Chapter Text
Lan Zhan met the ghost the day after he moved into Gentian Cottage.
Gentian Cottage implied a cosy little house with exposed beams, lace doilies, and doorways too short for anyone over five foot six, not the relatively spacious three bedroom semi-detached house built in the 1920s that was the reality. Even so, it felt cluttered and overwhelming with boxes stacked everywhere and furniture in awkward places. Lan Zhan barely made it through his morning meditation and a cup of tea before it became too much and he had to start unpacking.
He decided to start in the kitchen. The village had one Italian restaurant and two takeaways--an Indian and a fish and chip shop that also sold a few Chinese dishes for inexplicable reasons. His stomach still felt vaguely queasy from the previous night's scampi and chips. It had looked more appealing than the neon orange sweet and sour prawns at the chip shop, but he couldn't face it for a second night. Sitting alone in the bustling Italian restaurant sounded awful and he couldn't handle spicy food, so he would excavate a functional kitchen before supper or he would die in the attempt.
A small, Lan Huan-sounding voice in his head tried to reproach him about that vow, but he slapped a mental hand over that voice and refused to listen. He ignored the other thought, the one about Lan Huan offering to help him move, too.
This was his choice. He was finding a new path, a different path from the one he'd been guided towards for most of his life, and letting his brother help him settle in didn't feel right. It wasn't Lan Huan's fault that Lan Zhan needed to find a new way, but Lan Huan brought reminders of all the things Lan Zhan was learning to change and that wasn't what he needed right now.
Some of the kitchen boxes had been dumped in other rooms, so Lan Zhan's first challenge was checking labels and moving boxes. Then he started methodically opening each box, unwrapping items, and putting them away or setting them aside to wash.
Lan Zhan had a good rhythm going when he opened a box and emerged with his wok, feeling triumphant. As he straightened up, a man walked through the kitchen wall humming a tune.
Their eyes met.
Lan Zhan dropped the wok with a loud clatter. The man's eyes widened and his mouth started to shape a word.
He disappeared before any sound emerged.
Lan Zhan stared at the space where the man had stood for a long moment. Eventually, he blinked.
The man didn't reappear.
The wok was still on the floor where Lan Zhan had dropped it, the only evidence that anything odd had happened. He bent to pick it up, eyes still fixed on the place where a man had just walked through a wall.
Lan Zhan had only caught a glimpse before he disappeared, but the surprised look on the man's face felt etched into his memory. The man had been tall and slim, only a little shorter than Lan Zhan, and there had been something odd about his clothes that Lan Zhan couldn't pin down. What he remembered most vividly was the wide grey eyes and the round "oh" forming on his lips before he vanished.
And the fact that he looked Chinese. That was also notable in a small village thirty miles from London.
Lan Zhan put the wok down on the kitchen counter. He skirted around the boxes and put his hand on the wall. It felt solid enough. The pale yellow paint was cool under his fingertips. Lan Zhan tapped the wall and swept his hands over it, but it was just an ordinary kitchen wall.
Perhaps he'd imagined it. The previous day had been stressful: watching strangers handle all of his things and pack them away, then catching a train to meet them at the house and watch them haul box after box inside, trying not to frown as they manipulated furniture through doors and around tight corners.
He'd been exhausted when he went to bed. Exhausted and vaguely nauseous. Maybe he hadn't seen a man walk through a room: perhaps it was just a figment of his imagination. A vivid daydream or sign that he was even more tired than he'd realised.
Lan Zhan walked back to the kitchen counter and picked up his wok. There was a tiny dent where it had hit the tiles. This time he did allow himself a small frown.
He glanced up at the wall again, smoothed out his expression and squared his shoulders.
It had been his imagination. People didn't walk through walls or vanish. He simply needed to finish unpacking the kitchen and make some lunch.
Finish unpacking, walk to the tiny village shop to buy a few items, and then make lunch. Lan Zhan momentarily regretted arranging for his grocery delivery to come later in the afternoon, but it was done and perhaps the fresh air would help to blow away any other lurking imaginary figments.
He hung the wok on a hook and delved into the box for another thing to unpack.
***
He didn't see the figment again until evening. He'd almost managed to convince himself it had been a strange waking dream when the figment walked through his dining room wall and stopped, an odd look on its face.
Lan Zhan ignored it, focusing on a point just to the left of its elbow as he lifted a piece of bok choy to his lips with his chopsticks. He chewed slowly, carefully, and pretended he couldn't see anything unusual.
