"One man, alone?" He sighs, sitting back on his heels, dropping his rag into Lan Zhan's bowl. "Take it from one who tried that. It isn't."

He wipes his hands on his 'new,' threadworn cloak, his better robes underneath preserved for the time being. He knows what it is to fear, and to not know. He knows for Lan Zhan this has to be in specific, calcified ways harder, the wondering, the uncertainty, the need for knowledge. He also knows it's not something they can guarantee. Not the appetites of these dead walking, but the ravishing desperation, and that they need not look just at the mines, but their place of captivity, study those grounds, observe the culled.

But senseless, to take those better minded and bodied for whatever perversion of purpose they'd been summoned here. He's not cursed, and where he'd hesitated before in asking, he wonders if he should now. He doesn't.

"Tomorrow, then. If I'm to mind my matters," he drawls, flashing a smile with sadder eyes before he turns them away, steeling over, "Then the dead, my friend, are mine. I've unknowingly left A-Yuan behind once before chasing after the ones I knew walked on to death."

He shifts to his feat, a stuttered grunt of effort.

"Never again."