If they cannot be vulnerable with one another as brothers, who else will shoulder that weight for them? Who else could survive it? Who else would dare risk their back and their life in the trying?

“You missed the discussion conference,” Jiang Cheng snaps back at him, whipping his head up stiffly from his perfunctory bow.

Nie Huaisang’s smile doesn’t waver, his entire expression perfectly, painstakingly polite. He looks pale, but anyone of his mettle would, clad in the violent contrast of silver and black. It all relinquishes nothing to Jiang Cheng but the means to inflame his irritation for the situation and for himself. He had left the conference too quickly to contemplate his …

If Jiang Cheng kills him here — so long as he sits with Wei Wuxian’s body in this field until he grows cold, and he does not return to Lotus Pier — his life will have been worth its cost.

A sabre is, by nature, forthright.

If Lan Wangji has learned anything from his atonement for Wei Wuxian’s death, it is that patience is neither simple nor shallow.

The possibility that keeps him up at night is that Meng Yao came into his service an honest man, and over time changed into what he sees before him now. That, as his ambitions rose and his world grew grander, he reshaped himself and discovered the things he was capable of, all the while looking like his familiar self, but transforming under his skin into something Nie Mingjue could hardly recognize.

“Why do you wear your face like that?”

Nie Huaisang's hand comes up partway to Meng Yao's face before his fingers curl inwards. Meng Yao's eyes go wide and tremulous before the corners of his mouth curl into a small smile, like one of the soundless laughs shared between them in the midst of a banquet speech.

Talking at someone is only fun for so long. That's all being a sect leader is: talking and talking to people bound by courtesy to listen to you. It's so fucking dull. A relief, then, to face one’s equal, and no less an old friend who is inclined to interrupt you whenever you ramble. He likes it. It’s one of Jiang Cheng’s best qualities.

In the years after Guanyin Temple, Nie Huaisang attends to unfinished business.

Jin Guangyao thinks that, in another life, he would have been an excellent merchant. He is not so foolish as to commit certain things to written record, but in his mind, there exists a ledger. Considerations behind every action, what he has risked, and what he has gained. People who are beholden to him, people who fear him, people who want what only he can provide. People who want him.

Wen Ning recognizes what is happening. He is being confessed to. This happens to him, sometimes. There is something about him that makes people tell him secrets, although he doesn't think he does anything to encourage this. His sister used to say he had trust-worthy proportions, which people could naturally see. Since she had never read his fate in his face, this doesn't seem too reliable.

Wen Ning encounters Lan Xichen, and they discuss trees. A secret i…