The familiar scent of aged ink and paper lingered in the air, mingling with the subtle remnant of sandalwood and incense that drifted from the burner positioned near the window ledge. The stick had long since burned to ash, collapsing into its tray at some point during the night, untouched and unmoved in the hours that had passed unnoticed. No one had been awake to tend to it.
Dust motes drifted in the pale gold light that crept through the window, each particle suspended in the stillness belonging to the early morning. The light moved slow as honey across the worn floorboards, casting long shadows that stretched and swayed along the walls in a silent performance, a shifting theater that gave away the hour more honestly than any bell could. It was the kind of morning that felt apologetic for arriving, as though the sun itself was aware it was intruding on something fragile.
Within the sect's inner compound, the core disciples' residential wing was just beginning to stir. Or perhaps had already stirred, leaving behind only one memory of tinted blue hair. From somewhere down the corridor, into the late yard of the Sword Arts Pavilion, came the distant clatter of a water basin, the soft shuffle of feet across wood, the low murmur of early risers already preparing for morning forms. No one had thought to check on the smallest room at the far end of the hall, not yet.
He Renxiao had always been punctual. He had always been at morning practice before anyone else, standing at the edge of the training ground with his sword already drawn, his breath already heavy with the implication that he had been training long before anyone in the sect had risen. It had never occurred to his fellow disciples that they might need to knock. They had already expected the male would be at work.
They would have been shocked, then, had they known what was happening inside that room.
A sharp gasp tore through the silence.
He Renxiao shot upright from his bed with the blind, violent urgency of a drowning man breaching the surface of water that had been pulling him in a drowning repeat or suffering. His breath came in ragged pulls, quick and thinner than thread. For a long moment, he simply sat there in a disorienting maddness of confusion, fear, and a deeper feeling of loss he couldn't, and rather wouldn't if he could, place. His chest heaved and his fingers knotted in the bed sheets beneath him like a vice.
Slowly, as though moving through something thicker than air, he lowered his gaze to his hands.
They looked wrong.
They were soft in the morning light. Smoothm and unblemished, without callus or scar and without the rough, hardened texture that years of relentless swordplay had carved into the throws of his very body.. The skin was almost delicate in its unmarked state, pale and fine-boned. These were not his hands. His hands were rough maps of everything he had survived, scarred by blade and by grip, by the cold iron of chains and the crueler weight of a golden core slowly being shattered from the inside out.
More correctly, these were his hands, but yet, something that would have took a play in a finer time of life. Before he had to worry about politics and when his next meal, if there would be, would be, while on a field of blood and sweat piled with bodies as far as the eye could see.
His vision was blurred. this meant nothing. He was probably just too tired to think straight.
That was right. He was awake now. What had happened? Where did this feeling come from?
A nightmare. He'd had a nightmare.
That in itself was not unusual. Nights were a common occurance for the male with black, tinted blue and braided hair. His sleep had been plagued by demons, both real and imagined, for longer than he cared to measure.
He had grown almost resigned to it over the years, like it was customary, in the way one grows resigned to an old injury that never fully heals, just flares up at the worst possible moments and reminds you it was always there.
But this one had been different. It wasn't like the dreams that had carried he pain of his lost Shixiong, now the emperor of the the cultivation realm, and rather, this clung to him even now as consciousness settled, unlike those other dreams, and began seeping into his bones like a cold that had nothing to do with the morning air.
And yet, try as he might to grasp at the fine fragments of it, to pull them into focus, to understand what had reduced him to this breathless, trembling state, it slipped through the cracks of his memory like water through trembling fingers. Nothing remained.
His fingers trembled where they clutched the sheets.
It was only then that he realized the fabric was damp.
He touched his face with shaking hands and found the wet tracks still fresh on his cheeks. He stared at his fingers afterward, shock tinkling in like spilled Ink on a calligraphy mat.
He was crying.
Everything felt surreal.
The walls were the same.
The furniture was the same.
The faint sandalwood scent, the latticed window, the worn floor, all exactly as it should be.
And yet, He Renxiao knew this was not where he was meant to be. He had been in the Snow Parting Pavilion. He had been locked there. Trapped there, lost there, so why now, of all times, had he been placed in this hell space, in the old sect he lived as a young 9 year old child?
He felt entirely adrift from himself, as though whatever had haunted him in sleep had left a sliver of itself inside him when it fled.
He pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead with a low groan. Pain, sharp and radiating, greeted the pressure immediately, making the edges of his vision blur. He breathed through his nose, slow and deliberate, applying the same method he had once used to endure things far worse than headaches.
When the worst of the pulsing had dulled to something merely unpleasant, he attempted to swing his legs over the side of the bed.
His entire body protested. It was not just a mild complaint, his muscles were screaming as though he had been put through a training gauntlet the day before, or as though someone had beaten him while he slept.
His shoulders ached. His back throbbed. His legs felt dense and foreign. It made no sense. He could not recall sparring, could not recall training past the point of exhaustion, could not recall doing anything that would explain this level of physical misery.
It reminded him of a time when he was young and bold, tedious and quick enough to force himself to train and push through pain as if it was tea he could simply refuse to stop drinking.
Strange fragments flickered through his mind as he sat hunched at the edge of the bed.
A flash of a jade pendant.
