[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]

You're frozen on your bed, unable to move a muscle after Wen Qing stabbed you in your acupoints. "We've come to a conclusion," she says.

Her undead brother rises to his feet -- he'd been ready to hold you down, in case his sister's paralysis didn't take at once, you realize. "Sister and I have decided. We’ll be going to Koi Tower to give ourselves up.”

“Give yourselves up?” Shock joins your fear. They can't-- “What are you going to do? Apologize? Surrender?”

Wen Qing rubs her reddening eyes, but her expression is calm. “Yes, more or less. The Jin sect wants an answer for the death of their heir. The only acceptable one is to hand over the two leaders of our sect's remnants -- us. That should settle matters."

“You can shut the fuck up! It’s already chaos as it is! Both of you stop adding trouble to the pile. Give yourselves up, my ass. Did I tell you to do this? Take it out!”

She's watching you struggle, calmly answering your protests with logic, as your rage and fear gives way to something hollow and cold. They can't do this. They can't pay for your mistake like this.

At last, she says, “That’s right. They didn’t ask you for proof you were the one who did it. They straight-up prepared to kill you. Do you understand now? They don’t need any proof, and they don't need you to find the truth. Whether you present those or not, it doesn't matter. You’re the Yiling Patriarch, the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. You specialize in dark curses, so it wouldn’t even be strange if you didn’t have curse marks on you. On top of that, you didn’t have to do it yourself. You could’ve gotten Wen-dogs, your slaves, to do it for you. It’s you no matter what. You won’t be able to deny it.”

You curse, try to rise again, to pull out the needle, to do anything, anything. They wait once more.

“But, but--” But you have no excuse to follow that with; no good reasoning to counter Wen Qing's merciless logic. You settle for, “But even then, I should be the one going, not you. I was the one who made corpses kill the people, who lost control of Wen Ning. Why should the knife go instead of the murderer?”

“Isn’t it better this way?”

“Better than what?!”

She is so calm. “Wei Ying, we both know. Wen Ning is a knife, a knife that scares them, but also a knife that they use as an excuse to attack you. If we go, they’ll no longer have an excuse. This entire thing might finally blow over.”

You finally understand why your brother acts the way he does, why he always says that you have a hero complex, why he always looks like he's restraining himself from striking you. Watching others take the responsibility onto their shoulders no matter what, insisting on bearing all of the negative consequences, to be unable to stop them--it's unbearable! Detestable!

Once you run out of arguments, Wen Qing looks soberly into your face, then reaches out and flicks her finger against your forehead. “I’ve said what I had to say, explained things, and said farewell. Goodbye.”

“No…”

“I’ve never really said such things to you before. But now that it’s come to this, there are indeed things I should say before I lose the chance."

“...shut up...let me go..."

“I’m sorry. And, thank you.”

You will lie paralyzed for the next three days, as they go to their doom.

[strikingchords]

[nailed it.

takes a deep breath, lets it out...

is the ghost Wen Qing?]

[laughitoff]

[Yes. She appears standing in the inn doorway, unperturbed by the monster traffic going through her. There's a clean red line cut all around her neck, blood spilling down to dye the white part of her robes red.]

[strikingchords]

[...what's inside this inn...]

[laughitoff]

[Just looks like a regular-ass inn except it's full of monsters.]

[strikingchords]

[whew. disappears another unoccupied chair, ignoring the monsters, and then repeats the same process as he's used on Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan on this ghost.]

[laughitoff]

[Undead Wen Qing...immediately moves herself out of the doorway before monsters can ram into her, giving him a sharp look.]

[strikingchords]

[bows to her, too. I'm assuming monsters probably aren't running into him because he's standing there looking like such a bad idea to run into.]

[laughitoff]

[None of them have noticed him since he came into the village, but they can still make physical contact, so he probably has some bumping into him and moving around him in this crowded of a space, actually. Whatever, they're moving away from it a bit.

She returns the bow with a degree of caution.]

[strikingchords]

Wen Qing.

[laughitoff]

Hanguang-Jun.

[strikingchords]

...

[watches her steadily; he has little to say to her. he tried, once, to defend her to the sects. it did not work.]

Is there any way I can be of service to your memory, here?

[laughitoff]

Go save that stupid man.

[strikingchords]

[nods]

Do not hesitate to advise me further.

[laughitoff]

What better advice can I give you? You have what you need from here, get out. If he stays around, people can help him from outside; if he goes, nothing will help at all.

[strikingchords]

[inclines his head, acknowledging]

Please find young Madam Jin and her husband. I will return shortly.

[laughitoff]

All right.

[strikingchords]

[he may have enough pieces to restore the Tiger Seal even without whatever Wen Qing might carry, but he can't just leave these ghosts frozen, either. tiger time...]

[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.]