Downwards, pressure opposes him, strips and lashes skin it cannot reach. The suit at once shields and strangulates him, lessens him from man to iota of dust, from a projectile, weight-bearing, to a particle adrift.

Around them, the coral crown thickens, doubles its filigree. On instinct, he reaches a hand out to anchor himself in the nest of threadbare, cloying dark. On caution, he holds back. It seems to him the coral's littered wisps of rot and vine have spiralled into an eternity, and the reach is only south and souther-bound.

"I had assumed," but he knows the segue, inevitable, and battles through it, "Limitations."

Humbling, to understand what Wrath politely keeps hidden: that limits and corners and edges carve out the space of Lan Wangji's reality, but need not his own. "You are fully immune?"