[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]

[dryly, focusing on the rocks in front of him]

Being eaten likewise lacks appeal.

[he's distracted for a moment by his goal for those stones, which I regret to say is:

- holding the first in his left hand and focusing as intently as he can on causing a reaction based on "I want to see as clear an example as possible of the general effect of this 'Orthodoxy' ability"
- holding the second in his right hand and focusing as intently as he can on causing a reaction based on "I want to see as clear an example as possible of the general effect of this 'Heresy' ability" also
- actually he's going to find a third similar rock and see what happens if he tries to do both at once also]

[laughitoff]

perhaps we would COOPERATE for a while if you fed yourself to us

[Orthodoxy makes the first rock glow faintly gold and look more like an Idealized Rock.

Heresy makes the second rock crumble.

There is new knowledge in him, as soon he activates both circles: The rules are different in a Palace, but these two kinds of powers are not meant to mix, back home. They are not compatible. Heresy damages the wellsprings of Orthodoxy. You can use them at the same time, but not without going mad, eventually.

He already knew this, but it's a grim reminder of #weiwuxianproblems in general.

Also the third rock crumbles, but stays held together by a golden glow as long as he's keeping both powers active.]

[strikingchords]

...

Was this the bargain Wei Ying made?

[soft. he's staring at the rocks.

he'll retrieve a piece of paper out of his sleeve, after another moment]

[laughitoff]

...

he gave us REVENGE, and he made himself OURS.

[strikingchords]

[still soft]

The dead cannot master the living.

He forgets, at times.

[he's going to write, at the top of the paper, Why is Wei Ying fading?, mark off a space for an answer, write "What does Wei Ying need to heal? underneath, mark off a space for that answer, and then focus Orthodoxy on it as strongly as he can manage, thinking about an ideal paper that will "provide helpful and relevant written guidance on the answers to these questions"

he has experience with this one]

[laughitoff]

[Why is Wei Ying fading?
The monster is taking over. Wei Ying has no knowledge of why.

What does Wei Ying need to heal?
Someone must gather the Treasures, open the door, and heal him, in whatever way is available to them.

The handwriting matches his own.]

[strikingchords]

["What are the Treasures?"

"How were they lost?"]

[laughitoff]

[What are the Treasures?
The blade of Orthodoxy and the seal of Heresy.

How were they lost?
Carelessness, foolishness, death.]

[strikingchords]

[...

one more:

"Are these answers based on Wei Ying's own understanding?"]

[laughitoff]

[Are these answers based on Wei Ying's own understanding?
Yes.

His Orthodoxy-bearing hand hurts deeply.]

[strikingchords]

[oh cool, interesting insight into how this works. he's going to take out another piece of paper, write "Lan Zhan scorns Wei Ying's failures" on it, and use Heresy to fucking destroy it. smears his hand through whatever crumbled ash is left, nuking it from memory

then he'll writes on the bottom of the first paper:

"Wei Ying is only human. A fate earned is not a fate deserved.
If all his efforts were foolish, would be proud to be called fool.

I wish him here.
I will find him."

then he will draw an array on the paper and concentrate very hard on using both Orthodoxy and his cultivation to send that whole Q&A to Wei Wuxian's shadow, wherever it is behind its door; he is expecting this to work like a sending talisman, so the goal he's envisioning is the paper catching on fire and crumbling in his hand, hopefully for its words to appear elsewhere.

he won't know if it was successful, of course, but he can hope.]

[laughitoff]

[The use of Heresy works as intended, and the pain in his Orthodoxy-bearing hand lessens.

The paper catches on fire and crumbles in his hand.

The Orthodoxy-bearing hand hurts deeply, again.]

[strikingchords]

[ow! that's fine for the moment though. he'll stand, picking the Ideal Rock up to weigh in his hand as he does. hmm.

is the collective huli jing still hanging around?]

[laughitoff]

[They're watching him greedily.]

[strikingchords]

...

[attaches a small bit of his own spiritual energy to the rock and tosses it out of the entrance to the cave, to see if anything outside stirs that he can see from here]

[laughitoff]

[There's the faintest ripple in the outdoor scenery, but it's one of the ghosts that eats the rock. Just unhinges its patchwork jaw and swallows it straight down.]

[strikingchords]

...





[exhales pointedly and goes to look at the blood pool.





okay yeah I'll just ask. is it the same blood pool that he remembers. anything weird going on with this pool o'blood, narration?]

[laughitoff]

[This could almost be a natural cave pool, and maybe it was once. Now all the water has been saturated with blood, and glows a dull, sickly red. There’s a mad tangle of talismans and twine all around it and dangling partially into it, which look to have snapped and fallen from the cave ceiling. Some sort of broken barrier…?

tl;dr it is absolutely the canon blood pool

There are flickering, strange presences darting and congregating thickly under the liquid.

His instincts don’t scream danger just looking down into the pool, but they do twinge. It’s risky to deal with whatever’s in there.]

[strikingchords]

[shifts into a dragon and wings up to the cave ceiling to look at the remains of that barrier more closely...]

[laughitoff]

[THAT'S METAL

They look like protection and suppression warding, not unlike when Wen Ning was being kept in there.]

[strikingchords]

[hangs onto the ceiling and flicks a pebble down into the blood to see what happens...]

[laughitoff]

[The flickery things cluster excitedly around where it fell in, but nothing more notable happens for now.]

[strikingchords]

[hmmmmmm.

he wants to know more, but he doesn't want to burn more Orthodoxy to ask.

...

two more questions, actually.

- is there still a partial protective effect remaining from what wards are left holding these blood pool buddies inside?
- he does remember the arrays used on Wen Ning. though Wei Wuxian's protective circles use different sources of energy, Lan Wangji obviously understands the principles behind warding in general really well.

out of curiosity, could he replicate what had previously been done before, or something with a similar effect, with his own cultivation?]

[laughitoff]

[There is still some energy in the ward talismans themselves, but they're useless with the barrier partially torn down like it is. They're kind of protecting a random section of air and ceiling right now?

He can replicate the work with his own cultivation.]

[strikingchords]

[cool cool cool.

he's going to hang onto the ceiling upside down, bite one of his own feet or the tip of his tail for blood now and then, and start working, in that case. :B

he will:
- incorporate the remaining talismans into the pattern as much as possible
- leave the protection circle very clearly open to additions or refinements by Wei Wuxian
- use Heresy to destroy anything that's nonfunctional and unable to be restored
- also use Heresy and/or his claws to score the main circle deeply into the ceiling, hopefully creating a permanent effect. refinements can be added on top, because he doesn't want to go too crazy on overusing Heresy or adding stuff Wei Wuxian can't change by his own will, but the goal is to use rock carving to make the big basic marker of "THIS IS THE DEFINED AREA WHERE THESE OTHER THINGS CAN TAKE EFFECT" be just part of the ceiling now. (a note: he WILL probably use Heresy enough to get to the point of pain, if it works as intended in this context.)

the open-ended style of his work here is not wholly like his typical cultivation but is pretty similar to how he was trying to so-carefully leave space for Wei Wuxian when he was augmenting Wei Wuxian's wards on the gravestones in Reverie--trying to say "we can work together rather than at cross purposes" through design rather than words, however successfully or unsuccessfully that message came across.]