Just as it is apt for Sui Zhou to invite him, he has grown adept at telling what it is that he is inviting. This Tang Fan is real, tonight, and so Sui Zhou goes with him all the way into waking.
“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.
Of all the prisons in which she's spent time, Lotus Pier may be the kindest.
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.
In the early days of the Russo-Japanese War, a disciplinary episode results in Sugimoto Saichi being transferred from the 1st to the 7th Division. It doesn't take long to figure out that Russian gunfire might pose him less danger than the tangled web of a unit in which he's ended up.