ok actual ghost king xie lian hours now.
xie lian dies in that coffin, fully and wholly. repeated deaths wear his body down to the point where even the curse shackles cant bring him back.
his ghost body, that of a wrath, looks divine. his clothes are simple and white, golden stitching and patterns barely visible.
his fingers, once worn out, having repeatedly fallen off in his attempted escapes, are now made of gold.
all of his scars are filled with gold, in fact.
the hole through his chest, directly piercing his heart, flows over with gold and spreads out around his torso like shattered ceramic.
the flesh once covered by the cursed shackles is a line of gold, cracks flourishing like vines, under his jaw and up to his cheeks and eyes like tear tracks.
his lips once chapped and torn and bitten now shine gold under the sunlight.
his ears are pointed and he finds joy in wearing jewelry that jingle when he walks.
his red blood is now golden.
he makes his lair overtop of his grave, a cave that was only barely passable as a yong'an mausoleum, with no visible markers that anyone was buried there.
the blood from his hundred year burial infected the land around him for miles, and now its just as much his own as ruoye or fangxin. it listens and responds to him, and he can feel it move.
he still travels, but now he has somewhere to return to, and with his luck returned to normal, things are mostly fine.
instead he hosts markets in order to find cursed goods and keep them out of the hands of mortals. his lair is filled with so many cursed objects.
when he becomes a calamity, his motivation is to keep others from stumbling upon his lair and becoming hurt. as soon as he's out of the kiln he dissolves into gold dust and glitter, teleporting right back to his den and confusing the officials sent to observe him.
he still finds his human disguise being involved in the conflict between banyue and yong'an, and becoming general hua xie, and "dying" that same death.
his third ascension happens after he deals with a particularly nasty curse, he ascends in his human disguise which is basically just canon him. he gains the title as the martial god of curses and spells, which is quite accurate but he can't exactly tell people that he's been studying weird objects for centuries now can he? no one knows that he's the calamity known as White Gold Gathers...
