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For the longest time, he doesn't even feel the cold and damp, as if he's already left his body behind. Lan Wangji, Second Young Master of Lan, thinks about death like he's already a ghost. He has a lot of time, here in this cave, where his heart had once started beating. The scripture of Lan is laid out on the altar as a reminder of his duties, but all he can see is the way Wei Ying knelt right there and promised an old woman to undo her mistakes.
Wei Ying was too good for them.
Anger builds inside him and he wants to scream. He doesn't. He's a ghost.
Wei Ying would try to find a way out, but Wei Ying isn't here.
Wei Ying isn't anywhere anymore.
The thought doesn't hurt, because the truth of it is so all-encompassing that Lan Wangji feels it in every breath, yearns with every moment of every day to join him. He thinks about it a lot. What it would feel like to take Bichen to the heart. He doesn't have Bichen, but he could easily drown in a puddle if he set his mind to it.
If he really wanted, he could lock his core and starve to death.
He doesn't. He thinks about it a lot.
What keeps him in this world isn't love or duty.
It's rage.
Unspeakable incandescent rage that burns wildly through him like Wei Ying cut through armies with his terrible demonic power. Even fighting the corruption of evil spirits and abusing the bodies of the dead, Wei Ying had more decency, more honor and courage, than all of the so-called heroes of the war put together.
He thinks about death a lot, but more often than even that, he thinks about justice. He thinks about finding Suibian and ramming it into Jiang Wanyin's treacherous heart. He thinks about burning Carp Tower to the ground and salting the earth it stood on. He thinks about the elders of his own clan daring to stand with his enemies, desperate to plunder Wei Ying's legacy.
He burns with the knowledge that he is a vengeful ghost. He is what they all feared Wei Ying would become.
Lan Wangji will be his ghost.
Because, somehow, against all expectations, Wei Ying's spirit does not roam these lands. The power of all the clans can not locate him, no amount of inquiry can find him. Wei Ying is gone so completely, he may as well have never existed at all.
Lan Wangji's hands shake, but not from the cold. Ghosts can't feel cold.
There is ice on his breath, clinging to his knuckles and creeping up to his eyes. He's crying crystal tears that never hit the ground. The cave is so empty, he can hear his own heart beat. This is good, it means that time is passing, and he will once again be free, and when that happens, he will exact precise and calculated vengeance. Nothing like what Wei Ying did to Wen Chao, who died begging. Lan Wangji does not care about closure. He will simply bring balance to a world that no longer has Wei Ying in it.
In these moments, here in the cave where Wei Ying and he were once so intimately connected, he does not think of A-Yuan or his brother, the only two embers of warmth in his heart. He will think of them again, but not here, not in this moment.
Here, he is a ghost.
It is a year of this, of heart beats and ice he cannot feel. A year of rage so profound, it is almost its own thing, like a companion that sits beside Lan Wangji during his eternal vigil.
The disciples do not think he can hear as they stumble through the passage that leads to his grave. They laugh quietly and whisper to each other, as if he hasn't been listening to drops of water, the rush of wind through cracks in the stone.
"It is a mystery for sure and some believe he might still be alive," one of them says, his high pitched voice grating and unpleasant.
The other one giggles. "That's just to scare the kids. No one could have survived that fall."
"Well, did you see it? Because from what I hear, Clan Leader Jiang has not been able to find a body, not even the trace of one. I'm sure of it, the Yiling Patriarch is still alive, and he will return!"
And his heart still beats.
They squabble for a bit longer until they arrive at the mouth of the cave and bow deeply to Hanguang Jun, delivering the message that he may receive a single visitor for an hour if he so wishes. This message has been delivered to him every three months and every three months he has declined.
Lan Zhan is very cold. He's shaking, every muscle in his body aching, as he rises from the position he's held for a year and thirteen days; he rises in pain and sorrow and the worst, most awful emotion of them all.
A tiny speck of hope.
"My brother," he says with a voice that sounds like ice breaking, the rush of an avalanche down a mountain.
The disciples leave, unaware that they have witnessed a glacier become the ocean.
Lan Zhan collapses to his knees, tears burning trails of liquid fire down his cheeks. His whole body is shaking with the pain of it, the cold, the damp, the sorrow. Ghosts don't feel these things, but people do.
Men like Lan Zhan, whose heart is not a cathedral of ice, but a simple beating drum, feel all things, even if they manage to hide them.
Wei Ying, he thinks and can't help but hope, and yet with hope comes fear and pain and the awful truth that hope is only a chance and that on the other side of it is an eternity of nothingness, of living a life devoid of light. It tears through him like lightning, burns everything in its path.
This is how his brother finds him.
And they do not speak.
But there is warmth in his brother's arms and when his brother sings for him, the lullaby their mother used to sing, for the first time in a year and thirteen days, Lan Zhan falls into a dreamless sleep.
When Lan Wangji wakes, he is alone, and there are seven hundred and seventeen days left in his punishment, and every day, every single day, he burns with a new kind of pain. Because there is a chance, however small, that this world still has Wei Ying in it. No matter how long it takes, Lan Wangji will find him.
Hope is a precious, fragile thing and a terrible burden, but it is, at its very core, alive.
Ghosts can not feel hope.
It takes another five thousand four hundred and sixty-two days, but the bud of hope in his chest blooms into a flower, like a lotus bursting from the mud. The sound of a familiar melody, the curl of a familiar smile, the beating of a familiar heart under his finger tips.
"Wei Ying."