[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

[laughitoff]

[Wen Qing did say that if he keeps taking time in this area when he already has what he needs in full, then whatever he does for any ghosts is not going to matter, because Wei Wuxian will fade out.

Anyway, if he's still going to go to the tiger monument with that knowledge, it's a huge tiger being swarmed by hundreds of smaller creatures and overwhelmed. The partying monsters in this area seem to like climbing on it and posing triumphantly. A banner which reads THE CONQUEROR dangles from its snarling, half-open jaws. He may notice that unlike its other teeth, one of its fangs is a gleaming gold.]

[strikingchords]

[he's going to try to move fast.

he'll start by using Heresy to attempt to dig a wide pit around the monument, as deep or deeper than the blood pool, leaving the statue on an island in the middle: it will at least be harder for monsters partying to reach it this way

(if it works as intended, there will be enough warning rumble for the monsters to notice this and get away instead of falling into a pit, at least)]

[laughitoff]

[Sure, there's now an inexplicable empty moat pit around this statue.]

[strikingchords]

[cool! with the monsters cleared off, hops over there to take the tooth.]

[laughitoff]

Your role in the final battle of the war starts small. Your undead troops defend you and the living cultivators on your side, uncomplaining meatshields. There's a few enemy cultivators in the vanguard of the Nightless City's defenses who fall in those first sallies, and you turn them against their fellows. But Wen Ruohan is wise to your tactics now, and those efforts get put down quickly.

Still. No one was prepared for what you'd do when, midway through the first night, your side breaches the outer wall. They didn't think you'd be able to reach through their wards so easily, and gain immediate access to the ancestral tombs and graveyards of the city. And maybe normally you couldn't, not so quick, not so brutally -- but you made a tool they didn't expect.

You hold up the Yin Tiger Seal. Power pulses out of it, and your sanity goes with it.

The battle took three days, you learn afterwards. You struggle to keep the dead turned only on killing your enemies, but that restriction makes less and less sense to you by the time you hit the shrouded sunrise of the second morning. You're pulling in vast quantities of resentful energy now, gathering it into yourself to push the Seal's range out farther and farther. Somewhere in there you stop having to grit your teeth to do it and it gets gleefully easy again.

For the first two days, you're laughing on the battlefield as your dead tear through, genuine joy as you see them fall on the enemy lines and break them. Every fire on the field is rotten green with resentful energy, and the terror of your allies is only outweighed by their desperation.

But the third day dawns, and everyone is flagging, and the Nightless City has not yet fallen. You're steeped so deeply in demonic cultivation by then that you hiss openly at the sunlight. You no longer feel human yourself. You feel hollow, your bones sucked dry of marrow and your blood replaced by screams and grudges. You stop trying to filter through the individual spirits' wants to direct them, and simply press down hard on their rage, driving them with it like a whip. Part of you goes with them, every time.

The Tiger Seal only goes quiescent again, when every enemy on the battlefield is dead. It's taken all your effort to ensure it is only every enemy, and not everyone.

When its power drains out of you, you believe yourself a corpse. You collapse into a pile of your fellow corpses, and stay there.

[strikingchords]

[shuddering, as that memory passes; forcing himself to look for the ghost...]

[laughitoff]

[A ghostly, already-undead Wen Ning sits slumped at the bottom of the pit.]

[strikingchords]

[oh buddy.

hops down there and uses Orthodoxy to restore him to... his usual, at least :(]

Wen Qionglin. My apologies.

Can you find your sister?

[laughitoff]

A-ah, Lan-gongzi, of course...

[strikingchords]

[offers him a hand up out of the inexplicable pit, if he'll take it :(]

[laughitoff]

[He will, and will go set out on his task unless Lan Wangji had more to say to him.]

[strikingchords]

[nah. reckoning time.]

[laughitoff]

[The stall the banner directs him to is hawking food, but probably not the kind he wants to eat. The horned bearlike beast manning it is doing a brisk business, taking coin and passing out long pieces of barbecued meats for other monsters to munch on. It's only when he gets closer that he can see that they're human legs, the feet and toes still attached.

A paper tag hanging off one of them catches his attention; an evil-attracting talisman.]

[strikingchords]

[he'll take it down...]

[laughitoff]

The Wen Sect were fools, to have taken over another sect's home. It makes it very easy to move around unseen, to send in spirits at points where they'll wreak the most havoc and create the most paranoia among the occupiers of their home. You can taste it as well as any of your attendant ghouls, even from where you hide in the forest beyond the town walls. The fear is rich, thick and heady -- the promise of a meal.

You find every ward talisman on the outer walls during the day, and slip in through doors they don't know about to get to the ones inside. It's the work of a moment to change each ward, a few strokes of your own blood making it into a tool to attract the malice of the dead rather than repelling it.

When you prowl closer and the spirits touch their nightmares that night, you can hear them screaming within the walls. You smile. That's your signal to beckon the gathering dead, and tell them to get to work.

You also tell them to get creative, in the way only vengeful ghosts can be.

It's over within the hour. There's no one to stop you as you stride through the halls of your childhood: all the people in the compound are dying, or already twisted in death, in a hundred different gruesome ways. You follow a particular set of screams that's still going strong, though: you saved this one for last.

Wang Lingjiao and Wen Chao are struggling on the ground. It's the latter who's squealing like a stuck pig, hands clasped to a spreading bloody spot between his legs. The former's gnawing on what she's bitten off him, even as tears stream down her face.

They're the only ones you take care of personally, that night. Wang Lingjiao finishes it dead. Wen Chao's bodyguard rescues him, but not before you've handed him a knife and made him cut into his own flesh, made him cram it into his own mouth and choke it down around his braying sobs. Not before you mocked him for needing it to be cooked, and made him use a heated lamp accordingly on his face. Not before you've grabbed his wrists and made him offer his hands up to one of your favorite ghosts, a furious little child who died of hunger.

Ah, revenge. You did warn them you'd come back.

[strikingchords]

[closes his eyes and schools his gorge down; it's not hard. he has practice.

opens them to look at whatever ghost this represents...]

[laughitoff]

[Three ghosts appear after that very special memory experience finishes. Wen Zhuliu, the bodyguard, has clearly been strangled, his eyes bulging and his face blue, and his head lolls on a broken neck. Wang Lingjiao's entire head is bruised and deformed, and some kind of wooden stake protrudes out of her mouth -- it's been forced down her throat. The third ghost is just fully unrecognizable as Wen Chao at this point, but his continued torture past the memory is pretty evident -- his legs have been fully flayed to the bone, the fingers of both hands are missing, and his face is raw, exposed flesh.]

[strikingchords]

[okay

if he just turns them all three to ash with Heresy, he'll have three Orthodoxies going into the next place. perfect.]

[laughitoff]

[They disperse into the breeze, and are gone.]

[strikingchords]

[it's honestly more respectful treatment than all three of them gave a lot of people Lan Wangji personally knew, so. there's that.

he'll head back through the corridor and central area and head left, now.]

[laughitoff]

[Left hall.]