[PALACE GAME - LAN WANGJI RUN]

[laughitoff]

Everything is red. You are dying, somewhere far beyond pain, the very essence of yourself going to pieces. You’re shattering so badly you don’t know if you’ll ever find all of yourself again, if you’ll ever put yourself back together. There are teeth on you, ripping, tearing, devouring. There are teeth inside you, carving their way out, and those are worse.

This is a memory, happening at a remove. It is not yours. This is not happening now.

Everything is grey. You wake up in a prison cell, eyes wide, the ceiling flat and blank and unfamiliar above you. For a moment you simply think, no. You think, Please, wasn’t it over? Wasn’t it enough? You consider closing your eyes again and refusing to get up, until oblivion reclaims you. Even if you’re no longer dying, everything hurts.

This is a memory, happening at a remove. It is not yours. This is not happening now.

What is happening, then?

You–

–sit up.

Comments

[strikingchords]

[bows his head and tucks the bunny under his arm to get up and hang the bell over the cage lock, with the other one. they look pretty together.

he'll return to his previous spot by the bed and consider for a while, then use Orthodoxy on the gold orb pieces as well, to repair it]

[laughitoff]

[They reform into a gold sphere. However, even under the use of Orthodoxy, none of the cracks between the numerous tiny pieces disappear, and there are mny holes where some are missing. This object, and the memory in it, is badly damaged.]

[strikingchords]

[does it give him anything more solid than he got in the fox's stomach when he rests his hand on it?]

[laughitoff]

[It is incredibly patchy and filled with blackout spaces, but he will get at least the gist of this:

Wen Qing thrusts the drugged cloth into Jiang Cheng's face. He and Wen Ning hurry forward to help catch him as he topples forward, a dead weight. They hustle him into the cave, settling him as comfortably as possible. Wen Qing gestures sharply to Wei Wuxian, and he nods, getting down and lying flat on his back next to his brother. He tries not to shiver; the cave is cool, with his torso bared to the air.

In any other circumstance, he'd be talking, but he and Wen Ning need to be quiet in case Jiang Cheng isn't drugged so strongly as they thought. In any other circumstance, he'd be eagerly watching Wen Qing's preparations -- this is a new procedure, after all, it's still damned interesting no matter how you slice it -- but her needles hit his pressure points, spreading numbness through him.

"We've got a little time," she says, low. "I'll see if we can't do it with you unconscious, first."

He smiles at her.

...

She can't do it with him unconscious. She tries to make it quick, instead, but finds she can't do that either, for fear of destroying what she's removing from his lower belly to give to his brother instead. Wen Ning holds him down once Wen Qing takes out the needles keeping him still and sedated.

He loses track of everything but the pain, bright and singing agony like nothing he's ever known, and the feeling of cold trickling up from the tips of his extremities and up his limbs, slowly pooling in his chest as Wen Qing concentrates all his spiritual energy in his core. All the power he's built up since he was a beginning disciple, the pride of a cultivator, is taken; the flow of energy in his body slowly smooths into a dead, stagnant pool. The light pressing against his open eyes brightens once, darkens once.

Is he dying, after all? It feels like it. He doesn't regret it, but he is afraid.]

[strikingchords]

[





hey what the FUCK]

[laughitoff]

[Yeah, what the fuck.

In the wake of viewing the memory, the orb glows with a faint, flickering gold light.]

[strikingchords]

[it's taking all his training not to hyperventilate right now. cool cool cool cool cool

it's enough to identify the fragment of pain he got from the steam as part of this, he thinks feverishly; that means that the rest is...

...

he'll use Orthodoxy to restore the other and put his hand on it before he can think about any of this too hard]

[laughitoff]

[It reforms into an equally damaged red star.

The memory within is very long and garbled and full of blackouts as well, too much so to make one contiguous experience. However, in summary, what Lan Wangji can make out, can relive in brief broken flashes, is this:

Wei Wuxian was thrown into the Burial Mounds, an enormous mass graveyard so intensely corrupted with the resentful energy of the dead that it spelled certain death for anyone who entered. As Lan Wangji knows from the memory he received when he entered the fox, he was in terrible shape on arrival, and in no shape to defend himself the way he might normally be able to. For lack of other food he ate the dead; for lack of other drink he drank death-corrupted water where he found it. He was desperate to find a way out and take revenge on the ones who had put him there. Morality lost all meaning; humanity lost all meaning; time lost all meaning.

He came to the edge of death regardless, but death in the Burial Mounds has a life of its own, and it resonated with his desire, and kept him on that edge instead of letting him fall all the way over. In that state, still without other reasources, he reached for the energy of the place and tried to master it. It was a long and horrific process -- Lan Wangji gets the very definite knowledge that resentful energy is painful to the body and corrosive to the mind -- but he was able to get it under control enough to make his way out and escape, with some of the ghosts of the place in tow.

He lived by his own willpower, but only because it let him, because he was able to promise it things which appealed: revenge, ruin, feeding. And his connection to it remained even when he left, and would for the remainder of his life.]

[strikingchords]

[he's just going to put his hands over his face and stay that way for a while with a bunny in his lap, thanks]

[laughitoff]

[Thank god he made himself a bunny, honestly.]

[strikingchords]

[he'll take his hands away and pet it again, eventually. his eyes are dry. it would take someone with a discerning eye to read the expression on his face.

he puts the bunny back after a few more minutes of petting and heads to the front of the cavern again; are the ghosts returned to full activity?]

[laughitoff]

[The ghosts are clustered around the crumpled fox in a desultory sort of way.]

[strikingchords]

[all right. he'll make a second hole in the ground with three uses of Heresy just outside the entrance of the cave, then: once to create a new protection circle etched into the ground, another to carve away a slab of stone, another to make the space underneath it. he marks this stone Pain with Bichen's edge. you could read it as either another grave, or a safe with a label.

places the two memories down there and covers them up again. he might put the sword there later too; he's still deciding.

assuming all that goes fine, he'll head back inside and move to go through the right door.]

[laughitoff]

[Right hall.]