The figment--hallucination? Ghost?-- stepped closer to the dining table, tilting his--its head to the side.
"Hello?" it said.
Lan Zhan put a green bean in his mouth and chewed.
"I know you can see me," the figment said.
Lan Zhan scooped up some noodles, refusing to let his eyes drift to the figment.
"Seriously? You're really going to ignore me?" it said. "I know it was rude of me to disappear this morning, but I wasn't expecting you. I apologise."
Lan Zhan kept his gaze on the wall and ate more noodles. The pale cream paint was a soothing colour, but there was a tiny dark mark where something had bumped it. Perhaps he'd hang a picture there.
"Fine," the figment said. "You're ignoring me, but I know you can see me so I'm not giving up. You're my first chance of conversation with someone over the age of seven for more than a hundred years. I can wait."
Lan Zhan couldn't stop his eye twitching slightly at that, and the figment crowed its delight.
"I'm right! I knew I was right! I'm going to annoy you into talking to me, just you watch."
Lan Zhan's chopsticks scraped on ceramic and he dropped his gaze to the bowl. One lone strip of pepper was all that remained of his supper. He picked it up and popped it in his mouth.
"Well, it's been nice not talking to you," the figment said cheerfully. "We'll do this again soon, but I've got a date. Coronation Street starts in five minutes and the Brewers in Magnolia Villa watch it live. Why doesn't anyone watch shit live any more? I can't follow anything people are streaming because they don't do it on a schedule. They watch two episodes and then they sneak another two in while I'm not looking, so I miss half the plot."
Lan Zhan drained his water glass, picked up his dishes, and turned towards the kitchen. He was tired and achy; maybe he'd have a shower and a cup of soothing tea before bed. Everything would be normal again after a good night's sleep.
The figment waved cheerfully. "Good night, then. See you tomorrow."
It had already disappeared when Lan Zhan looked over his shoulder. He hadn't intended to look, but something about the forced cheer in the figment's voice had drawn him. The stab of disappointment at its disappearance was unwelcome and unexpected.
Lan Zhan frowned and forced himself to walk to the kitchen. Clearly, he needed sleep and a fresh start more than he'd realised if he was having emotional responses to something that was clearly a symptom of an overworked imagination.
He made a mental note to add finding a new therapist to his list of tasks tomorrow.
***
The figment reappeared as promised the next day while Lan Zhan was building a desk in the bedroom he was turning into an office. He almost put a screwdriver through his hand when it walked through the wall, and he couldn't stop himself from shooting it an irritated glare. He recovered in a moment, smoothing out his expression, but the figment had noticed and was delighted.
"You can't pretend you didn’t see me, I saw you see me."
Lan Zhan studiously ignored it, but he had to pause his desk construction when he realised he was leaving bloody handprints where the screwdriver had nicked the web between his thumb and index finger. He sucked on it for a moment, frowning at the mess on the side of a half-constructed drawer.
The figment scratched the back of its neck apologetically. "Sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you."
Lan Zhan refused to look at it as it followed him to the bathroom for a plaster and the kitchen for a cloth to wipe the mess up with, continuing to apologise all the time. It didn't seem to have an off-switch, because as soon as Lan Zhan knelt down to resume his building efforts, it sat down opposite him.
The figment was incredibly detailed for a product of his imagination. Its long black hair was braided with a red ribbon, strands escaping messily everywhere, and there was a smudge of dirt on its cheek.
Lan Zhan made himself look down at the instructions for the desk and began counting out wood screws (#5232) and dowels (#5445).
"Maybe it's a language thing," the figment said thoughtfully, before switching to Mandarin. "Does this work better? Can you understand me now? Anything?"
It was oddly accented, not quite a different dialect from what Lan Zhan had learned at Chinese school, but nothing he'd heard on his trips to China, either. It was more formal, somehow stilted and hesitant at the same time. As though the figment hadn't spoken it aloud for a long time and was trying to pull out words and concepts from deep in its memory.
"French is a long-shot," the figment said, switching languages, "but it's worth a try. I'm going to run out of languages soon. You don't want to hear me use Japanese, I was bad at it even when I was alive and that was a long time ago."
Lan Zhan dropped a wood screw (#5232) and bit down on the exclamation that was trying to escape.
