When Harry was eleven years old, his Hogwarts letter came by owl. He'd been accidentally blowing windows open and lighting cauliflower on fire for years. James took Harry to go get his wand at Ollivanders, and Lily took Dudley to the Owl Emporium where he tried to convince her they should build an aviary in the backyard. They came home with a fat black cat who hissed at everyone. Dudley named him Spooks, and Lily called him Monster. "Did you have to?" said James. "That is the meanest beast I've ever met, and I've known Remus unmedicated on full moons and a pubescent Sirius thwarted in love." Lily, who had ink on her cheek and a ballpoint pen stuck behind her ear, waved vaguely at the living room without looking up from her arrest report. Dudley was asleep in an armchair. The cat sprawled across his lap. Both its front paws were wrapped around Dudley's arm as it cleaned his wrist with aggressive fondness. "Alright," said James. "Yeah, you had to."

“Well, no one cares what you think!” Jin Zixun shouted, and Jin Zixuan flinched, already knowing that this was going to end in disaster. His older cousin – his father’s favorite of the lot – was mean at the best of times, and when he was angry, he was especially cruel. A kid like Jiang Cheng, barely nine, wouldn’t be able to deal with him. “You’ll never made anything of yourself, anyway; the best thing you’ll ever be is A-Xuan’s wife!”

“You want me to what,” Lan Qiren said. “Be the father of my child,” Cangse Sanren said. Simply and straightforwardly, as if that were just a thing people said.