Raised voices, his own among them, raw with something that might have been fury or desperation or both.
The figure of Mo Shuyi.
A blade.
The cold sensation of stone beneath him, and something warm pooling beneath his side.
A dagger pointed somewhere in his hands to defend rather than fight, yet ending up pushed through ribs, muscle, and blood anyhow.
And then nothing. The rest was empty.
He Renxiao had always prided himself on his memory.
It was one of the few things he had never questioned about himself, that sharp, precise recall that allowed him to remember the smallest details of a situation hours or days after the fact.
It had served him well in cultivation, and it had served him even better in survival, which had, for a considerable stretch of his life, required far more careful attention to detail than any martial technique.
These gaps, these blank stretches where important things should have been, were not just frustrating, they were torture.
He rose from the bed with careful, deliberate movements, bracing himself against the bed frame until he was certain his legs would hold.
A low growl escaped his throat. Pure frustration. Pure discomfort. He already knew, with the absolute certainty of someone who had survived too many terrible days to count, that today was going to be horrible.
His gaze drifted across the room and found the bronze mirror on the far wall. Old, the metal dulled with age and slight tarnish at its edges, it had hung there long enough that it had become part of the room's furniture in the way all permanent things do.
He approached it with the slow, reluctant steps of someone approaching a verdict.
The reflection that met him was his own. He recognized the dark crimson-gold eyes, unusual enough in their coloring that they had drawn comment throughout his entire life.The architecture of the face was familiar. But the face itself was wrong in a way he could not immediately articulate.
But he soon enough realized the picture of what was wrong.
The face was young.
Not just young in the way he might appear after rest or before stress had settled into his features. It was the face of a boy.
Fourteen, perhaps, or fifteen at the absolute most, though for him this would look ten or eleven, due to his stunted growth.
He stood before that mirror for a long time, taking in the impossible scene with a growing, cold clarity.
And then, with a quiet sigh that seemed to come from somewhere very deep and very tired, the only possible conclusion settled over him like snow.
He was dreaming.
The 'nightmore' he had come to from before was reality, and now he was merely dreaming. ironic in a funny way.
He thought of Mo Shuyi. Of the fight that had not seemed deadly at first.
He could remember, with painful precision, the sensation of cold steel sliding between his ribs, the hot-cold spread of it moving through his chest.
It had not struck the heart.
He had convinced himself of that in the moments when blood pooled beneath him across ancient stone. It had not been a mortal wound, not for the cultivator he had once been, the one with a strong golden core and advanced healing and something to fight back with.
But his golden core was no longer what it had been. Mo Shuyi had seen to that, slowly and systematically, over more time than He Renxiao liked to think about, yet quicker the moment it happened. What might once have been survivable had perhaps simply been too much for what remained of him.
He did not know whether to laugh or to cry. He didn't know what had come over Mo Shuyi in that moment, nor what he had done to engage the male so intensely that it involved such a fight.
He stood in the hazy liminal space between those two responses for a long moment, doing neither, this time not about why, but the outcome. And then he turned away from the mirror.
He was here. Whatever "here" was. And while he was here, he might as well let himself exist in it without fighting.
Lucid dreaming was not uncommon for him. His mind was a precise and stubborn instrument that often refused to fully relinquish consciousness even in sleep, constructing careful architectures out of memory,grief, and recycled pain.
He knew this dream for what it was.
This one was not alarming. Always calm, and yet somehow different, more careful in its rendering than the nightmares that usually claimed him.
He couldn't bother himself to think more about it.
He turned to his closet and opened it.
He Renxiao was, technically, one of the young masters of the sect. Though that true crown of "young master" would always go to Li Yuan, his older half brother, as the future air and son of the current sect leader and his wife.
This was a designation that had always sat somewhat awkwardly on him, like a formal robe cut for someone else's measurements.
He knew his father was the sect leader.
He also knew his father as a distant figure at best, a man whose face appeared at formal functions and whose acknowledgment arrived in the form of material provision rather than anything warmer or more human than that.
He was different for Li Yuan. Li Yuan had a stronger relationship with the man. he grew up with him in the time that truly mattered in childhood.
His mother had died when he was very small. He had lived with her, unaware of who his father was, until the time was too late for him to have any true functionality to the cause. He also had a twin brother named "He Chixuan," howeber.. His twin brother had gone with her, taken by the same fire that He Renxiao had barely survived himself.
He did not remember his brother's face. He did not remember his mother's face, either, though he had been told, by Lan Qiang and by a few others, including the mysterious form his his father, that she had been beautiful.
He chose to believe this. It was one of the few pieces of her he had access to, and he held it carefully.
She had worked at a brothel, or had become a brothel maiden after he was born, the specifics were something He Renxiao had never fully untangled.
She had hidden him and his brother in a small bunker she had made herself, concealing him and his btoher from the clients and from the world, making them pretend to be her younger sisters on the rare occasions they could not be hidden at all.
If anyone had known she had children, both her life and theirs would have been more complicated and more dangerous than they already were.
He Renxiao had never blamed her for any of it.
She had done what she could with what she had.
He understood that now in a way he had not been old enough to understand when she was still alive. Just like he hadn't been able to understand why she sacrificed herself to save him and He Chixuan,.
His father, Li Chengyuan, had apparently loved his mother before the brothel, before whatever complicated chain of events had led her there.
