The forest is dark, and calm, and quiet. Birds chirp in the trees, and herbivores snuffle around in the underbrush or bolt at the scent of a predator, but nothing more aggressive than nature itself can dwell long here without being discovered and dealt with, one way or another.
In a clearing, a brook winds its way through shallow curves in the hillside. Anything remotely supernatural that happened here would definitely be noticed within less than an hour.
Fascinating. They seem to actually have someone who can see possible futures. That's completely bizarre. He manages to get a glimpse of her, hiding on the roof and peering over the edge. He's only a little surprised it's a woman, but the obvious foreign-ness of her features and her short haircut are much more startling. Maybe it makes sense, though, if anyone ever managed to develop future sight it sure wasn't here, not unless it was all within the past thirteen years. What's she doing here, though?
If this keeps up he definitely won't be able to do anything about the Mo family until the Lans are all gone. Which is fine, honestly, when has a Lan ever done anything except cramp his style.
Aside from all those times Lan Zhan totally did things other than cramp his style ANYWAY. Humiliating the Mos in front of their cultivator guests was his best plan for revenge for Mo Xuanyu that didn't involve killing them. Not that killing them would be hard, but that doesn't mean he wants to do it. He's going to have to try to think of something else and sooner rather than later.
He settles in to watch over the baby Lans and make sure they don't get in over their heads. Just in case.
The next thing to go wrong is when, despite the fact that all the walking corpses seem to have been dealt with no problem, dawn finds the supposedly-safe interior of the building with all its doors and windows firmly shut full of zero living people and lots of corpses of the non-walking variety, each incredibly withered and sunken, missing their left arm.
She has enough meditation under her belt to pull the occasional working all-nighter, so this is noticed at around half past midnight and reported to the entire cohort of Lans.
The entire cohort of Lans drop what they're doing with the walking corpses and break into the house! This is much more concerning than some bog-standard walking corpses!
The servants are disgruntled to be woken from their sleep, but are almost all alive, so you know what, they can deal.
Two of the servants, and Madame Mo and her husband and son, are already dead.
"Mo Xuanyu" is not by any stretch of the imagination part of the cohort of Lans, but he has eyes. When the baby Lans drop everything and make for the house en masse, he figures out something's up.
He follows them through the broken-down previously-locked door and looks around.
He finds out about the fatalities.
He peels the bandages back from his wrist. All the cuts are gone. Well...yay?
Isabella is pretty upset she didn't catch this in time to save the five casualties. She wraps her arms around herself and unloads on Alex.
She isn't the only one who's upset. The servants stare, ashen-faced, at the bodies of their masters and two of their own. One of them attempts to accuse Mo Xuanyu. Several of them flee the building.
The juniors search the building for about ten minutes before someone looks outside and sees that one of the servants who fled is now in the same state as the other victims.
That she catches and [tells everyone about] while she's having breakfast.
Wei Wuxian is incredibly tempted to just bolt. It's not going to go well for him if anyone from the Lan clan who is not a baby or a weird foreigner shows up and figures out who he is. With the curse already fulfilled with the deaths of the three Mos and, presumably, one of the dead servants, probably the one he got into an altercation with on the way out of Mo Xuanyu's room if he had to guess, he has no further business keeping him here. And the baby Lans have their improbable seer to keep them safe.
But nobody can see everything, and if he fled and found out that more people, maybe even some of the baby Lans, had died...no.
They locate the man who died in Senior Suan's precog. He seems to have been shocked into silence; he goes where he's chivvied, but he doesn't say anything.
Seven minutes later, he collapses, face as sunken as the others.
What the fuck!!! is going on here!!! [I think we need backup, I can send for someone.]
[On my way] he says as soon as she's done. He knows her; she wouldn't say they needed backup if they didn't fucking need backup; he was on his sword before she finished the first sentence.
She can't seem to find any futures where that one guy doesn't fucking die. She can get a whole lot of angles on that one guy dying though.
His hand vanishes the first time his body is remotely unattended after his death. If only one person is around the body when the hand vanishes they die next.
The guy never says a word, and the next person to die never says a word between his death and theirs.
Okay, she wants everybody talking to each other out loud once a minute and also she wants somebody to pin the dead guy's spooky arm to the ground between the bones with a sharp object really hard after he dies.
Yep it was totally the arm. Once you look at it closely it doesn't match the guy's right arm, much more muscular and with very different callus patterns. As soon as someone tries to stab it it goes for their throat.
(Examining the guy's vitals before he "dies" reveals that it was in fact six people who died before they made it into the house)
Can someone... shoot the arm from a ways off to pin it in place? Or throw something heavy onto it? Or something? She is open to suggestions.
How does she feel about the fierce corpses of the five other dead barreling up to engage the thing.
Ambivalent. She tells everyone in her group including the incoming Lan Wangji.
Of the five fierce corpses, the three Mos are definitely the stronger ones. The servants' corpses fall relatively quickly to the ferocious undead hand. The Mos last longer, but it's pretty clear they aren't going to be able to actually win this thing.
And then the resounding chords of a guqin infused with the energy of a powerful cultivator echo through the walls of the building. All four still-moving dead creatures freeze as Lan Wangji's playing subdues their resentful energy.
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