Lan Wangji will never tell Wei Wuxian what he did after the massacre at Nightless City—what his brother would call the only mistake he ever made. Nor will he forget it himself.
Tang Fan is looking at him — hasn't stopped looking at him once, really, in some way, since Sui Zhou stepped over the threshold and into his room — but he's looking at him, now, with a wonder so holy it's encroaching on worship. As though Sui Zhou has shot down a sun for him instead of something else infinitely less incredible.
When they arrive in the Yiling Supervisory Office, Jiang Yanli freshly recovered from fever, Jiang Cheng in a coma, and Wei Wuxian nearly at the end of his rope, Jiang Yanli does what she does best—acts as the warm, nurturing support for her brothers. But she's tired, too.
Following the tragic and sudden suicide of General Hanazawa, Ogata and Tsurumi debrief.
“Oh,” Qingming breathes out, his shoulders sinking deep with it, “how fortunate.”
Yes, Boya thinks, foolish and giddy and wrecked with affirmation, how fortunate.
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.
Ding Rong should have suspected scheming the moment he saw Wang Zhi in red.
Is it him that courts such misfortune, Qingming wonders, neither for the first nor the last time in his long baned life, or is he the misfortune courted?
In the wake of Qingming’s revelation, the night bleeds out into a sombre quiet.
His house has been so quiet without the volume of Tang Fan's life filling it, these last days.