Chapter Text
Xie Lian felt the moment his brain shut itself down.
He’d been trudging through thick layers of snow with tattered robes and a straw hat clinging to his body, blocking out the cold for however long it could, which was not at all. He felt the cold pierce through the layers and freeze his body as he treaded through the freezing air. His mask covered half his face but the dried blood made the mask a permanent fixture on his face.
Biting cold air is carried through the wind's arms and the force of its breeze pushes him around harshly as he fights for balance. He sways, walking slowly so as not to fall into the snow beneath him. He’d been walking for what felt like days, months even. His heart had long stopped beating, and his brain fought desperately to keep the rest of him awake and alive. It fought for even the smallest chance of survival. Not for Xie Lian, but for itself. Xie Lian often separated the two. For his brain to inflict decades of torture onto the vessel it occupied was enough to alien it from himself.
This often occurred in the coffin. When his heart would cease beating, the brain would sacrifice many of the organs and senses of his body to stay active. Like a puppeteer, the brain would cut off the useless baggage in its control.
Once, he lay despondent in the three-layered coffin, heartbeat dying out and the hunger in his stomach drumming with every growl. While hunger was no longer quite a necessity to alleviate or satisfy, his body still demanded the food it hadn't received in decades. The growls occurred in longer intervals until they stopped entirely. It took him a few more deaths before he figured out his brain was turning off the desire for food to feed itself, and every time his heart died, the first thing he would lose would be the only sound that resembled a shriek in that god-forsaken jail. The goals stopped, and he almost would've thanked his brain for its service if it had stopped then.
The first time it occurred, he really couldn't tell the difference. Having lost the distinction between closed eyes and the darkened space around him, he could no longer distinguish whether his eyes were open or closed. The only signature he had as proof of his vision was Ruoye. It would often twirl and dance in distressed and panicked gestures, desperately vying for his attention in a way to alleviate his loneliness and distress. The pure white had faded into brown from the dust and dirt, accompanied by darker shades that resembled dried blood from its attempts at pulling the stake from his heart.
Sometimes he’d entertain the gestures and others he would snap at Ruoye with a vicious snarl, batting it away with weak gestures. If he felt petty enough, he’d close his eyes.
When he felt Ruoye petting his face softly to gain his attention, he opened his eyes. At first, he thought he’d had to adjust his vision to the dark as he had many times before, but as minutes and hours passed, shapes never appeared. He ordered Ruoye in a panicked whisper to rub at his eyes, to re-orientate himself. His voice broke with rasped cries when nothing changed. He used to think it was worth it, buried by his sole student as a way to atone not only for his sins towards failing Lang Qianqiu but for everyone else in his life he’s failed. Now he only wanted to scream at his past self for doing this to them.
After his vision faded, he began to feel colder. Besides the chill of winter, he was never warm. However, the warmer seasons always made him feel a variance in the air. A shy warmth that came around for about a month or two before being replaced by the chill of fall and winter. When his heart first stopped beating, he knew it to be spring. However, the longer he waited, the warmth never came. Instead, a bone-chilling coldness seeped into his bones and it never left. Its presence was like admitting to his loss of life, that he would truly never feel alive again. Even as decades passed once more and his heart re-animated itself once more, the cold never left and he never felt the brush of warmth again.
So as he stumbles through the violent winds and snow blasts, the deep cold isn’t new. However, it is just as destructive.
Despite his heart having stopped, the brain must realize the need for sight as he navigates the storm tiredly. He stumbles once more, however, he doesn't stay upright. A burst of wind pushes him onto his side in the snow, and he might as well have been blind for he cannot see a single thing through the bursts of snow from above in the clouds and swept up from the ground with the wind.
However, he is so ever grateful that all he sees is white. For decades, he’d been enshrouded in darkness and dust, accompanied by a ghost of white he longed to see so many times each time his sight failed. Now, he feels the breeze and the snow on his face and almost feels grateful, but the sadness, anger, and solitude that has buried itself inside him for centuries and has grown so much in the past century is all that’s left.
As he falls onto the ground with a thud, he lands at an angle that pushes the stake further into his heart. A harsh breath escapes him and he lets out a small grunt of pain before setting both hands onto the ground to push himself up. With a huff, he rises with trembling limbs before walking once more, ignoring the pain that pounded through his whole body like a drum.
He’d forgotten how he’d wound up here, for a significant gap exists in his memories. From when he’d last passed out inside that coffin to now, he comes up blank when trying to come up with a reasonable explanation. The only fact that exists is that he is caught up in, possibly, the worst weather imaginable for a man whose heart has stopped. He feels it as a frost snakes its way around his heart, encasing it in a frozen cage as the rest of his body follows suit. He feels it as his blood cools, freezing his blood in place and it stops the pitiful circulations it had been fighting to do without his heart’s pumping. He choked out, unable to let out a single breath and watched as the tips of his fingers turned blue and then purple.