The story had gone as follows; Madame He was a young lady descended from one of the many clans that had merged to form the Li Clan and its smaller daughter sects in which the sect leaders sons would later take hold of after generations and generations of raising a clan stronger than most elite royal armies of the time.
Li Chengyuan had fallen in love with her.. He had specified what happened beyond this. According to the him, she had run away in order to protect their child,
He Renxiao had opinions about it. He kept them to himself.
The name "He Renxiao" in question had come from a night of grief and alcohol.
His father, informed of the infant's existence before Madame He had up and left the sect like a thief in the night, had been intoxicated when he chose the name after losing his first son that Madame He had miscarried, and assuming on the basis of what he had been told that the child was a girl. He Renxiao, taken from "He Ren," his mother's name, combined with "xiao," meaning small or little.
A little version of Madame He.
A milk name, a childhood name, something soft and feminine that had been given to a small boy who had grown into someone complicated.
He had a formal name, Li Meiling, bestowed upon him by Lan Qiang in the ceremony, rather than the scoundrel Li Chengyuan who never had time for him, and that had made him an official disciple instead of his father doing the honor.
He used it when he had to. But He Renxiao was the name his mother had chosen to keep, the name carried her in it, and he had never been able to let it go. He was, as he had been told several millions of times, just like her. He was the little version of Madame He, the great and powerful female cultivator later reduced to a lowly brothel Maiden. He told himself he would always uphold her cultivator name in honor of who she was, and not how she ended.
His fellow disciples had understood this without being told.
They called him what he asked to be called. Lan Qiang, who had given him the formal name in the first place, was the only one He Renxiao had been too afraid to correct, and so he answered to both. One more formally, and the other a familiar term.
He pulled a set of robes from the closet and stood holding them for a moment.
The navy blue robe with the laced sleeves. The blackish-blue belt that clipped at the waist. His sect had formal uniforms that defined ranks within the sect. Unless at public events or masters performing inspections, disciples weren't required to wear them, however, and sect master only had a color preference, the deep and varied range of blues, royal, sky, light, navy, and He Renxiao had always defaulted to the darkest of them. It suited him, he thought. Or perhaps he had simply worn it so long it had become part of his self-image.
He Renxiao had quickly become a core-disciple after he was proven through trials that he was worthy after entering the sect, which was why he had been permitted his own quarters that he wouldn't have to share with any other disciple. He had been offered his own pavilion, but at the time, he had been too scared to be far away from Mo Shuyi. In contrary, however, since he was a young master, these rules never applied to He Renxiao, and he was also required, outside of the sect, to wear the same robes that Li Yuan always wore no matter the occasion.
He looked at the matching ribbon for a long moment. It would tie up half his hair in the way he'd worn it back then, the rest twisted back and braided neatly. He'd forgotten how much thought had gone into it, in those early days. How deliberate even small things like this had been.
Yet, even despite this, he eventually set the ribbon aside.
It had been years since he'd last had reason to wear those robes. The first time Mo Shuyi had taken him, the robes had been ruined in the process, torn and then, he had always assumed, burned, while Mo Shuyi took whatever pleasures he wanted from his body.
He had been left with only white inner robes afterward, a detail so deliberately humiliating that it had taken considerable effort not to let it break something fundamental in him. Though of course, this had happened after Mo Shuyi had shattered his core. What could have been any more humiliating?
The white had felt like a statement. He had never been sure if Mo Shuyi had intended it to be one or if it had simply been convenient cruelty.
The ribbon felt wrong now. Too proper. Too much like someone He Renxiao was no longer capable of being. Someone he had been before suffering had rearranged the furniture of his personality into configurations more suited to survival than softness.
Before he turned to the door, he paused in front of the mirror once more. This time he looked not at the face but lower, where the inner robes lay smooth and unmarked against young skin. In his real life, those robes would have revealed scars. A constellation of them, some faint with age, some still sharp in the memory even if they had faded on the surface.
He had used a spell to clear them, early on, when hiding his past had still felt like something he could manage. The spell had worked. The scars were gone. He still remembered every single one of them. The tired days that had followed when he was living at the brothel and even time he got caught outside the room, the warden would be at him while his mother cried for mercy.
It was stupid, the part of him that sometimes missed them.
He hated the scars.
He had always hated them.
But they had been proof, in their own ugly way, of everything he had endured and not been destroyed by, like what Mo Shuyi had done.
Without them, there was only the smooth evidence of a life that, on the surface, appeared to have happened to someone else.
He turned from the mirror and went to the door.
He Renxiao had barely turned the handle before the door swung open from the other side, causing him to stumble back in shock. A startled, reflexive yelp came forth of his throat, of someone whose nerves had already been worn to a thin, frayed edge, and whose body reacted before his mind could interfere. The back of his legs met the edge of the bed once more and he caught himself against the bed frame with both hands, heart hammering so hard he could feel it in his jaw.
Standing in the doorway, eyes wide and expression pitched somewhere between relief and scolding, was Jing Peishi.
He was seventeen, perhaps eighteen, with a round, younger-looking face that he had been teased about more than once and that he bore with the long-suffering patience of someone who had learned there was no point fighting certain battles.