The figment made a disbelieving sound. "Seriously? French is what gets a reaction?"
Lan Zhan picked up the instruction booklet and used it to block the figment's face from his view. It was very important to put the wood screws (#5232) in the right place.
The figment leaned sideways, one eyebrow lifting. It switched back to English. "Fine, no Japanese. I'll save French for special occasions. But I know you speak English."
Lan Zhan found the dropped screw and began patiently attaching a side panel (#445) to a sliding mechanism (#2110).
"You can't just keep ignoring me," the figment said. "I'm not going to let you. I'll sing if I have to. I'll sing every terrible 80s pop song I know and there are a lot of them, I can keep going for hours."
Lan Zhan added another screw.
The figment grinned. "Okay, how about some Rick Astley? It's a classic. There's even an Internet thing about it."
Without waiting for a response, it began singing Never Gonna Give You Up in a surprisingly good tenor. Lan Zhan gritted his teeth and ignored it.
He ignored the figment through the construction of his desk (Rick Astley, New Kids on the Block, The Bangles), his chair (A-ha), and two bookcases (Bon Jovi). The figment sang for more than three hours with barely a break, looking as though he was having a great time while a headache slowly built up behind Lan Zhan's eyes.
Eventually, early in the afternoon, the figment sighed, sounding almost regretful. "This has been fun, but I've got a thing. The kid down at the end of the road should be home from school soon and he's got...well, he needs some help. So I have to go."
Lan Zhan's fingers spasmed around the book he was putting on the bookshelf and he almost fumbled it.
"Don't worry, I'll be back!" the figment said. "Can't abandon you now. You're stuck with me and I'm not giving up until you talk to me."
It took Lan Zhan a huge effort to lift his hand and put the books on the shelf without glancing over at the figment. He managed it and then he deliberately turned away to survey the boxes he'd brought up until he was sure the figment must have gone.
When he turned back with another handful of books, the space where the figment had been standing by the window was empty. Lan Zhan told himself that this was good, he was pleased, and dumped the books haphazardly on the shelf before trudging downstairs to make tea and take something for his headache.
***
The figment visited again the next day while Lan Zhan was making supper. He almost threw a packet of tofu across the room when it walked through his stove. It laughed as though that was hilarious and then talked to Lan Zhan without stopping about whatever seemed to come into its head. Being ignored didn't seem to stop it, even when Lan Zhan propped up a book to read as he ate.
Lan Zhan could almost hear his uncle chastising him for reading while eating. The thought sent a quick stab of pain that he immediately suppressed.
The figment stayed until nine and then vanished to see whether Magnolia Villa was watching a TV show Lan Zhan had never heard of.
It kept appearing. The figment rarely arrived before mid-morning, but it always visited for at least a couple of hours a day. Usually it talked to Lan Zhan, still undeterred by the lack of response, but it serenaded Lan Zhan a couple of times while he painted and constructed furniture in the guest room.
He discovered the figment's limits one day when he went out and the figment couldn't follow. It wasn't deliberate, because escaping from the figment hadn't occurred to Lan Zhan until then. Where was the sense in trying to outrun a manifestation of his own psyche?
(That explanation was getting harder to believe as the days went on, but every other explanation felt even more impossible, so Lan Zhan was sticking to it. He was going to find a new therapist any day now.)
Lan Zhan told himself later that he was relieved to have found a way to avoid it when he needed to. The figment appeared while Lan Zhan was clearing up lunch, just as the sun emerged after a morning of heavy rain. Lan Zhan had promised himself he would sit down and start working on his new book now that he'd unpacked the house in every possible sense. But the sunshine was gleaming wetly off the road and there was a hint of blue on the horizon. He found himself putting on walking boots before he could think twice.
The figment didn't seem to notice what he was doing, too absorbed in a rambling monologue about the decline of bees. It followed Lan Zhan out of the house, down the front path, and along the road, but then it simply...stopped.
Lan Zhan looked back. The figment was standing at the end of the street, right where the give way lines were marked on the road, and for once it wasn't talking or even singing. It was just standing, a lone figure completely out of place next to a streetlight.
For the first time, Lan Zhan was able to pin down what was odd about its clothes. It was wearing dark trousers, braces hanging from the waist, with a striped tunic-collar shirt, half untucked.
And one leather slipper.
It looked like someone who was caught halfway through dressing--or perhaps halfway through undressing--but the clothes were decades out of date.
