Wu Ming Loving Hours
~featherpoet @ AO3~

Endnotes and Sources

Endnotes: an Intro

Welcome to the endnotes for the Wu Ming Loving Hours!! This will be part bibliography and part “L explains their choices for various decisions”. It's completely optional and unnecessary to read, so if extensive endnotes aren't your jam, then that's fine! Go be free! :)

I’m building off of the characters I wrote in To Love a God for this fic, so you can assume that all the same backstory events carried into this fic.

The header art was drawn by the inimitable Morf! Find the whole triptych here!

Thanks so much for reading! You can find me on AO3 and twitter.
I wish you a lovely WuLian morning, evening, afternoon, or night! :)

Names

The first thing to address is fairly obvious: Wu Ming’s name. Thank you all for sticking through ~5k words of narration by an unnamed character! I really wanted to use Wu Ming’s name in the narration for the majority of the fic and there really wasn’t another way to make that transition seamlessly. The awkwardness is really just a byproduct of the writing’s third-person-limited POV; for Wu Ming, it would be completely undisruptive to not have a name he particularly cared about. He would just think of himself as “I” and move along. Bear in mind that these interactions with Xie Lian are the first time he ever really talks to anyone. He has a slur of a name from his estranged (and now deceased) father, but that’s it.

“But what about San Lang?” the imaginary reader in my head asks. This is fair, imaginary reader. I did write all the narration of To Love a God using this name, after all, and I did just say that the stories were connected. So what gives? Well, there wasn’t a single person in the entire fic who ever referred to him by an actual name, so the use of this name was more of a metanarrative signal to We the Readers that it was, in fact, the same character we know and love. If you want to headcanon that he’s the third child in that household, you can. I personally prefer the headcanon that San Lang was an invented name referring to being in his third life cycle when he finally caught up with Xie Lian in the early chapters of TGCF, but this is purely my personal preference and shouldn’t affect your reading! To me, it’s incongruous that such a hateful family would have such a normal-sounding or even endearing name for someone they saw as a demon child, and equally incongruous that San Lang would still have any attachment to that title 800 years later even if it had existed. It seems more likely to me that he just created some excuse to trick Xie Lian into calling him “darling” just like he managed to establish “Gege” as an acceptable endearment! Sneaky Xueyu Tanhua, you~ ;D Regarding the reasons behind San Lang’s name, even MXTX was vague about this in one of her interviews, and I felt that it would be inappropriate to pin it down arbitrarily in my own writing.

This brings me back to the Wu Ming Loving Hours. Actually, my first draft of this story did continue to use the same subliminal San Lang that I used in To Love a God. But I ran into trouble pretty early into the divergent part of the story for a reason that is, retrospectively, pretty obvious: he actually talks to people in this fic! And Xie Lian cares about him! Of course he would need a name, and I just wasn’t comfortable caving to the same “Well you see, Gege, there are three people in my family” explanation that he used in the novel. So I had three basic choices:

1.) stick to using ‘San Lang’ in the narrative and ‘Wu Ming’ in the dialogue, just like the novel does with ‘Hua Cheng’ and ‘San Lang’;
2.) carry over my subliminal ‘San Lang’ and change to ‘Wu Ming’ after he receives that name from Xie Lian; or
3.) endure a few thousand words of namelessness before ‘Wu Ming’ is finally adopted.

The problem with the first option is that at least ‘Hua Cheng’ and ‘San Lang’ were both his actual names in the novel, and some characters did refer to him as ‘Hua Cheng’ even though Xie Lian didn’t. In my story, ‘San Lang’ isn’t a real name, but by juxtaposing it with ‘Wu Ming’, it’s implied that it is.

The problem with the second option is a more extreme version of the problem with the second. In this version, not only are they juxtaposed, but they’re both brought into the same plane: the narration. It lends even more authority to the ‘San Lang’ and was thus even less feasible of a choice for me.

And that left only the third option. It was with heaviness in my heart that I removed as many named references as possible and used ‘the boy’ as sparingly as I could. Really, thank you for enduring it. 3000 lanterns to you all. I hope it was worth it to read about a version of our beloved Hua Hua who is based in the same canonical roots but developed into a completely different person as a result of the canon break. I thought it would be really nice if that character got to keep a new name from all his other versions and timelines!

Next: Lu Xinhui’s name. This name is written as 盧欣慧 (Lú Xīnhuì) and translates roughly to “joyous intelligence”. I wanted to give her a name that was compatible with her personality – full of laughter, cunning, and competence in equal parts. I’m not a native speaker, so I did my best to double-check this name against resources and real historical people in the hopes that the tones would sound natural in this combination. I think it’s equally possible that she was given this name in her human lifetime or that she chose it for herself when she became a ghost.

Bodies and What Happens to Them

(((Content Warning for this section: discussions of dead bodies and decay)))

The text of TGCF does suggest that the bodies on the battlefield were brittle bones (Xie Lian tramples them when he arrives there as the White-Clothed Calamity) but I wanted to double-check that for myself. The short version is that yes, it's reasonable based on the passage of time and the way decomposition works.