He was a disciple of Elder Liu Shibao, one of the five disciples He Renxiao had known and been close to within the sect's broader community, in other words just the core disciples'. He had always, always worried too much about everyone around him. It was perhaps his most defining characteristic, the way concern seemed to radiate off him in constant, low-level waves, sharpening into something almost frantic when any of his younger martial siblings gave him cause for it.
He was giving He Renxiao that look now. The frantic one.
"Xiao-Shidi!" His voice carried with genuine concern and was now channeling that worry into something that sounded almost like accusation. "Where were you? I've been standing out here for ten minutes, knocking, and everyone else has been wondering, and I was about to go get Shizun myself, you made me so worried—"
He Renxiao exhaled through his nose, slowly, and straightened his posture.
He had forgotten.
Of course he had forgotten.
In his mind, he had only just arrived here, only just manifested into this dream's careful reconstruction of the past, and he had had no way of knowing that from the perspective of everyone else in this dream, he was simply late to morning lessons. He had missed half the morning. He was never late. They had every reason to worry.
This was a nightmare if He Renxiao had ever seen one, he thought, with a dark humor that surprised even himself: Even in death, I'm late to morning lessons. Shizun would have said something cutting about it.
He cleared his throat. "Sorry to worry you, Shixiong," he said, and his voice came out measured, composed, giving nothing away. He had learned that particular skill through long necessity. "I just wasn't feeling well."
Jing Peishi stepped forward immediately, face shifting into the concentrated, searching expression of someone running a private diagnostic. He lifted one hand and pressed it gently to He Renxiao's cheek, tilting the younger boy's face slightly to look at him with the hard-eyed focus of someone convinced that the truth was hidden somewhere in the complexion if you looked closely enough.
The touch was gentle. Warm. Thoroughly, heartbreakingly normal.
It was the kind of concern He Renxiao had not experienced in a very long time, the direct, uncomplicated worry of someone who simply cared whether you were all right and had no ulterior motive behind the asking. He had forgotten it could exist without conditions attached.
In the real past, the one He Renxiao carried inside him, Jing Peishi had been one of the first. One of Mo Shuyi's earliest victims, back when everything had first begun to fracture after Mo Shuyi escaped the water prison, when He Renxiao's caring senior brother they had all known had started his transformation into something unrecognizable.
He had died before He Renxiao had understood what was happening, before any of them had understood, before anyone had been given the chance to do anything at all.
Of course, at the time, He Renxiao had been too gravely injured and ill to do much of anything other than listen to his Shizun tell him everything that happened outside the pavilion, and the grief had been weaponized against him before he even had time to properly feel it.
Seeing Jing Peishi now, alive and present and worried in that excessive, familiar way of his, was more than He Renxiao had been prepared for.
This dream was set to torture him.
His eyes burned. He did not allow them to do anything further.
"I'm alright now, Shixiong. Thank you." He made his voice stay even. A smile followed, practiced and precise, the kind he had spent years perfecting until it sat so naturally on his face that even people who had known him a long time could not always tell it was made rather than felt. He took Jing Peishi's hands in his own, feeling the warmth of them, and gently moved them away from his face. "You don't need to fuss."
Jing Peishi allowed his hands to be moved, but his expression remained unconvinced. He studied He Renxiao with the particular brand of skepticism that came not from suspicion but from simple, practiced knowledge of his junior's habits. "If you say so, Shidi," he murmured, still looking down at the smaller boy with an air of undimmed concern. Then his gaze shifted toward the corridor, and his expression eased slightly into something more ordinary.
"Well. Do you want to come down to the food pavilion? Mo Shuyi said he'd get everyone soup." He paused. "He's been waiting with it for a while, actually. Getting annoyed over the wait, knowing him."
The name landed like a stone dropped into still water.
He Renxiao went rigid. It happened faster than thought, the full-body seizing of someone who had learned over many years to react to that name the way prey reacts to the sound of something hunting in the dark. He could not help it. The discomfort crossed his face before he had time to put anything in front of it, and Jing Peishi, who was observant in the specific way that worried people tend to be, caught it immediately.
"Shidi." His voice sharpened. "Are you sure you're alright? You're very pale. Perhaps you should go see your Shizun after all." He stepped forward again, hand rising toward He Renxiao's forehead this time. "Let me check if you have a fever—"
He Renxiao slapped the hand away.
The sound of it was sharper than he had intended. It had not been a harsh slap, not one designed to hurt, but it had been quick and hard and unmistakable in its refusal.
He Renxiao's jaw tightened. "I'm fine," he said, and the words came out with an edge that was entirely at odds with the soft-faced boy he appeared to be. "I don't need to see Shizun. I said I'm fine."
The silence that followed was not comfortable.
Jing Peishi stood very still. The expression on his face was the particular dumbstruck look of someone who had extended an ordinary kindness and received something entirely unexpected in return, the expression of someone recalibrating, trying to understand what they'd done to cause this response. He did not speak. He simply stared at He Renxiao with wide eyes and an open expression, the hurt in it unguarded and undisguised, because Jing Peishi had never learned, or never needed, to hide when something had caught him off guard.
He Renxiao looked at him and felt the familiar, sickening weight of having done exactly what he had not meant to do. It showed how much a person could change.
The younger He Renxiao, the one whose body he currently occupied, had been all warmth and eagerness and perhaps too much trust.
