"Ahh...there you are, Lan-guniang." 

"Let them go. Leave the Cloud Recesses."

He gestures, and his soldiers surround her with swordpoints at her neck. 

"Where is the Yin Iron?" 

"Leave the Cloud Recesses. I will go to Qishan."

He slowly smirks. 

"Alright." 

He circles her, looking at her with a concerning glint in his eye. 

"You know...we were always going to get the Yin Iron from your sect. It would have been much smarter to try to hide the treasure that is Lan-guniang, enh?" he asks, tipping her chin up with the point of his sword. 

She stares straight ahead. "Tell your soldiers to retreat. Now."

"Hm." 

He gives her a considering look. 

"Break her leg." 

One of the soldiers thwacks something extremely heavy against her calf as Wen Xu waves the rest of the soldiers away. 

She gasps through clenched teeth and falls to one knee. Pain shoots up her entire leg like lightning.

Lan Zhan has never broken a bone before. It fucking hurts; agony comes in waves, pulsing stronger with each heartbeat. She bears it silently.

Su She flinches worse than she does.

The soldiers haul her off, supporting much of her weight with their tight grips on her upper arms and shoulders; what this spares her in pain to her broken leg is at least somewhat returned in the digging of gauntleted fingers into her flesh. 

They reach a temporary camp with tents in Wen colors. She is bound hand and foot and thrown into one unceremoniously and warned not to try to escape. 

Well. She hopes Brother made it out alive. 

She still has the Yin Iron. If they search her, they will find it, and she needs to do something about that. She needs to hide it somewhere else, and there are not very many other places available to her. Does the ground under this tent have any convenient holes?

A rabbit, recognizing her, crawls out of its burrow to nuzzle her hand. 

Her eyes fill with tears. At least the bunnies are okay. (There were so many bodies, so much blood...)

Lan Zhan pets the bunny and curls around it. Soft and friendly. A very good bunny.

"You are safe. Good job," she tells the bunny quietly.

The bunny makes contented bunny noises at her. 

So, so good. The bunny is being very sweet; she thanks it seriously.

She needs to take a break from petting the bunny to remove the Yin Iron from her robes, but it can still be cuddled. It takes a few minutes to extricate the pouch from beneath all five layers of her hanfu, but eventually it tumbles to the ground. She nudges it towards the rabbit's burrow.

The bunny prods at the Yin Iron with its soft bunny nose. Maybe it recognizes it; these bunnies were Lan Yi's companions originally, after all. 

She thanks the bunny for its hard work. Eventually the Yin Iron disappears into the burrow with a muted thump.

"You must look after this for a time," she murmurs, petting the bunny.

The bunny nuzzles her again and hops into its burrow. 

It is some amount of time later--less than half an hour, more than a quarter--when Wen Xu strides into the tent where she is held. 

"Search her," he orders the soldiers flanking him on either side. 

They do. They do not take great pains to be professional about it, but when they have confirmed that there is nowhere she could be hiding the Yin Iron on her person, they stop and inform Wen Xu of this. 

"Hmm," he says. "Leave us." 

The soldiers leave. 

He grips her by the chin. 

"Where did you hide it?" 

"You can make your life a lot more pleasant by cooperating, you know." 

She could've also made her life a lot more pleasant by killing Wen Xu the moment she surrendered, but she didn't do that now did she.

She did not, and now she has to live with the situation she's in now. 

"Tell me where it is, and I'll make sure everyone knows you're my...personal prisoner. Refuse, and I'll let my little brother use whatever methods he likes to get the information out of you." 

She is not overly concerned with the interrogation methods of the least competent person she has ever encountered.

(...She is trying not to be concerned with his interrogation methods. But it's not like being Wen Xu's personal prisoner is a more acceptable outcome.)

"Fine. So be it," he says eventually. He stands up and leaves. 

(Wen Chao visits before too terribly long. He is profoundly incompetent at extracting information; unfortunately, his one proficient skill is making things very, very unpleasant for the people around him.)