Nie Huaisang flips his fan shut with a fluid pivot of his wrist and taps it to his own mouth, signalling for Jiang Cheng to lower his voice. “So you can see just how serious this is! If it’s found out, we’ll really be in some strife.”

“We?” Jiang Cheng gapes at him, and does not lower his voice at all. “We?! There is no we in this! This is a problem of your own making, it can be a problem of your own solving!”

Of all the prisons in which she's spent time, Lotus Pier may be the kindest.

There is no-one here to watch Nie Mingjue, save for their ancestors, save for him.

“If there is anything else that can be said of Qinghe Nie,” Lan Xichen recites, helplessly faint, “it is that we take our weddings and our burials very seriously—”

“—For they are, to us, one and the same,” Nie Huaisang finishes for him. “You do remember.”

He will remake Qinghe—refurbishing its rooms, balancing its ledgers, soothing its master’s tempers—until it’s a place for a man like him.