He had never once raised a hand against a sect sibling in his early years, not in anger, not in defense of himself. He had cried over small things and laughed easily and asked for help without shame, because he had not yet learned that being that open was a vulnerability that could be reached into and used against you.
That boy was gone. And even here, even in this careful dream reconstruction, He Renxiao could not fully become him again. He could put on the robes and play the part. He could not put on the person.
He reached out toward Jing Peishi, his hand trembling slightly in the space between them. He needed to say something. To explain, or at least to take the edge off what had just happened, to acknowledge that it had not been Jing Peishi's fault and that the anger had not been aimed at him.
But before he could speak, footsteps sounded at the end of the corridor.
Jing Peishi heard them too. He turned his head, visibly relieved at the interruption, and took a small step to the side to make room in the hallway, his eyes still not quite meeting He Renxiao's.
"Did you two fall down the stairs, or something?" The voice arrived ahead of its owner, dry and carrying a faint edge of exasperation that was clearly not its first this morning. "It's been ten minutes since you left, and Mei-Mei and I have been waiting at least fifteen."
He Renxiao did not breathe.
He turned his head with the slow, unwilling movement of someone approaching something they cannot avoid but deeply do not want to face. His gaze traveled the length of the corridor and found, at the far end of it, a face that had no right to look the way it looked right now.
Mo Shuyi.
He was older than He Renxiao by a small number of years, only 2-3, tall and sharp-featured in a way that had always made him seem more composed than other boys his age, as though he had been born already knowing what he wanted and roughly how to get it.
He was handsome in a manner that He Renxiao had long since learned to distrust, the kind of handsome that disguised itself as reliability.
His hair was neatly bound in a top knot and his robes were immaculate, a mix of navy blue and sky blue. His posture was easy and confident without being careless. He looked like someone's trusted older brother, like the person you would want standing beside you in a difficult situation. He looked, He Renxiao thought with a cold and helpless fury, like someone who would never dream of doing the things He Renxiao knew he would one day do.
He had been a fellow disciple of Lan Qiang's, the most senior among them the four of Lan Qiang's disciples, studying alongside He Renxiao, Li Yuan, and Nan Fang in the same hall, sharing the same tables and the same bowls and the same mornings. He had been, by any outside measure, a good senior brother. Attentive. Protective in a manner that could sometimes cross the line into overbearing.
Looking at him now was like looking at a map of a country you knew had been destroyed since the map was drawn.
"Shidi." Mo Shuyi's gaze had settled on He Renxiao and sharpened with something that looked, with sickening precision, like genuine worry. His brow furrowed. "Are you sick?"
The concern looked wrong on him.
He Renxiao knew it was unfair to feel that way, knew that this version of Mo Shuyi had not done those things yet and might not understand them at all, might be some preserved echo of a person who had existed before everything went wrong. But fairness had very little to do with the reflexive, physical revulsion that moved through He Renxiao at the sight of that expression on that face. After everything that had happened.
After everything that had been done under the cover of similar expressions, similar apparent concern, similar carefully maintained gentleness that had turned out to be a performance so complete it had fooled everyone, including, for a time, He Renxiao himself.
Watching a wolf pretend to be a dog was still watching a wolf, even if the wolf had not yet decided to stop pretending.
"No," He Renxiao said. His voice came out more controlled than he felt. "I just.. I'm not feeling well. I'll take some medicine and see you at evening lessons—"
"Evening lessons?" Mo Shuyi's eyes narrowed. The patience had not gone, but the edge of it had sharpened, a familiar shift in register that He Renxiao remembered from what felt like another life, the way Mo Shuyi sounded when he had decided that stubbornness was no longer going to be tolerated.
"Xiao'er, you've missed half the day already. And we all know how you get when you're sick. You say you'll take medicine and then you don't, you never do, one of us always has to stand over you to make sure it actually happens." He uncrossed his arms. "You're not going to evening lessons like this."
He Renxiao opened his mouth to argue.
Mo Shuyi's hand closed around his wrist.
It happened before He Renxiao had time to step back or prepare himself. The grip was firm and entirely unapologetic, the grip of someone who had made a decision and was not particularly interested in negotiating it. He Renxiao's immediate, instinctive reaction was to pull away, sharp and hard, the way an animal caught in something pulls against the trap regardless of whether pulling is useful. It wasn't useful.
Mo Shuyi was taller and stronger and had already begun moving, steering He Renxiao down the corridor with the calm, unruffled efficiency of someone performing a task they had performed before and expected to perform again.
The direction they were heading in made He Renxiao's stomach drop.
The Snow Parting Pavilion. Their Shizun's private residence, nestled near the Divine Truth Pavilion where Lan Qiang spent most of his working hours. He Renxiao knew exactly what the Snow Parting Pavilion was, what it had looked like in the years after things went wrong, what had happened behind its doors while the rest of the sect remained oblivious.
He knew the smell of the place after the violence of it, the way the furniture had been overturned and the scrolls scattered and the walls marked with evidence of struggles that the walls themselves had not been designed to witness. He knew what Mo Shuyi had done in that room. He knew how many times it had happened. Both to him and Lan Qiang. Had counted them in the maddening fear of loosing it all.