To show my work a little, let’s start with the timeline. Book 4 starts within one or two weeks of Xie Lian’s banishment. The final battle where Wu Ming died happened in that time break, and they meet as banished god and ghost fire on the night of the Zhongyuan Festival. That’s held on the 15th day of the 7th month of the lunar calendar, which places it at roughly early autumn. To use a concrete example, Zhongyuan in 2020 is September 2nd. Tracking forward to each major event in Book 4, Xie Lian’s graveyard drinking happens in mid-December, his run-in with the 33 heavenly officials at the spiritual site in the mountains happens in early March, and his torture in the broken temple happened in mid-April. He then took two months to heal enough that he could descend the mountain and go back to Feng Xin and his parents, bringing us right up to mid-June as the time that Wu Ming would have returned to the Imperial City to collect his remains.

Then, I read a paper called The Effects of Sun and Shade on the Early Stages of Human Decomposition by Carrie Srnka of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The relevant section for the purposes of this fic is actually quite early in the paper, in the literature review where the various stages are outlined and roughly placed on a timeline. There is quite a lot of wiggle room here! Much depends on the conditions the bodies are kept in, the amount of exposure levels, etc. But since the early decay would have happened after peak summer, I’ve concluded that the bodies would in fact progress normally through the decomposition process (instead of becoming desiccated), and enough time had passed (about 8/10 of a year, which is 9.5 months or ~290 days) to reasonably expect that the “dry” period of decay had been reached. All this to say that yes, Wu Ming would be dealing with bones, not flesh, when he finally returned to his remains.

Carrying on with this theme: cremation and the creation of diamonds from human ashes. These were both topics that I had to research in a modern setting and then heavily adapt to fit the technology and resources that were available to WuLian in the abandoned Imperial City. I took lots of liberties here, but hopefully it was still an immersive and plausibly believable experience for you! I seriously envy MXTX’s ability to just present us with a forged ring and leave it at that!!! T^T

So, the cremation process is fairly straightforward. Remains + fire between 1400~2000°F / 760~1100°C for 1.5~2 hours. Then you grind what’s left. A normal campfire can reach 1650°F / 900°C in the continuous flame region. A forge fire could be stoked to a much higher temperature than that; steel can require as high as 2400°F / 1300°C. Since Wu Ming’s ashes were not burned in the continuous flame region, but rather were removed by a sort of shelf that the flames licked around, these higher temperatures would probably have been necessary.

This shelf is not a thing as far as I'm aware! I made it up. I had two reasons for using the shelf to separate the remains from the fire. The first one has to do with the mechanics of ghost ashes. Some amount of ash from a different source is inevitable, since the remains were burned in a wooden box, but I wanted to minimize that as much as possible. The ash from the firewood, for instance, was something I felt could be avoided. The second reason for avoiding that interference was simply to do with volume. All of these ashes have to end up packed into one ring, and if the quantity is too bloated with wood ash, that would be harder and harder to believe. Because Wu Ming wasn't dealing with flesh by the time he got around to doing all this, it would be a much smaller volume than modern cremations performed closely after death.

That brings me to the crystal forging process. In the modern world, we can create diamonds by synthetically applying massive amounts of pressure to human ashes over a long period of time. Carbon then does what it does and eventually you get diamonds. Generally, this process produces more than one gemstone (this doesn’t seem to be strictly necessary, but perhaps it’s more practical for this industry so multiple people can share the remains), and they would then shape, cut, and polish them the same way that other gemstones are usually prepared. You can already spot a few problems, I’m sure. Fancy modern compression technology – doesn’t exist. A process which results in multiple gemstones – nope, it’s only one. Shaving away parts of the final product – yikes!! Ghost remains are important! We can’t just cut out huge swaths of them for aesthetic reasons and expect things to be fine!

For all those reasons, I had to do my best to simulate what this might have looked like in the context of their world. Wu Ming wanted a ring, but even if I translated our modern ring-making processes, that still isn’t truly viable because sticking a cylinder on a lathe and carving out the center just presents a variation on the same carving problem as before. This process needed to create something that was as close as possible to the final result. If you suspend your disbelief enough that only the roughest edges were smoothed down at the end and that that was still fine for the integrity of the remains, then the welded-on ring mold is perhaps the best possible solution out of everything I considered. Then, all the pressure comes from our resident Strong Guys adjusting (and sometimes replacing) clamps and belts and cords. This whole process takes a few weeks, so I’ve given WuLian flexibly three weeks to a month of chill time while this is all going down.

Qixi Festival

Qixi (七夕) is an annual festival celebrating the reunion of two lovers, Niulang and Zhinü, who live in the sky on opposite sides of the Milky Way. I took plenty of liberties with the ghost city's celebration, but it's rooted in real practices.