Some days, it isn’t so bad. His qi irregularities are within the expected boundaries. The desire to give in to the whispering need that wants him to succumb to violence is a quiet thing—imagine how his blood would look on our fingers, Baxia says, but Mingjue smiles through it, bows to Sect Leader Ouyang respectfully, and offers him tea. (If he spends a minute gritting his teeth and breathing heavily in a side chamber before the next assembly at the yearly cultivation conference, does it matter? If a report gets crushed between his fingers and the edge of his vision goes red for a second, a minute, did it really happen if nobody saw?) Other days, it is harder. For those days—the violent ones, the ones where he hangs onto his sanity by the edge of his teeth—he has Xichen.