"Mo Shuyi, stop!" He Renxiao said, and his voice came out sharper than he intended, pulled tight across genuine, irrational panic. "Seriously. I'm not that sick! Just a headache! There's no reason to bother Shizun about this!—"
"Ren-Ren'er." Mo Shuyi said it without slowing down, without loosening his grip, and the nickname landed in He Renxiao's chest like something thrown from a great height. He hadn't heard that particular diminutive in a very long time. "You know better than I do that even a mild fever will have you bedridden for weeks if you don't take care of it properly. You were a sickly child." He said it without judgment, simply as fact. "The sect spent years building up your constitution. You are not going to be reckless with it."
He was right. It was an indignity that He Renxiao had spent years finding ways around acknowledging, but it was simply true.
He had been sickly for most of his early childhood, one illness overlapping the next in a chain that had seemed at times like it would never stop, a consequence of growing up in the entertainment district where disease spread easily and proper nutrition was rarely guaranteed.
He Renxiao guessed that, because he had been exposed to the smoke for so long, his immunety to sickness had dropped to below little to nothing. Lan Qiang had worked on his constitution with quiet, consistent attention, and it had eventually taken hold. He was not fragile now. But he had been.
Mo Shuyi had always been protective of that fragility, even from the very beginning. Even when He Renxiao had been new to the sect and there had been no reason yet to extend that particular care to him. It had been genuine, or it had appeared to be.
Even now, even knowing everything, He Renxiao could not bring himself to claim with absolute certainty that it had all been performance from the start. That thought was somehow more disturbing than if it had been.
He continued to grumble and pull against Mo Shuyi's grip as they moved down the corridor, accomplishing nothing, his feet stumbling occasionally to keep up with the longer strides. Behind them, Jing Peishi followed at a careful distance, his footsteps hesitant, as though he wasn't certain whether he was supposed to be part of this particular scene and had decided that trailing along was probably the least bad of his available options.
As they passed, Elder Shiguai happened to pass by the training courtyard just as a small cluster of disciples from a neighboring sect were gossiping in the shade of the eastern archway while the group of Lan Qiang's disciples passed. He would not normally have paused to listen. He was not, as a general rule, someone who engaged in or encouraged idle talk about other people's business.
But he heard He Renxiao's name mentioned, and he slowed despite himself.
"That little one under Lan Qiang is something, isn't he," one of them was saying, in the tone people use when they cannot decide whether they are impressed or unsettled. "I saw him at sparring practice last week. He's what, fourteen? And he's already putting down disciples twice his senior."
"He's always been like that," another replied. "I heard he came to the sect late, later than most. Something about his background being complicated. But Lan Qiang took him in personally. Went out and brought him back himself."
"Lan Qiang doesn't do that for just anyone."
"No." A pause. "There's something about that boy. I don't know what it is. He's polite, he follows every rule, he works harder than anyone in his year by a considerable margin. And then sometimes you catch him looking at something and there's this expression on his face like—" The disciple searched for the word. "Like he's already tired of something. Like he's made peace with a loss that hasn't happened yet."
Elder Shiguai had continued walking before he could hear what followed. But the description stayed with him in an uncomfortable way for the rest of the afternoon. He had his own observations about He Renxiao, collected over years of watching Lan Qiang's disciples move through the sect's shared spaces.
The boy worked with an intensity that exceeded dedication and occasionally shaded into something that looked like punishment, as though he were trying to outpace something rather than simply improve.
He was courteous to everyone, but it was a precise and measured courtesy, not the open, easy warmth of someone who was naturally sociable. He laughed when it was appropriate. He kept his own counsel in a manner unusual for someone his age.
He thought of this and thought: whatever that child has already survived before he came here, it was enough to mark him. And he hoped, in a way that was more feeling than formed thought, that Lan Qiang understood that and was being careful with him.
When they reached the door, Mo Shuyi knocked with a confidence that suggested familiarity—not quite like a resident, but like someone who visited often enough to feel comfortable.
This obviously infuriated He Renxiao.
In their past life—or future life, depending on how you looked at it—Mo Shuyi had violated Lan Qiang relentless times in that very room, behind that very door. He had violated He Renxiao in that very room as well. What gave him the right to act so carelessly?
Lan Qiang opened the door with a slightly dumbstruck expression on his face, which was not his usual expression and which he corrected almost immediately upon seeing who was outside.
He stood in the doorway and surveyed the three disciples before him:
Mo Shuyi, straight-backed and composed, Jing Peishi, hovering uncertainly at the rear, and He Renxiao, still visibly attempting to free his wrist from Mo Shuyi's grip and failing at this with the focused futility of a cat that has decided a particular door must be opened immediately and cannot understand why clawing at it isn't working.
He was in his mid-to-early-twenties, Lan Qiang, though cultivation had given him the kind of timeless quality that made precise ages difficult to assign.
He was beautiful in the way of a very fine thing that had been maintained with great care and occasional ruthlessness.
He had a temper that was, charitably, variable.
He was capable of tremendous cruelty when in the grip of it, the cold sort that identified weak points and aimed precisely, and he was equally capable of a care so thorough and attentive it had reduced more than one of his disciples to tears of the gratitude variety.
Lan Qiang had known He Renxiao since He Renxiao was very small.
