He very professionally and neatly ties it around her waist. "Where were we? --The Wen clan tends... vicious. It has been the most powerful clan for many years, and so many people in it are ambitious and power-hungry. If you don't do your best to climb to the top, someone else will push you to the ground so they can step on you." 

Merrin is mostly over being distracted by his prettiness. Mostly.

"...That doesn't sound like a very effective way to run an organization?" she says, uncertainly. "I mean, the - having everyone anticipating that either they have to be the most powerful or else they'll get...stepped on. - Metaphorically, I assume." 

"Metaphorically. --Well, who can stop it once it becomes that way? Changing a culture is hard."

Maybe at some point she will get used to his face and it will stop being distracting. Merrin thinks it is very unfair that the first clearly intelligent person she's encountered in the Bizarre Low Tech Fantasy Magic World (which she keeps hoping is a hallucination or a weird dream but she's not super expecting that at this point) is also gorgeous. 

Why would that correlate Merrin is aware that traits-generally-considered-positive tend to correlate with each other? Because of...something about mutational load, she can't remember the specifics. Possibly because she's distracted by the memory of abs– also she's still trying to hold quite a lot of medical information and that by itself would explain her distraction. 

Merrin takes a deep breath. Lets it out. "...Actually I think I could use some background on the entire conflict between the clans? Assume I'm a - small child?" aaaaah she isn't sure that's at all the association she wants to give him but never mind, "- and that I don't know anything that you'd consider obvious."

"The chief cultivator sets policy for all the clans and sects on matters important to everyone-- the education of children, border disputes, driving monsters onto other clans' territory so someone else has to kill them, that sort of thing. Clans handle their own internal matters, but the chief cultivator rules on matters affecting multiple clans. Normally, the chief cultivator is chosen by consensus of all the prominent clan and sect leaders, and he can't do anything which offends anyone too badly. Wen Ruohan wanted to be able to make whatever decisions he wanted, without having to appeal to the other major clans. So he wiped out several clans which threatened the Wen clan's power. In particular, he killed almost the entire Jiang clan-- there were only three survivors-- and attempted to kill the entire Lan clan, although fortunately more Lan could escape. Now we're going to war against the Wen clan to punish them for their actions. Does that make sense?"

Merrin was mostly following along, up to a point, but she has no idea whether that makes sense because she is too busy INTERNALLY SCREAMING! 

"......I - sorry - I'm not sure if I'm missing something but - by 'wiped out' do you mean...everyone was killed? Actually killed, murdered permanently, no way of - of getting them back -?" 

Merrin is not screaming out loud with her actual mouth but this is very, very hard and taking pretty much all of her willpower and intensively-trained discipline and inherited dath ilani Dignity. 

"Yes. Fortunately, cultivators had soul-calming ceremonies as children so they won't leave ghosts or fierce corpses."

That does not necessarily seem like an improvement, actually! If 'ghosts' and 'fierce corpses' are the best angles this bizarre fantasy world has on escaping true death– 

She can think about that LATER. 

- in the meantime it is kind of hard to think very coherently about anything else, though. 

Merrin takes another deep breath and lets it out, again. 

"I need to know what rules I should follow if I'm going to be wearing Lan robes? Apparently there are three thousand? I really cannot remember three thousand separate items but if they can be chunked into, um, less than ten sub-categories, then I can handle that. I think."

Ten is really pushing it but Merrin does not want to fail at this. She can do it if she applies extra-hard diligence, probably. 

"You are my guest, you don't have to worry about the disciplines. You aren't wearing a forehead ribbon"-- he touches his own-- "no one will mistake you for one of the Lan. Especially since you're obviously a foreigner."

"- Okay. Thank you." 

Merrin feels like she still does not at all understand the local geopolitical situation but - probably that's mostly on her? Maybe it'll be easier to figure out once she's slept, and -

- and dealt with all of her emotions about having died in a plane crash, and failed to save any of the other passengers. It's actually not at all surprising that she has feelings about that. There just hasn't been any space or time to deal with it, yet. 

Merrin is not going to say anything about this to the Lan clan leader, because it's really on her to handle this, but it's sort of showing on her face anyway, despite her best efforts. (She doesn't have a lot of practice at really hiding her thoughts and feelings. It wasn't something she was incentivized to train.) 

"You seem to have something on your mind?"

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah??? 

Yes. Yes she does. This is true. How can he tell? 

"....Um, I - died? At least I...thought I was going to. I was in a plane and it crashed. And - and now I'm here and I - I don't understand how or why or, or anything, anymore...." 

Possibly that is too much feelings and not actually what he was asking about??? Merrin feels awkward now. 

"The first time you think you're going to die is always horrible," he says. "I didn't leave seclusion for two days afterward."

"How...many times have you thought you were going to die?" 

"It's a war. I've lost count."

Merrin might notice, now that Lan Xichen's abs have been put away and are less distracting, that he's also quite young-- a little older than Wen Ning, but not very. He'd have barely graduated from school in dath ilan.

That's...confusing. He's a clan leader? Merrin isn't sure exactly what that involves but presumably there is a lot of responsibility, even separate from the entire war thing. She's noticed that a lot of things here don't fit in well with her baseline expectations for...anything, really...but some of it holds together, once she accounts for 'very low tech development' and 'magic', and this doesn't.

...Now that she's thinking about it, it's actually very notable that everyone she's interacted with is absurdly young. Much younger than her. Wei Wuxian is apparently the world's best at demonic magic and he's even younger. 

- are all the older people dead. That's not an explanation she likes but it would fit. 

"How long have you been the Lan Sect Leader?" she asks him. 

"When I was fifteen, but before the burning of the Cloud Recesses-- where the Lan live-- my uncle handled most of the day-to-day work."

Nod. "Is that - a normal age to have that amount of responsibility? What's, um, the selection and qualification process for becoming a Sect Leader?" 

Merrin also has questions about the 'burning' of the Cloud Recesses, whatever those are, but she is not going to ask right now. She's not sure that she is ready to cope with the answer. 

"No. My father died quite young. Different clans and sects have different methods of selecting a leader, but among the Lan the heir is the eldest child of the current sect leader."

"Oh. I'm sorry. That...must have been very hard for you."

This feels so, so inadequate as a response. Merrin has a wide range of scripts for a huge number of situations and yet feels not at ALL prepared for this. 

"--The books of the Lan record many strange events. If your world is unfamiliar with what happened to you, then it must be something that happened because of the way our world is."

"I would definitely like to understand what happened to me!" 

Merrin stops. Makes a face. "I...might not know, if - what happened to me - were a thing that's happened before, in my world," she says slowly. "Because, I mean, I died. From the perspective of everyone there, it's - I'm just gone, right, and there's not a mystery to explain. It's not as though I can tell anyone that actually I'm here. ...I guess the Keepers would know. Because if - this is the sort of thing that can happen - then that's a fact about the nature of reality, it's going to be correlated with everything else, reality holds together, you can still make predictions about facets of it that nobody can observe directly and report back. But that's still compatible with me not knowing that, hey, actually True Death just results in waking up in another world - I can think of lots of reasons why the Keepers might have decided that shouldn't be public knowledge..." 

"What's a Keeper?"

Merrin isn't sure what the word is translating as, for him, but it's clearly not mapping to something he recognizes.

"Ummm, they're - people who keep track of all the really important things? Especially things that are secret, and - the sort of thing that most people would have a hard time thinking about sanely. They're like scholars, I guess, and advisors. You can go to them for advice."

Wow that is not at all a clear or complete explanation of Keepers. Merrin has never actually needed to explain it to someone with no context.