Wei Wuxian inclines his head, lifting Chenqing and holding it ready, the whole of him steady. He doesn't need to speak about how wrecked he's been only weeks before, controlling and guiding dead more willing than unwilling to purposes of holding back an army of dead for long enough that the living might escape. He can spend this time, these moments, preventing one man from being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. It isn't too demanding.

It should, in other ways, be demanding enough, but he's a practical man, and he's been damned for it before, and this is justice.

"Hunt well," he says by way of verbal acknowledgement, and when Lan Xichen seeks to vent the demons of his heart against the grasping blindness of this village's dead, he watches, he listens, and he keeps his husband's brother's back clear of danger. Listens too for signs of other persons needing guarding, of dead to turn back, knowing in the same moment this village stretches too long for any one man to defend it whole.

There will be deaths come morning, and he's sickened to know it, even while he does what he can in the ways he can, fighting against the curse that powers the dead here, the twisting ways of it, in this dark and sodden landscape gilded red and silver by the moons.