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Wei Wuxian found the whole idea of soulmates and soulmarks odd. Having a soulmate was fairly rare and even if you did you might not ever find them. And the marks themselves? Ridiculously unhelpful. The mark represented an important milestone in your soulmate's life, true, but what the fates determined was important and what a person might consider significant weren't necessarily the same. Add in the fact you were born with the marks so the event they were reflecting could be five, ten or even fifty years from now? The result was that overall they were far less useful than they could be in helping determine anything.
In theory, interpretably matching marks or no, you were supposed to just 'know' when you met your soulmate. Somehow. If the master storytellers were to be believed, encountering your soulmate was a feeling akin to being hit by lightning or like diving into a warm lake, a million wondrous emotions coursing through your body all at once.
It wasn't that he thought the whole idea was completely made up whole cloth by people with more imagination than common sense, but he had his suspicions. Everyone knew someone who'd met someone who heard of two soulmates finding one another and becoming inseparable cultivation partners or how this sect or that one had risen to power due to being led by two soulmates. It was possible the stories were true. Unlikely, but possible. Vaguely possible.
He liked to think his parents had been soulmates and that was why the stalwart Wei Changze had left his sect, and close friend Jiang Fengmian, to elope with the wild, free spirited rogue cultivator Cangse Sanren but he had nothing to base that on other than a child's fanciful thinking. They died when he was so young they barely exist in his memories so it wasn't surprising he has no recollection of seeing soulmarks on either of them at all. Perhaps they simply just loved one another. If so, there was nothing wrong with that. Love was nothing to be scoffed at in his opinion. There was far too little of it in the world.
There were marks on his back that have been there as long as he could remember— two light lines across his right shoulder and a slightly darker, longer one, along his left. Shijie had seen them when she was helping clean and bandage some scrapes he'd gotten after tumbling off his sword the first time he tried to ride it and suggested they might be soulmarks, but he didn't think so. Besides, as there was no way to be certain until his soulmate touched them, he figured it didn't matter if they were or weren't. If someday he met someone who took his breath away and made him feel like he'd been both punched in the stomach and exploding with joy or whatever was supposed to happen then he'd deal with it, but until then? He tried not to think about it. Most of the time, he managed that.
Some days though, when Yu Ziyuan's barbs were more vicious than usual, he'd find himself wondering if they were soulmarks then why did they appear the way they did? Did they mirror scars on his soulmate's back? Did they represent something else? A magical tool? A spiritual weapon? Or, had he just fallen as a toddler or perhaps scraped himself trying to dodge feral dogs when he'd been on the streets?
There was a moment, when he first met Lan Wangji, one of the Twin Jades of Lan, outside the gates of Cloud Recesses that he thought he might have felt something stirring inside him that signaled that this was his soulmate. He was about to ask if Lan er-gongzi felt it too but then he and all the Jiangs were dismissed with a brusque, "No invitation. No entrance," and decided he must have been mistaken. It wasn't feelings heralding the finding of one's soulmate but rather annoyance, possibly a little indigestion, and definitely not anything soul related.
The spar on the rooftops later that night was pretty fun though.
As the months passed he began to reconsider. They spent quite a lot of time together and okay, a lot of it was due to Lan Zhan being the one to supervise him during the punishments Master Lan kept giving him but still, maybe his first impression hadn't been exactly correct. It was probably wrong to do so, but when Lan Zhan had passed out after drinking Wei Wuxian took a cursory look for scars or soulmarks. He wasn't sure if he was happy or sad to realize there were no marks on his back that might correspond to Wei Wuxian's own. There were, however, four light, paper thin lines on Lan Zhan's left forearm that bore all the signs of being soulmarks. Wei Wuxian had never been cut up like that and couldn't imagine a situation that would result in him receiving such scars, so he figured that meant they couldn't be soulmates.
At least knowing they didn't have mirroring marks made things easier since he didn't have to try to have broach the awkward 'hey, so we might be soulmates, can you touch my back so we can find out for sure?' conversation. It didn't mean they couldn't be friends though. Or maybe, eventually, be cultivation partners or even lovers. Being soulmates would have taken any relationship they had to another level entirely but it wasn't necessary. They could get along just fine without that being the case. For a while, anyway.
After the Burial Mounds, and the loss of his core, things between them changed. Although, to be fair, Wei Wuxian should have suspected that would happen. No longer able to cultivate normally, incapable of riding or properly wielding a sword, having to rely on tricks and talismans and the 'wicked' path… it was no wonder Lan Zhan looked at him with something akin to distaste and was no longer able to treat him the same. He tried to convince himself it didn't hurt. Sometimes he succeeded. Sometimes not.
When trying to do what was right caused everything to spiral out of control and the cultivating world turned against him he found himself glad he didn't have a soulmate, since it meant at least he wasn't dragging anyone down with him. Sure, there had been a moment there on that rainy pass when he and Lan Zhan came face to face as he was trying to lead the Wen to safety that he thought there might have been a spark of something that passed between them, but it was probably just disappointment. After all, he was breaking a ridiculous number of those rules that the Lan believed in, what else could it be?
At the end, dangling off the edge of the cliff as he stared into Lan Zhan's horrified eyes, it was only his surety that somewhere out there Lan Zhan's true soulmate was waiting for him that gave him the strength to tear himself free and let himself fall. With him gone maybe Lan Zhan would finally be able to find his true soulmate.
It was only when he woke up sixteen years later with four slashes from the sacrificing curse on his arm that he realized his mistake.