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.

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?"