It starts with Meng Yao’s scars. Well. Depending on how one looks at it, it might start with Nie Mingjue of Qinghe naming his oldest and lowest ranked disciple his vice general. It might also start the day Meng Yao first lays eyes upon Lan Xichen standing under a flowering haitang tree in Gusu, and is filled with an immediate, burning sense of wanting. Perhaps it doesn’t actually matter how it starts. - in which Meng Yao seeks comfort in yielding.

“Huaisang?” asks Jiang Cheng when he leans against him. “I’m tired,” Huaisang says into Jiang Cheng’s shoulder. “Just tired.” Jiang Cheng hums and settles a hand on his shoulder, a minute touch, warm and steady. Then he winds an arm around Huaisang’s waist and picks him up effortlessly like he weighs nothing: like he is exactly as hollow as he feels right this moment, on this balcony, under these stars. “Come on,” says Jiang Cheng. “Let’s go to bed.” - In which Huaisang has a recurring nightmare, the Nie disciples demonstrate excellent capacity for problem-solving, and Jiang Cheng turns out to be more patient than it is generally expected of him.

The cascade of events that lead to this moment—Nie Mingjue in a mesh crop top and billowing pants and a snake shaped chain that connects the neck bit to his trousers, good god—started, like all chaotic things in Mingjue’s life do, with Huaisang. With Huaisang’s new boyfriend, to be precise. And Huaisang’s boyfriend’s brother’s boyfriend’s brother. Who just happened to be Mingjue’s high school almost-sweetheart. - in which Huaisang has an art show, Xichen wears a suit, and there are. Shenanigans.

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.

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.

One day Lan Xichen will ask Meng Yao why he chose to go to Qinghe after his mother died. Meng Yao will say that he chose the Nie Sect because of Nie Mingjue’s well-known distaste for Jin Guangshan, but the truth is at once simpler and more immediate: Meng Yao walks out of the sea, hangs the pouch with his mother’s ashes around his neck, and vows never to swim again until he gets her other-skin back from Jin Guangshan. Qinghe, tucked between mountain peaks and barren hills, is as far from this gentle sea shore as he can think of. That Nie Mingjue turned out to be a man Meng Yao didn’t expect and couldn’t anticipate was an accident. - In which Meng Yao makes promises he cannot keep, some things are irreversibly broken, and the villain earns his due punishment at last.

“Let’s play a game,” Xingchen says. Song Lan and Xue Yang share a look.