The figment caught Lan Zhan looking and perked up, waving cheekily. Lan Zhan turned on his heel and walked away.
He refused to let himself feel disappointed that the figment wasn't waiting for him when he got home a couple of hours later. Wanting his figment to be on the doorstep was definitely a bad sign, and he put a mental line under the find a new therapist task on his mental to do list. It was only much later that Lan Zhan realised he'd been disappointed but not worried, because it was just after school got out and the figment always visited the boy at the end of the road on a Wednesday afternoon.
Why did a figment of his imagination have a regular schedule?
***
Lan Zhan sat down one morning at his desk and turned on his laptop. He'd unpacked everything, done every small decorating and repair job possible, and there were no longer any excuses. It was time to get back to work. He couldn't live on trust fund income forever. Well, technically he could, but mentally he couldn't.
He opened up the outline for his new book, the one his agent had almost swooned over, and read it through carefully. The words all made sense, the book they described would be very good, but he didn't feel connected to anything in the outline. He could remember writing it. He could remember feeling pleased with the narrative he'd built, the clever symmetry of the resolution.
It was like reading an instruction manual for a machine he didn't care for much.
Even the main character didn't spark anything inside. He didn't hate the character. He didn't love him either. The central character was a perfectly good one, flawed in exactly the right way for the book he'd constructed, and Lan Zhan didn't feel anything about him. He certainly didn't have any interest in writing about him.
Lan Zhan allowed himself a small frown.
There was nothing wrong with the outline or the character sheets he'd prepared. This was how he'd written five books and all of those books sold well. Critics liked them. His agent had been excited about the outline. She'd emailed him a couple of days ago, asking to see the first three chapters. There were editors interested already.
The outline was good.
Lan Zhan fired up Scrivener and opened the file that he'd started for the book weeks ago. All the folders for the chapters were lined up ready, with little summaries he could read when he opened the corkboard view. The outline was right there, neatly divided up into small chunks and ready to be written. He browsed the character sheets, but they didn't contain anything he hadn't already reviewed in his outline.
After a while, he added a file to the first chapter folder and stared at the blank page of the first scene. The cursor blinked at him.
"I hear it works better if you type something," a voice said behind him.
Lan Zha refused to look around.
"Not that I know much about this," the figment continued. "We didn't have computers when I was alive. We barely had typewriters."
Lan Zhan expected him to continue, but the figment lapsed into silence. For a few minutes, Lan Zhan refused to look around. Maybe it had gone already.
He typed a sentence into the document. Deleted it. Retyped it.
Maybe he needed a book. A reference for...what had he just written? That wasn't important, he just needed a book. Lan Zhan swung round in his chair and stood up, keeping his eyes carefully trained on the bookcase so the figment would be in no doubt that he wasn't checking on it. He just needed to check on something in--he scanned the titles desperately--Butterflies of the Amazon.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the figment sitting on the floor. He--it had drawn its knees up to its chest, arms wrapped around them, and was resting its chin on them. The usual cheeky grin was missing. It was just staring at the floor, almost like a puppet with its strings cut, or maybe a hurt child curling in on itself. If it had been real, Lan Zhan might have thought it looked sad and tired.
He flicked through the book and put it back on the shelf before returning to his computer. The cursor blinked at the end of his sentence accusingly. When he reread it, the words made no sense.
Lan Zhan suppressed a sigh.
He rewrote the sentence into something that was grammatically acceptable, but it still didn't make sense in the context of the book he was meant to be writing.
He deleted it again and stared at the screen. Every couple of minutes, he dragged a finger across the trackpad to prevent the screensaver popping up. He told himself he was meditating on the best first sentence for the book, but even in his own head it sounded like a flimsy excuse.
Almost as flimsy as his conviction that the thing sitting on the floor behind him was a figment of his imagination and not something...else.
It had been quiet for a long time now. Lan Zhan turned his head slightly to check, but it was still there. It probably hadn't even noticed he was checking: its eyes were still fixed on the carpet a few inches from Lan Zhan's desk leg. He wondered what it was thinking and then chastised himself for wondering.
If he told Lan Huan he was seeing and hearing an annoying (and strangely beautiful) man every day who appeared and disappeared into thin air, he knew Lan Huan would worry. And if he admitted that he was worried about the creature's silence today, Lan Huan would more than worry.
He might even be right to worry.
