Xichen left, his intervention a gentle lie meant to offer solace. He did not know that Wangji would do the opposite of what he was told.
He never did. He probably never would.
Never did?
Lan Wangji watched his brother's retreating back for a moment, then turned and took the hidden, moss-slick path that led away from the Jingshi, away from rest, and back toward the lonely hillside. He moved with a fluid silence that felt less like Gusu Lan discipline and more like the stealth of a thief.
His rebellious heart had finally ensnared him, its threads pulling taut. The decision was made. He would prepare. He would do it.
Tonight.
Even as his heart hammered against his ribs with a violence he had never known—not in battle, not in fear—his resolve was a cold, hard stone in his gut. Hidden beneath a borrowed, nondescript black cloak that swallowed his pristine white robes, he felt the rules of a lifetime crack and shatter beneath his boots with every step. The sound was silent but deafening in his mind, like walking over a frozen lake as it splintered.
He would exhume Wei Ying's bones. The ritual would commence. Tonight. In the secret chamber he had constructed beneath the Jingshi's floorboards, a space born of a hope he had never dared name until now. When the Cloud Recesses fell into its deepest, rule-enforced silence, his blasphemy would begin.
A hysterical thought bubbled up: digging a grave was not the work of a normal man. But then, nothing about this was normal. A sharper, angrier thought silenced it:
'Was what they did to him the work of normal men?'
The question was a blade, cutting through the creeping guilt. It left behind a clean, cold purpose.
Fear and a terrifying, electric excitement coiled together in his chest. He would bring him back. That drunken, laughing youth would once again sprawl across his desk, stealing his brushes, ruining his concentration. He would draw foolish pictures again, and this time, Wangji would not throw them away. He would fold them carefully and place them in a box.
'He saw I did not help him. Will he forgive me for this?'
'What explanation will I give if they suspect?'
'Will it work? The texts are incomplete. It is not a soul-for-a-soul sacrifice, but a call into the void…'
'No one must enter my room after tonight.'
'I am capable. I am the Second Jade of Gusu Lan. Nothing will go wrong.'
The torrent of thoughts devoured him as he moved through the outskirts of Caiyi Town. People passed him, a figure in a dark hood, and gave him only a cursory glance. Who is that, walking like a ghost? their eyes seemed to ask before dismissing him.
He stopped at the foot of the lonely mound. His gaze was analytical, scanning the terrain, calculating angles of approach and concealment. No one visited, but a watchman made occasional rounds. His throat tightened. He swallowed hard, the sound loud in his own ears.
Slowly, he knelt. He marked his spot. From within his robes, he drew a short, sturdy digging tool.
Come back, Wei Ying.
He drove the tool into the earth with a force born of thirteen years of anguished silence. The impact juddered up his arm, old wounds in his shoulder singing a sharp protest. His jaw clenched, teeth grinding.
You have to, he thought, the command aimed as much at the corpse as at his own failing courage.
The ancient, packed soil gave way. He glanced left, then right, movements sharp and furtive. With a frustrated huff, he hitched up his wide, white sleeve, impatient with the impractical elegance of his own clothes. It will be stained. They will ask questions.
He did not dig a wide pit, but a narrow, deep channel, just enough to reach the remains. Efficiency over thoroughness. Risk management, even in heresy. His hand trembled as he reached into the cold, dark cavity, the chill of the earth seeping into his bones.
His spirit nearly fled his body when his fingers brushed not dirt, but the coarse, rotten weave of fabric. Wei Ying's robes.
He pushed deeper, his touch ghosting over what lay beneath. His fingertips traced a long, smooth curve. A radius. An ulna. An arm.
The bones were separate. Good. It would make extraction easier.
He grasped the fabric and gave a firm, sharp tug.
A soft, gritty shuffle answered him—the sound of bones shifting in a long-forgotten bed.
Gently, almost reverently, he lifted the first bone free. It was a forearm, light and brittle. He brushed the cold, clinging soil from it with his thumb, his golden eyes softening for a fleeting second before the hard light of his mission snapped back into place.
From his sash, he produced a spirit-trapping pouch, its spatial magic more than ample for this grim harvest. One by one, he placed the bones inside with meticulous care. A rib. A vertebra. A femur.
Finally, he reached for the skull.
He lifted it with both hands, cradling it. He stared into the empty sockets where those storm-grey eyes, full of laughter and lightning, had once blazed.
He missed them. Terribly.
With swift, efficient motions, he pushed the displaced earth back into the hole, smoothing the surface to leave minimal trace. His attention returned to the skull in his hands. He brushed a last bit of dirt from its temple, the gesture tender, as if tending to a sleeping child.
On an impulse that bypassed all reason, he drew the skull close, pressing it against the spot over his own silent, frantic heart. As if the silent calcium could hear the drumbeat that now felt like a lie.
Dust from the bones smudged rusty brown across the white silk over his chest. For the first time in his life, he did not care. The fastidious disciple who abhorred disorder was buried with the rules he now spurned. The tremor in his foundation was now visible in the hard, desperate set of his jaw.
He froze.
A footstep. Crunching on gravel. Behind him.
Someone was here.
His mind cleared of everything but instinct. In one fluid motion, he tucked the skull into the pouch and sealed it. Before the intruder could round the bend in the path, he was gone, a streak of shadow using the peerless Gusu Lan footwork for a purpose its founders never imagined.
"Who's there?!" a man's voice barked. The watchman, a half-eaten bun in his hand, peered around the gravesite.
Silence. Only the wind sighing through the dry bushes.
"Must've been the wind," the man muttered, shaking his head before ambling away.
Lan Wangji stood pressed against the cold stone of a garden wall on the opposite side, concealed by a thicket. The pouch was a heavy, secret weight against his ribs. When the danger passed, he stepped out, adjusting his cloak, and walked away with a deliberate, unhurried pace that belonged to a man with nothing to hide. No one looked twice.
He slipped back into the Jingshi like a secret, the door closing behind him with a final, quiet click. He was safe. For now. Xichen believed him on a night-hunt; no one would disturb him.
In the hushed solitude, his frantic energy focused into a chilling precision. He had a list. He began.
First, the bones. He opened the hidden panel in the floor, revealing the small, warded chamber below. He placed the spirit pouch inside as if laying down a sacred relic, securing it with layers of silencing and masking talismans. It was not bones he protected, but the shattered possibility of a future.
Next, he gathered the other components. The scrap of old black robe, kept like a holy relic. A new, vibrant red hair ribbon, purchased years ago and never used. A bowl filled with the dark, congealed blood of a slain yao beast—the required sacrifice.
In the center of the bare chamber floor, he drew the complex array with the blood, his hand steady, each line and character perfect. He placed Wei Ying's tattered robe scrap in the center, arranging the bones from the pouch atop it in a crude approximation of a skeleton. Lastly, he laid the new red ribbon across where the neck would be.
He stepped back, surveying his work. The array pulsed with a faint, ominous glow in the dim light.
Everything was ready. Now, he had only to wait for the deepest hour of the night.
The waiting felt like an eternity carved from ice and dread.