“It’s not wrong if you write it down,” Mo Xuanyu muttered to himself like a mantra as he scribbled down a rough explanation of what he was going to do. “If you write it down, it’s just an experiment, and that makes it okay.” That’s what they used to say back at Koi Tower, back when they were doing all those bad things. They also said that you’re supposed to try stuff out before you do the real thing, because practice makes perfect. And anyway, surely it wouldn't hurt to put the cat in the middle of the body-sacrificing array before he put himself in - the array ran on resentment, on revenge, and how much resentment could a cat possibly have?

There was another boy there at the base of the balcony outside of Meng Shi's window, where Meng Yao liked to sit: a boy few years older than him, taller, in finely made clothing that would normally make Meng Yao itch all over in futile envy, but the other boy’s eyes were white around the edges in a way that was immediately, painfully familiar. “Someone’s chasing you?” Meng Yao asked, and the boy’s eyes widened even further, surprised, but he nodded in confirmation. “There’s a trellis around the left side – can you climb up? I'll hide you.” "Thanks," the boy said, later, once the man he called Wen Ruohan had left. "My name is Nie Mingjue. What's yours?"

It wasn’t that Jiang Cheng hadn’t liked Nie Huaisang well enough, when they were all learning together in the Cloud Recesses. Anyone who had the energy to keep up with Wei Wuxian – and just enough good sense to help veer him off the really bad ideas, even if he did keep egging him on in regards to the medium-grade bad ones – was good news in his books. But liking him didn’t mean respecting him, and the fact that Nie Huaisang hadn’t participated much in the war – couldn’t participate much – had led Jiang Cheng to discount him more or less entirely. That’s what made it all the more surprising when Nie Huaisang ended up being the unofficial leader of the three remaining Great Sects in opposing Jin Guangshan after the war.