Lan Zhan peeked again, but the figment...creature...man...still hadn't moved. He tried to tell himself that he wasn't worried, that he didn't miss the chatter, but that was a self-delusion he couldn't sustain any more.
The figment shifted a little and its eyes flickered up. Lan Zhan turned back to his computer immediately, but he heard a soft chuckle behind him and he knew he'd been caught. There was a tiredness to the sound that made Lan Zhan's heart clench. It felt so wrong coming from a being who was usually so bright and ebullient about everything.
He wanted to ask what was wrong, but the words stuck in his throat, as though by speaking he'd be admitting to something he wasn't ready for.
Instead, he opened a browser and stared at the search bar. What could he even ask, though? He didn't know whether he should be searching for local therapists or advice on what to do about...spirits? Was that what was visiting him, preposterous as it sounded?
Eventually, he typed in a query and spent several minutes researching the history of typewriters. That led him down a rabbithole on index typewriters, stenography, telegraphs, and somewhere in that fugue of links and searches, an idea started to take shape.
He opened Word and began typing. No outline, no character sheets, no Scrivener binder of neatly organised plans and colour-coded themes. Just words on the page, pouring out of him in a torrent he didn't want to stop.
It felt thrillingly illicit, like bunking off school might have felt if he'd ever been the kind of person who did that. His agent would probably be furious.
Lan Zhan kept writing until the words ran out.
He'd completely forgotten he wasn't alone until he sat back in his chair and allowed himself a small sigh. There were words on his screen, pages of them, more than he'd written in months and it felt like something had finally released in his mind. It wasn't the book he was supposed to be writing and his agent was probably going to be unimpressed. There was no outline to show her, no elevator pitch to sell it to her. Pitches like that had never been his forte anyway, but he didn't even know where this story was going. It might be a novel, it might fizzle out in three chapters. All he knew about it was that it had felt good as he wrote, felt like a puzzle unlocking in his head, and ideas were buzzing around his brain in a way they hadn’t for longer than he could remember.
His stomach growled and there was a quiet puff of laughter from behind him.
Lan Zhan startled and turned his head, meeting the figment's eyes for the first time since that day in the kitchen. The figment smiled and offered him a small, mischievous wave.
"Hi," the figment said. "You looked inspired. Are you a writer?"
Lan Zhan refused to let himself roll his eyes and turned back to his computer. He saved the document and saved a back-up to the cloud, just in case.
"For a moment there, you actually forgot to ignore me," the figment said. "Must have been a big day for you."
"Ridiculous," Lan Zhan muttered under his breath.
There was another soft chuckle. "That's me, always ridiculous."
Lan Zhan gritted his teeth and refused to let any more words or acknowledgements escape. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted that the figment looked less sad. There was a twinkle in its eyes again. Lan Zhan told himself it was just an observation and he definitely wasn't feeling relieved that the figment's dark mood had lifted.
"School's out soon, so I've got a date with a kid and his teddy bear's party," the figment said, standing and stretching theatrically. "You should eat some food. And maybe take a walk or something, you've barely moved for hours. It's not good for you."
It was on the tip of Lan Zhan's tongue to respond that the figment had also been sitting still for a long time, but he clenched his jaw. No. Responding to it would only encourage it.
The figment smiled and wiggled its fingers. "Have a nice afternoon."
It sauntered away through the wall, and Lan Zhan glanced at his computer screen for a moment before allowing himself another small sigh. The figment was right, he did need to eat and he should probably go for a walk or a run. Maybe the ideas buzzing around in his head would coalesce into something like an outline while he did that.
Thinking about the book he hadn't planned to write was much less confusing than thinking about the visitor he was no longer sure was purely his imagination.
***
Lan Zhan finally had to admit that his visitor wasn't a figment of anything on a wet spring afternoon. They'd fallen into a routine, and this was usually the time when the creature was out visiting one of the children on the street it had adopted. At least, that was what it claimed to be doing and there was no way for Lan Zhan to check. He couldn't walk up to one of the houses and ask if their child had an imaginary friend who looked Chinese and only wore one slipper.
So Lan Zhan wasn't expecting it to run through his wall, eyes wide and hands flailing, speaking before it fully emerged from the brickwork.
"Don't answer the door!" it--he--said. "If you value your privacy and sanity, don't answer the door! You'll thank me later, I swear."