He was the one who had gone to collect him, who had lifted a small, dirty, frightened child from circumstances that should not have produced the composed and excessively talented disciple He Renxiao had become, and brought him back to the sect with the particular manner of someone who had made a decision and was not going to discuss it.
He had given him a name and training and, in the specific, unsentimental way that Lan Qiang gave things, something that functioned in the place of a home.
He Renxiao had never said directly how much this meant to him. Lan Qiang had never asked. They had an understanding of the type that did not require explicit statement, which was the only kind of understanding that Lan Qiang was comfortable having.
"What is it you three require?" He said it with the measured impatience of someone who has been interrupted mid-thought and is managing this fact with limited enthusiasm. "I'm busy working." He rubbed at his eyes, ink smearing slightly on his forehead from his own hand, which he did not appear to notice.
He looked them over again, his gaze settling and sharpening on the smallest of the three. "Li Meiling," he said, using the formal name as he always did, something He Renxiao inwardly bore with the quiet martyrdom of a person who has chosen their battles carefully. "Where were you during morning lessons? I didn't see you at practice."
He Renxiao made no immediate answer, which was unusual enough to deepen the furrow between Lan Qiang's brows. Normally the boy had a response to everything, prepared and delivered before the question had fully been finished, a habit that had exasperated and secretly impressed Lan Qiang in approximately equal measure for years.
"Shizun, we're sorry to disturb you." Mo Shuyi spoke into the pause, his voice carrying the effortless, practiced respect of someone who had learned exactly how to present himself to authority figures. "Xiao'er isn't well. You know how he gets when he's ill. We were hoping you might use a healing technique to help him." He paused, and something in his expression shifted to something more genuine than his opening, and he added: "He says he's fine. He always says he's fine."
Lan Qiang looked at He Renxiao, who was still making small, mutinous attempts to extract his wrist from Mo Shuyi's grip, and raised one elegant eyebrow. "He seems quite capable of physical exertion to me," he observed dryly.
But he was already looking more carefully. Past the determined expression, past the subtle flush of irritation on He Renxiao's cheeks. The pallor beneath it. The shadows under the eyes that had no business being there on a face that young. The slight, persistent tremor in the hand currently engaged in trying to pull free of Mo Shuyi's hold.
His expression shifted, closed and difficult to read, and he stepped back from the door. "Bring him in," he said. "Jing Peishi, you may wait outside."
Jing Peishi, visibly relieved to have been given a clear instruction, said "Yes, Shizun" and stationed himself beside the door with the obedient resignation of someone who has been benched from a game they weren't entirely sure they wanted to play.
The interior of the Snow Parting Pavilion was exactly as He Renxiao remembered from this time, and the precision of the memory was painful in its own right.
The scrolls arranged with obsessive neatness on their shelves.
The low table for tea.
The large desk, currently occupied by whatever project had been keeping Lan Qiang from sleep, its surface covered in a dense arrangement of papers, brushes, ink stones, and what appeared to be the components of some small device He Renxiao could not immediately identify.
The smell of it, ink and sandalwood and old paper, was so exact that He Renxiao felt it in his chest like a hand closing around something important.
It was not yet the place it would become.
It had not yet been touched by any of the things He Renxiao associated with it now.
It was simply a room where his Shizun worked and occasionally received visitors, and He Renxiao stood in the middle of it and tried very hard to see it for what it currently was rather than what he knew it would one day be.
"Come here, Li Meiling." Lan Qiang's voice was gentler in private than it tended to be in public, a fact He Renxiao had known since he was small and that still, despite everything, had the same effect on him it always had. Something in him relaxed involuntarily at the sound of it, some old, deeply embedded reflex that had never entirely unlearned itself.
He crossed the room and stood before his teacher.
Lan Qiang's hand came up, first to his forehead, then to his cheeks, reading his temperature with the calm efficiency of someone who had done this many times before. He Renxiao kept very still.
He thought of all the times, in a different life, in the years of what followed, when he had wanted nothing more than to be here again. Standing in this room. In the quiet. Hearing that voice. The thoughts pressed against the inside of his ribs and He Renxiao breathed through them without expression.
"He's warm," Lan Qiang said, directing this primarily at himself as much as at Mo Shuyi. Then: "Nothing serious. But." He took He Renxiao's hand. "Sit still."
The spiritual energy that moved through him a moment later was familiar in the way of something heard so often it has become part of the texture of ordinary life. Warm. Steadying. It moved through the places in He Renxiao's body that ached and loosened them gently, settling the headache, easing the leaden heaviness in his limbs, unwinding something that had been clenched for what felt like much longer than one night. He Renxiao exhaled slowly and let it happen. There was no point in resisting.
He had not been genuinely sick. He had simply been exhausted, and warm in the way of someone who sleeps too deeply and under too many blankets, which was accurate for him in ways that went somewhat beyond the literal, though the literal was certainly also true. He kept all his pillows. He had done so since he was very small. He did not apologize for it.
"Better?" Lan Qiang released his hand.
"Yes." He Renxiao found, to some private embarrassment, that he meant it. "Thank you, Shizun."
Lan Qiang placed his hand briefly on He Renxiao's head, a gesture that had appeared so long ago in their shared history that neither of them had ever marked the moment it began, only accepted it as part of the ongoing arrangement. He Renxiao did not move away from it. He allowed himself, just for a moment, not to be anything in particular.
