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!”

"I'm starting to feel," says Lan Xichen, "that this was a counterproductive suggestion." Wei Wuxian looks down onto the pristine, tranquil cold springs of the Cloud Recesses. Sitting in the water, their bare shoulders rising like dumplings carefully spaced in a steaming-basket, are a large number of Lan disciples. "They seem to be doing better," he says, encouragingly. "If they--oh, no, I see what you mean." At the near bank, someone has pressed someone else against the rocks and is kissing them frantically.

A night hunt goes wrong when the group encounters a Qiongqi. While protecting his nephew, Jiang Cheng is hit with poison by the beast. They don’t have time to research an antidote, but prolonged dual cultivation with another cultivator will neutralize the poison... When he’s chosen for the job, Wei Wuxian is surprised, and determined to give his shidi a good time. Alternatively: In Which Yunmeng Recon Happens While Wei Wuxian is Balls Deep In Jiang Cheng.

Baxia takes the shape of a woman with the body of a tiger and three heads, each more horrifying than the next. Huaisang is standing between her and his brother. Wings of ink and ash unfurl behind him as the white-throated needletail dissolves into nothing from Huaisang’s right flank and [defend] activates. “What do you want?” he asks. Shouts, really, through the screaming of the desert wind and the never-ending hum of Baxia’s energy. You know what I want, she says with three voices all at once. You know what I want, delicious one, pretty one. Jewel-snake, ink demon, fiend. - in which a sacrifice is made.

As a twisted gift for the sworn brotherhood of Nie Mingjue, Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao, Jin Guangshan slips heat triggering poison into his son’s tea. It has the opposite effect than he hopes, and instead of isolating Jin Guangyao from his sworn brothers, it deepens their bonds, making Jin Guangyao finally decide on whose side his loyalty lays.

It isn't even an accident, precisely—that might be the most humiliating thing about it. Lan Wangji had tasted the tea, expecting it to be precisely what it revealed itself to be; Lan Wangji had wanted to feel its effects, to gauge them, although he had expected them to be mild. He had brewed the tea himself. An entirely uncoerced and foolish act. Lan Wangji has a misadventure with an aphrodisiac. It works out for everyone.