He knows himself, in the paints of Wei Ying's pity: wreckage, temple a hard bruise, hand ruined by feverish eruption of need to crumble salt in the mines and cleanse the unburied dead. More shell than man, a familiar travesty.

He knows, too, the sight before him: Wei Ying, protective as he stood once before the young Sizhui, voice figments of carefully crafted tenderness, combined. Hands, hesitant. Words immature, traded only for the reassurance that he is here, beside Lan Wangji, alive and well and paying mind.

Bopping Wangji's nose, with a freedom so cavalier that Lan Wangji blinks at the offending hand, too paralysed to flee it.

"We are not in Cloud Recesses." Where he is royalty of the white mountain, served hand and foot by docile disciples and willing attendants, revered as brother to Zewu-Jun by sect members and chief cultivators by a cohort of squabbling children, the remaining clans. Here, he is stone weight on an ill-cleansed floor, hand curled tight and hot on tile and panel, frown deep-carved and infantile. He has no entitlements.

"I want for nothing," he pronounces, staggered. But lacks, notably, for everything. Foremost:

"...stay." More fool him, he only just said — "Until the floors dry. Footprints."

That old excuse, then.