He pauses, looks to Lan Zhan, expression more blank than it usually is. Chenqing wasn't a given, had been forged in a land so deeply mired in death that generations of cultivators had been unable to strip it of even a degree of its resentment. He was a sword held and thousands of screaming voices, some that pled with familiar tones, Wei Ying.
"I'm the one who survived the Yiling burial grounds, I guess." The impossible per some, the improbable by others who understood those energies, who had witnessed their thick spread even when he'd done all he could to scratch out a safe haven, to hold those energies at bay. He'd said it once, joking without joking, to his martial brother. What if I told you I found a cave with an old master's inheritance, and I studied it for three months? He hadn't had work to go off, not actually, but where else to learn demonic cultivation than in the bloody cradle of its inception, scrabbling for sanity in a world that screamed and raged in darkness?
No, he doesn't choose to remember much of that time, but he's been worse, he's been less, and found a way.
Lifting a hand to his lips, he smiles without much of mirth in it. Taps his lips with his fingers as he breathes in, audibly.
"Air in my lungs and lips. You know I don't need Chenqing to do what I do with less finesse." Nor would he rely on just one way of moving through that salt-encrusted realm. He cants his head to the side, fingers falling away from his mouth. "I may be a half wreck by comparison, Lan Zhan, but when and where has that stopped me before?"
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He pauses, looks to Lan Zhan, expression more blank than it usually is. Chenqing wasn't a given, had been forged in a land so deeply mired in death that generations of cultivators had been unable to strip it of even a degree of its resentment. He was a sword held and thousands of screaming voices, some that pled with familiar tones, Wei Ying.
"I'm the one who survived the Yiling burial grounds, I guess." The impossible per some, the improbable by others who understood those energies, who had witnessed their thick spread even when he'd done all he could to scratch out a safe haven, to hold those energies at bay. He'd said it once, joking without joking, to his martial brother. What if I told you I found a cave with an old master's inheritance, and I studied it for three months? He hadn't had work to go off, not actually, but where else to learn demonic cultivation than in the bloody cradle of its inception, scrabbling for sanity in a world that screamed and raged in darkness?
No, he doesn't choose to remember much of that time, but he's been worse, he's been less, and found a way.
Lifting a hand to his lips, he smiles without much of mirth in it. Taps his lips with his fingers as he breathes in, audibly.
"Air in my lungs and lips. You know I don't need Chenqing to do what I do with less finesse." Nor would he rely on just one way of moving through that salt-encrusted realm. He cants his head to the side, fingers falling away from his mouth. "I may be a half wreck by comparison, Lan Zhan, but when and where has that stopped me before?"