In his disorientation, he hadn’t noticed that he walked onto an ice-covered lake that creaked out with every step. Distantly, he seemed to feel Ruoye tugging on his arm to move him from his place, but he continued to stalk forward with a nonexistent purpose.
His vision blurred and he found it difficult to distinguish where he stood. Vision foggy, he squinted to try to articulate where he’d move next when he felt his feet give out beneath him. It took him a foolishly long time to comprehend that his body had fallen into ice-cold water when he realized the stake hadn't shifted from the ground's contact. When no pain pounded from his heart, he knew too late as he had already begun sinking. He could see Ruoye scrambling for purchase above, but slipped around any ice it found sturdy enough. Its smooth fabric wasn't made to cling to ice, a slippery and unattainable foe.
As he sinks, the water pushes down on him with a gravity-defying weight, dragging his limbs and his body down into its abyss. The weight holds him down as he scrambles his limbs into an action resembling swimming, but his body has been numb and unmoving for centuries, so where could it find the strength now? Despite the obvious adrenaline running through his body, he cannot surpass his obvious physical limitations.
The weight sinks into his chest, heavier than the shackle around his neck ever was. He feels the water as it enters his throat when he gasps, filling his body and his lungs, as it enters the gaping hole leading to his heart, blocked solely by a wooden stake, irritating the wound and its flesh. It all burns like a fire, destructive and unyielding in its path of destruction. He gives up his struggle when his eyesight weakens and his vision goes darker as he sinks further away from the water's surface. Or perhaps the brain had once again forsaken his ability to see. It also recognized sight was no longer a necessity.
Now that the cold in the air, ice, and water had filled his body, Xie Lian struggled to think of anything that could save him this time. Despite his numerous encounters with fatal injuries or death, he had never truly faced his end. Every time he came close, he discovered a way out. A hand to cling to, a rope thrown out to climb, or a bone thrown out to feed stray dogs like himself. However, it was always the shackles around his body and the immortality it represented which saved him. Perhaps he would live at the depths of this lake, filled to the brim with water and unable to produce even a single bubble, but alive. Fish may feed off his body, much like the bugs which passed through his coffin, but he would live.
If he looked on the bright side, it would truly be near impossible to perish now. He would suffer for perhaps a century more, but he should be grateful to live, no? He’d have to pray for even a sliver of hope, however. At least before he could hope that someone could stumble across his tomb, but what were the chances anyone would search down into the abyss of a forgotten lake? If he could somehow pray to any of the gods, he had no idea how he could direct them to this forgotten area, for not even he knew where he lay.
His body landed softly onto the sandy hypolimnion of the lake. The bottom lacked any light, and the water was so still he felt almost no difference from being above land if only he hadn’t still felt the crushing weight of the water. Either his brain had shut down his vision or the bottom was truly this dark, but he couldn't see even a sliver of light beyond him. The stake pressed against the sand softly, yet it still produced a sting in his body as it shifted.
He was cold.
He thought he’d been cold before, with the harsh winds and biting snow sweeping across his skin. Instead, he now thought while suffocating in the chill of a winter lake, at the bottom where not even a hint of warmth presented itself, his body and soul ran even colder. Where before he could at least feel a burn from the sharp pains against his skin, the ice cold that existed at the depths of this lake only encased him like a frozen statue. Without the ability to withstand the cold or the water, perhaps he would truly be encased like ice.
With no hunger, sight, or body heat, he once again resembled a corpse. However as time passed, his heart never re-animated itself. Whereas before the brain would have produced enough energy to restart the heart, it struggled to now. Without the blood circulation in his body and no air, there were no bases for the brain to support the heart. And so he felt it as his brain sacrificed every living organ and muscle. He could feel it when he lost feeling in his arms, legs, and face. Whereas before he could feel the dried blood crusted between his face and the mask on his face, burning with blemishes made from an effort to rip it off, he now felt nothing. Not even the salt water resting in his throat and against his tongue. Not the burn in his chest, unable to take in any air. Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Only a heart-wrenching pain in his head. The pain he should feel only existed in faint headaches in his brain before those disappeared as well. He felt every single part of himself shut down like an abandoned, dying animal. He now existed as a being only capable of thought and memory, until even those were gone.
It couldn’t recall much about itself, only that it had always lived here.
Cold.
It was probably cold, its identity, for all it could recall, was a choking, stabbing feeling of piercing cold.
It knew when it stopped existing and when it could no longer think. When his last string of consciousness cut itself away, he drifted away, unfeeling and cold.