( Enough. Enough of this. A man carving away the needles and splinters of himself, peeling away his skins only to learn in rounded, moaned horror, the trick of his rot is his marrow.

The widening dark of the corridor swallows the world. Lan Wangji searches the windows, for a moment, the worn-in widths of tired, withered planks. His palm catches lies and ravines of weakness, where water should have logged the wood towards decay. A slow, trickled coaxing.

It stands, to defend against him. )

You are sufficient. ( Not quite like Lan Wangji, perhaps better. Absent a clan, but gifted the world. One pauper ever envies another. ) I ask to know him. The countenance of his sickness.

( He may have come to Wen Kexing, an evil ready. But it was Wen Kexing who armed him, who shaped him, bellicose. )

You have made of a small man a great thing, invincible.