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.
Wei Wuxian examines the shackles. "These were definitely created just to hold Wen Ning," he says. "Hmm..." he reaches for Wen Ning's head and feels around under his hair, eventually extracting two long, wicked-looking black nails. He makes a face at them.
"The Jins, or whoever had him, must have used these to suppress his mind. It's going to take some time for him to recover. He'll definitely be noticed if we try to bring him to the shrine with these chains still on him, and they definitely won't yield to ordinary force. Can you use Bichen to cut them off?"
"Mn." It is completely irrational to feel jealous of Wen Ning for having Wei Ying's hands all over his head like that, given the context. He unsheathes his sword and begins cutting away the strengthened metal, careful to avoid catching the flesh underneath.
[Yisabeila, we have Wen Ning. Wei Wuxian believes that the Jin sect chose to imprison him instead of destroying him. He was being forcibly prevented from regaining consciousness. We intend to bring him to the shrine to destroy the goddess statue.]
[Can you ask Jingyi to create a distraction? I do not think destroying a goddess statue without proof would be taken well even if Wen Ning were not widely reviled.]
[Yeah.]
[Jingyi, can you do something distracting? If nobody provokes the goddess statue destroying it looks bad but provoking it is undesirable.]
Jingyi creates a distraction. It is extremely obvious when Jingyi creates a distraction. There is a very loud explosion coming from approximately the opposite direction of the shrine.
"What was that?"
"Lan Jingyi. I requested that he provide a distraction so that we could destroy the goddess unseen."
"Wow, this mysterious foreigner of yours just gets more and more mysterious. Lead on, then."
They wait a little while for people farther from the distraction than them to get past, then make their way to the shrine, Lan Wangji in the lead, checking for witnesses as they go, then Wei Ying, and finally Wen Ning following Wei Ying like a puppy dog, except exponentially either more or less terrifying depending on whether or not one is Wei Ying.
The shrine is old and not exceptionally well-maintained, littered with used incense sticks and decomposing offerings. Wei Wuxian ignores them and points at the goddess statue, a boulder naturally worn away by the elements into a remarkably humanlike figure, so much so that people decided it must be divine.
"Break it," he tells Wen Ning.
Wen Ning wades in to the statue, shattering its limbs and torso with no finesse but overwhelming power. It isn't long before the statue is reduced to homogenous rubble.
Unfortunately, pulverizing stone in a cramped echoey cave like this shrine is is kind of loud. Before they make it back to the entrance of the cave, voices can be heard speculating about the noise.
Possibly moving faster would prevent this and possibly it would not. He should at least try to resolve this before reporting misfortune to Yisabeila.
It seems pretty difficult to resolve, though.
Wei Wuxian does not have "call the precog" firmly lodged in his option set. He looks around for anything useful, sees a grinning opera mask among the offerings, and puts it on Wen Ning, adjusting his robes so the black veins don't show as prominently.
Three cultivators from smaller sects walk in and see the rubble on the floor that used to be a statue.
"Hanguang-jun! Did you see who did this? Who are these two?"
"...They are with me. Nobody else has been in the cave since we arrived but you."
"Do you think the soul-eating creature did it?"
"I suspect the soul-eating creature was involved with the statue's destruction."
"How terrifying!"
He manages to usher Wei Ying and Wen Ning out of the cave without having to say anything else.
[We destroyed the statue without being caught.]
The soul-eating goddess is dealt with, which is good, because nobody's soul is going to get eaten anymore and the survivors can be restored. It is also bad, because it means Wei Ying has no more reason to hang around him.
Unless...
"Come meet Suan Yisabeila," he suggests.
"Huh? Your extremely foreign disciple with the weird powers? Would she want to meet me?"
"I told her about Wen Ning. She is interested in the potential for people to be less dead."
"Hah, is that so? Well...you said she's how you knew about me, and Wen Ning, so I guess she already knows we're alive, so it probably can't hurt much."
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