( They do not attack the dead, their kind, their kind. They do not metabolise suffering too alike their own. This, Lan Wangji understands, however perfunctorily.

This ecosystem cannot survive long-term, if demons do not breed and the Motherless yet consume them. If the water around them, dark and vast and bottomless, keeps drawing the natural predators of these creatures to forgetfulness and sleep. )

What draws them to its sickness? Its lethality?

( Its vast, endless realm of destructive possibilities? He remembers: that in Taravast it thralled, in Ellethia doomed. In Ke-Waihu, somehow, it salvaged. In Serthica, it was lubricant to illusions, a critical component to deceptions of decay. )

It offers... nothing.

( To them, at least, it has only ever been an obstacle. )