@lanctiflora || Tainted Offering, Hollow Prayer. (Starter)
After your heart stops, your brain can persist for up to ten minutes. Normal men are granted the crooning mercy of a waiting room, the soft hushed welcome that blankets fear into nothingness before their body expires. For a cultivator, excess qi can be supplemented for oxygen, allowing a man to experience vividly the coming death that licks his nerves numb. Countless li away from the oceanside kingdom of Yunmeng lies their former second prince, eyes bloodshot and glossing by the second. Someone yanks out the blade that has bisected his heart and drags Wei Wuxian by the hair. He would come to regret not glancing over and seeing who exactly had slighted him, so he might haunt them as a vengeful ghost, but It’d been such a tiring year. Even his fearsome eyes can't bear to roll an inch more, stuck to a spot on the sky where light cracks from between soft clouds. He is waiting for a storm that does not come. Wei Wuxian dies under a clear and sunny sky.
Not everything that lurked within Binan Suo was dead, despite its rumor-given title of a ghost mound. Gui, yao, guai and mo. All combinations of orders gave uninformed labels to the men who shoved each colorful and sharp-toothed thing into some few boxes, missing completely the marvel of harmony they’d all managed to achieve. Refuge was once an old pit, say the beasts that crawled through Xinjiang border’s rich soil. Something had cleaved through the old city in its prime, rumors changed the culprit from calamity to god, all agreeing that the earth mixed with rubble and mercury so thoroughly that the land and its devastation became one. Like worms, the resentment-thick ruin became a paradise to all evil that hid in the gaps of air below stained earth, barging into beds and half torn kitchens that caused daily uproar over territory disputes. If they were grander things, larger and sharper, then the ambitious maggots might do as their nature asked but already there were too few shelters for the vulgar and filthy.
A century ago, Mount Tonglu shivers. From its cinnabar womb is born a man masked in simple bronze, delicate hands clean and pure, swathed in robes of ash. With no survivors, gossip relies on the minor ghosts who dared not enter too far. They speak of a horrible song with a melody so enchanting that the mountains themselves had been charmed, that the newest calamity did not play or hum a tune in his exit, that the lingering melody was the last obsessions of each spirit he had slain, too enchanted to recall anything else as their fires flickered and died. The soul twisting maestro of ash, hisses the wisest of cowards, a foul brute who domineered any opposing ghost, bending their unwilling bodies to break until they were broken themselves. He did not have to lift a finger.
A century ago, the Xinjiang Ruins found themselves hosting a man who introduced himself as Lian Ren. A decade later, a city blooms from sickly roots, bright and busy.
“You hear that crap ‘bout elders not showing respect to the kids at these things? The livin’ folk would just leave my kid’s body there! Too good to bring home their own sons!”
A child’s funeral is hardly a point for celebration, but each death within Binan Suo’s gates could be a point of jealousy. If there was one thing the town’s keeper excelled at, it was opulent rituals, laughing with a loose grip on fluttering joss papers that they have the coffers to spare. Today’s celebration is that a full week can be properly devoted to mourning and celebration; A short life is still a life lived, thus one worth honoring. The old ghost is given enough warmed liquor to forget about crying and every festive stranger intends to keep it that way.
“Yeah! And make sure not to dress ‘em in red! Wouldn’t want the little guy coming back as a ghost! HAH!”
Wine spills heavily at every opportunity, already dirtying the robes of the father, red-eyed and making a point to speak his humor towards his son. A small ghoul, the pair had arrived only a week ago with the son cold and muttering of a chasing wisp only he could see. “He’s beautiful,” the boy had murmured, “he’s telling me of his daughters.” The boy said very little after that and his body grew weaker and weaker until one sunrise revealed a cold body, as if his soul and flesh were cut. Most could sympathize with such a tragedy, pulling the father into a crowd as thick in cackles as it was in broken cups.
The master of Refuge is masked and clothed in black, lounging against a tree trunk a li from his city. He lowers his arm enough that the accompanying slender-necked ghost can refill the bronze zhi held carelessly between calloused fingers.
Wei Wuxian had no need to learn of each wedding or funeral but the manner of the boy’s death did not come to his attention until a coffin was commissioned, sending him on a private hunt, tugged along by intrigue and a strange guilt that his warding talismans did not hinder the unwelcome entry. Thinking it might be a variant of a reverend of empty words, Wuxian repaints the alarm seals by Wu time, grabs an assistant, gives his personal condolences, and leaves for the forest by Shen time. Dressed in light grey robes, he hums softly, beckoning the forest's spirits to color and rise.
"My condolences for interrupting your rest, I have to ask, does this story seem familiar? A man rides through the forest with his son, who begins to tell of a chasing wisp..."