Lan Zhan lowered the book he was reading. His agent had sent it to him to provide a blurb and he refused to put his name to anything he hadn't actually read, no matter how many times his agent begged him to "just say something nice and non-descriptive".
Silver eyes met his and there was a moment of startled hesitation, as though he'd expected Lan Zhan to ignore him as usual. Before Lan Zhan could respond, even just to mutter ridiculous and return to his book, there was a knock at the door. It was followed immediately by someone rapping the knocker loudly several times and then another little rat-tat with knuckles.
"Don't answer it."
Lan Zhan raised one eyebrow a fraction. "Why?"
There was another slight pause, as though the being hadn't expected the question. Or maybe any question. "Because it's Mrs. Beauchamp from Rose Cottage and she's here to recruit you."
"Recruit?"
"Induct, press, evangelise, draft, all of the above. St. Mary's is trying to become inclusive and you're Asian, single, and young enough to do any jobs that need heavy lifting. You're her dream. She'll score so many points with the vicar if she gets you. Don't answer the door, you'll find yourself on three rotas with no memory of how that happened."
"I have no intention of joining a church."
"Doesn't matter."
"I see."
There was another round of rat-tatting and door knocker abuse.
"She seems determined."
"She is."
Lan Zhan marked his place and closed his book. "Ignoring her seems ineffective."
A shrug. "She'll probably go away. Eventually. The break in the rain can't last."
"Hm."
Lan Zhan half-expected the--spirit? Was that the right word?--to reach for him and try to stop him, but it just gave him a resigned look and allowed him to pass without further dramatics.
When he returned to the living room a few minutes later, the ghost was staring at him with wide eyes. "That was magnificent. It's going to take her hours to realise you were incredibly rude and mean because you looked so polite while you were doing it. But I know you now! You can't hide from me, I saw what you were doing and it was amazing. Thank you. She tried to hand out her come to Jesus pamphlets at the Guptas' Diwali party last year and everyone was too shocked to say anything."
Lan Zhan nodded. "Thank you for warning me."
"I can't wait to be a fly on the wall later when she's telling her friends about this."
"Don't gossip."
"It's not gossip." A bright smile. "If it's anything, it's eavesdropping, except I can stand in the middle of her living room to do it and she never even sees me. It would only be gossip if I told you about it after."
Lan Zhan allowed one eyebrow to twitch.
"Don't worry, I won't tell you anything. Unless you want me to." A pause, and then, "So you've decided to admit I exist."
"I seem to have no choice."
"You can either believe you're seeing a ghost or believe you're crazy and talking to your own hallucinations. I know which one I'd prefer."
Lan Zhan was less certain about which option he preferred, but he decided he could examine that in more detail later.
"You're a ghost," he said slowly.
The ghost nodded. "Sure am. And you're the first person over the age of seven who's been able to see me, so this has been a big day for me. Big month. Big year! My first adult conversation in over a hundred years."
That explained the typewriter comment. It could also explain the odd accent in his Mandarin, and why he'd sounded so hesitant as he spoke. Only being able to speak to English children for over a hundred years had to leave a few scars.
"Who are you?"
The ghost straightened up and flicked his arms out, as though flicking long sleeves away, before clasping his hands together and bowing in a gesture Lan Zhan had never seen outside one of the dramas Lan Huan loved.
"This one is named Wei Ying," the ghost said in Mandarin, "called Wei Wuxian."
Lan Zhan almost returned the bow, before remembering that it was something he'd never done before and he would probably feel foolish. He dipped his head slightly instead, immediately feeling slightly silly at doing that much. He was sure people hadn't worn robes with wide sleeves and made those bows even a hundred years ago.
"Lan Zhan," he said.
The ghost waited.
Lan Zhan realised what he was waiting for after a minute. "We don't use courtesy names any more."
The ghost sighed. "Oh. I guess they were starting to go out of fashion when I was alive. Everything has changed so much. You should just call me Wei Ying, then."
"Wei Ying."
"And you're Lan Zhan." Wei Ying smiled. "That's a nice name. Lan Zhan. I like it."
"Thank you."
"Of the Gusu Lans?"
"My family came from that area," Lan Zhan said. "We still have property there."
Wei Ying looked unexpectedly relieved. "Great, I knew there had to be a reason you could see me."
"What do you need?"
"Lan Zhan of the Gusu Lans." Wei Ying drew himself up tall and lifted his chin, looking fiercely determined. "I need you to eliminate me."