useful to Wei Wuxian as he’s an only child with no known living relatives – he tries multiple times, never getting it to work, and fails to realize the reason there is a doodle of the moon nearby is because it is the phase of the moon necessary for the ritual to work.

Just. Wei Wuxian, writing down personal experimentation notes, unknowingly driving the Jin Sect insane. And then when he returns he fails to understand what is the problem until Lan Wangji talks him through it and suddenly so much makes more sense.