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Da-ge yells like a wounded animal when the nails go in. It’s not unlike how he yells most of the time otherwise, really; horrible gut-wrenching sounds that make his blood run cold as one of the dead himself, but.
Something about both the noises and writhing, combined with the sight of metal sinking into flesh, bother him in a way neither one alone had before.
(He’s only looking half the time anyway - facing the table, the thrashing body, the comparatively tiny starved-child frame wrestling it into submission, yes; but his eyes dance minutely up, to the sides, as often as he shunts them back, as though the sight itself repelled observation. Chengmei would laugh and call him squeamish if he wasn’t already distracted.)
As the growls grow weaker, more intermittent, Jin Guangyao wonders if the nails will work properly this time: if they will give them something they can actually control, unlike the failures so far with the Ghost General, who in over a year they’ve only succeeded at best in making docile. Though Nie Mingjue, docile… it’s a strange thing to imagine; from the first time Jin Guangyao had met him, he’d been constantly in forceful motion, always willing to take up one fight or another.
More fights than he should have, in truth; and he’d be veiling yet another truth if he claimed it wasn’t one of the things that infuriated him most about the man. If he had left his father alone about Xue Yang, most recently… If, years back now, he had seen the wisdom in hanging his head before Wen Ruohan, and instructed his disciples to live to see another day, rather than make a futile, stupid display of defiance…
If, as it came down to, he hadn’t insisted on cultivating so strongly, so recklessly; hadn’t stuck fully to his rigid, favored view of honor as if it could ever come to a good end - perhaps the killing intent in his saber wouldn’t have distorted his qi so fully and rapidly as it had, and they could have not ended up here.
(Perhaps, for that matter, the same could be said for if Jin Guangyao had stuck a nail or two in his skull sooner, instead of trying to play Clarity for so many stagnating months. Not the most practical though, but - satisfying. Or so he thinks, anyway. Maybe.)
When the howls subside for good, it takes a couple moments - punctuated by a vicious, satisfied little laugh from Xue Yang - for him to properly register it; then another few before he unlaces his hands from behind his back, and focuses his attention in on the body now sitting of its own accord, still, on the table it had thus far been chained to.
“Chifeng-zun,” he commands, ignoring how Xue Yang looks over at him covered with sweat and a few smudges of some unknown grime and grins. His voice sounds clipped and hollow to his ears, though perhaps it’s simply resonating in the empty chamber of his stomach. Corpses and nerves kill one’s appetite equally, he’s been discovering.
And it takes what feels like far longer than a mere second or two after speaking, but… Nie Mingjue’s corpse does turn. Its eyes are utterly black. Its face is bizarrely slack and unlined, aside from the new channels of resentful energy tracing what used to be living veins.
It’s the first that Jin Guangyao has felt safe in front of him in a very, very long time.