The search for breath starts with starvation, then urgency, then fear, then inhalation. On Wei Ying, the weight of the cultivation world is tangle of dark-wetted weeds, Lan Wangji's head reduced to white noise and its ornaments. Scratch and scrape, where pins still bind back tresses loosened. Damp has triaged his hair, made noose of the half that it has not born a mourning shroud over his forehead, his heated cheeks.

He gasps with it, chases Wei Ying's pulse with eyes beaded and round, a cat set on prey.

"...a-Yuan? Safe" Between them they share the lacquered, temple beads of a secret, rolling like dull, hollow heartbreak. He does not reduce Sizhui to his infancy often, to the years of his innocence as if his identity among the Lan is unrepresentative. But they are family, Wei Ying frames him.

He presses the tip of his nose against Wei Ying's collar, then, calmly peels back, until he is alone, severed, distant — orbiting the bath's lip again, easing in until his hair succumbs and spreads like a wild net in lake waters. A lotus flower, unfurling. In Lotus Pier, they eat and bruise and wear the blossoms in their hair. What would they make of him, so vulnerably ready for the killing?

"If he asks of your marks, speak their truth." A man should not lie to his one son.