He wonders, for all the seconds it takes for Tang Fan to start to move, if he’s fallen asleep again. He’s not convinced it is at all possible for him to have a dream as odd as this, as ominous, as wonderful. The Tang Fan that is trying to kick his bare feet beneath the lifted linens while all the heat Sui Zhou’s body has pressed into them escapes is too wholly fleshed out to be one of Sui Zhou’s fantasies.
Ding Rong has walked himself through five vivid calculations of Wang Zhi’s death at his hands in the carriage before Wang Zhi speaks.
“I’m in need of a second,” he says.
On the one night of their journey that suspends itself in the in-between, not yet Hetao but no longer home, Wang Zhi joins him for dinner.
Every vicissitude and every sufferance and every imposition of Tang Fan, Sui Zhou has bent to. Bent, and bent, and bent, and— he breaks. Tonight, foretold and finally and at long last, he breaks.
“Do you know how?” Wang Yizhou asks, but it’s all a light tease, and he’s already taking his hand away, as if in expectation.
“Nope!” says Ji Li, confident. Then, in a move that he will recognise, in hindsight, to be the start of the complete undoing of his whole night, he adds, “But I’ll learn. Really quick.” He fishes out his phone from the pocket of his shorts, and holds it up, almost conspiratorial. “Bet I’ll have it down in one video. I’m very resourceful like that.”
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 choice, and now, in Qinghe Nie’s main hall, he’s slowed down enough for the whiplash of regret to be both immediate and immense.
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.