"Against what?" he says, not flippant, though he has been in the past. He's gone from a half false lounging into a slow and collected sit, until his legs are crossed and his hands rest on his knees and he's staring at the man playing guqin, moving from that regard for his fingers and his hands to his wrists, his chest, his chin. He eventually looks to Lan Zhan's eyes, not a protracted assault on visual stimuli as much as a measured way to work himself to the point of looking him eye to eye.

"What's at play in this world is different. Resentful energies... those listen. Maybe decaying ears make it harder for the bodied," he says, and it's with a faint twist of his lips, a jest that he doesn't find an explanation to the why, but amuses him nonetheless. "But here... Lan Zhan, you must wonder, too. The high ranked creatures, did you ever catch sight of them when..."

He rubs at his wrists, both shying away from their period of bondage and an older memory, a different set of chains, different salivating animals locked in rooms he could not escape. The haunt of the farm here, the herder of the two sheep with their tendency to ball snow in their fur when they inevitably escape their warmer holding, bah-bah to this place, bleating weakening reprimands before inevitably nipped and herded in close, shivering.

He, who makes binding or bonding an undecided name for twenty years, knows chaining as something else again. His expression tired, eyes a touch more sunken now when he doesn't smile to make the whole of his face at least look more warmly welcoming. He is not easy with this playing, but he's steady through it and the considerations, as he says, "I will need a blade," and he means, a common one, soulless, and he does not look pleased. "Bow and quiver, arrows to match. That, at least, I can make." A boyhood and training and the necessity of invention; a decent bow can be coaxed into existence, a decent sword does not simply spring forth of the lands and fall, gently rusted, at his feet.

"If I remember there are... there is no reason to pretend I am what I'm not," that he isn't half a wreck, that he is not the cultivator they once knew him to be, "Then I'm better armed, and defended, than when pretending for the sake of protecting the people I was desperate to save."

When the cultivation sects would have swarmed over him, feeding like locusts, stripping him down to fragments of bone far sooner than they had while they feared his power and his perversion, to turn away from the sword to walk the dark, narrow road brushing against the condemned, then slipping off entirely into that darkness. He is free of that pretense here, and months leaned into the knowing of his limits.

His fingers curl into his palms. He inhales, closes his eyes, exhales.

"I can convince these undead minds to listen, Lan Zhan, but I'm not sure we can survive their attention. Better a foot soldier than a general." Easily overlooked, versus the targeted figurehead, given what they were brought here for, and what dangling temptation before the starving, freezing cold will do.

"I'm defended, but not for what we've yet to see." Circling back to what he'd touched on before, the ones who drove the Unhalad foot soldiers, the haunts which were not quite as human seeming, if they'd ever been human at all. The mermaids, their obsession, is a fishy, cloying memory at the back of his tongue. "Nor are my defenses against the elements what yours are, but they're better yet than an army man's."

He pauses, fingers slow to relax, lips twitching into a frown and neutral to a smile, then to nothing again.

"Lan Zhan... How are you?"