"On your way, then," Lan Qiang said, removing his hand and returning to the controlled exhaustion of his usual expression. "All of you."
They turned to leave. Mo Shuyi was already at the door, waiting. He Renxiao followed. Jing Peishi materialized from outside the door and fell into step with them.
"Wait." Lan Qiang's voice reached them before they'd cleared the threshold. They stilled. A pause, and then: "Little beast." The affectionate weight of it, the way it landed differently than all his other names, like something handed rather than assigned. "Get some rest tonight. And eat something. I can't remember the last time I saw you at a full meal."
He Renxiao was quiet for the length of a breath. Then: "This disciple will."
He did not look back. If he had, he would not have trusted himself to maintain the expression he was currently wearing. He walked out of the Gentle Snow Pavilion into the morning light with his jaw set and his hands steady and something aching in the center of his chest that he had absolutely no intention of examining while anyone else was present.
The food pavilion, which the disciples had taken to calling the A'Lu hall, smelled of broth and warm grain and the faint sweetness of something being steamed in one of the back rooms.
He Renxiao noticed he was hungry with the vague surprise of someone who has been so preoccupied that they have forgotten to monitor themselves, and then recalled that he was in a dream and therefore should not technically be hungry at all, which meant his actual body, wherever it was and in whatever condition it was in, probably was.
He filed this information away without urgency and followed Mo Shuyi and Jing Peishi through the door.
At the small table reserved for Lan Qiang's disciples, tucked in the corner nearest the window where the light was best, sat a girl who looked to be approximately twelve years old.
She was slight and neat-looking, with the particular quality of stillness that very well-behaved children sometimes have, though anyone who knew her well would have confirmed that the stillness was selective and that when it was absent, the absence was considerable.
She had been eating something, but she had put it down when they walked in, and now she was watching He Renxiao with an expression that was mostly relief and somewhat attempting to look casual about the relief.
He Renxiao stopped walking. Something in his chest, already under considerable pressure from the morning's accumulated weight, compressed further and then released in a wave that moved through him faster than he could manage or redirect.
"Shimei," he said, and his voice came out softer than he'd intended, the word not quite steady, and then he was already crossing the remaining distance between them and pulling her into his arms with a thoroughness that made her squeak in surprise before she hugged him back, her small arms going around him with the uncomplicated ease of someone who had been doing this for years and intended to continue.
"I guess you're feeling better then?" she said against his shoulder, muffled but audible, her voice carrying the bright, particular quality that He Renxiao had always associated with early mornings and good weather and things going more or less as they should.
"A lot better now," he said, and this, unlike many things he had said today, was true without qualification. He held on for one moment longer than he meant to, and then straightened up, releasing her and stepping back with a composure that was only slightly assembled around the edges.
Nan Fang. She had been the first of their small group to die.
The first and the youngest, (at least He Renxiao hoped) and the one whose death He Renxiao had returned to in his mind more times than he could count, picking it apart, wondering what could have been done differently, finding no satisfactory answer.
She had been his sect sister, the only one he had ever had in the full sense of the word, the one who remembered to save him portions of things he liked and who had, exactly once, cried in front of him and made him promise not to tell anyone, and who had been so thoroughly, completely good in all the ways that matter that her loss had felt, when it came, like proof of something fundamentally wrong with the order of the world.
She deserved better than what had happened to her.
She had deserved better than any of it.
That was a thought He Renxiao had finished with a long time ago, which is to say he had made peace with it and stored it somewhere it would not interfere with function, which was the closest he had ever come to finished with any of the things he carried.
He Renxiao straightened and assumed a slightly more formal posture, suddenly aware that he had been displaying sentiment rather comprehensively in front of multiple people. He cleared his throat. "Let's eat."
"Already ahead of you," said Mo Shuyi, who had set the soup in the center of the table with the quiet efficiency of someone who had cooked it, carried it, waited for everyone to be present, and was now mildly impatient for the eating to begin.
It was a large bowl, still hot, the steam rising from it in soft spirals. Chicken broth, from the smell of it, light and savory, the kind Mo Shuyi had always defaulted to on missions when he needed to feed everyone from limited supplies and varying preferences.
He Renxiao had never been able to eat spicy things with any real pleasure, a preference he had maintained without apology. This kind of soup was fine. More than fine.
Mo Shuyi reached for the glass bowls he had gathered earlier and arranged them at the edge of the table. He lifted the ladle. "You get the first bowl, Shidi," he said, directing the statement at He Renxiao with the particular, unironic authority of someone who had decided this and was not entertaining counterarguments.
He Renxiao looked at the bowl being extended toward him.
He took it.
He sat down, and he picked up his chopsticks, and he ate.
The soup was good. Simple and warm and exactly what it was, nothing more and nothing less, and He Renxiao ate it with a quiet that was not quite peace but was the closest available approximation.
Around him, the others talked: Jing Peishi describing some minor disaster that had befallen his morning practice, Nan Fang asking Mo Shuyi with the cheerful directness of someone still young enough not to think twice about it whether he had added the correct herbs this time or if it was going to taste wrong again like last week, Mo Shuyi saying with a perfectly straight face that he had no idea what she was talking about and the soup last week had been fine. The ordinary conversation of people who were comfortable with each other, who had accumulated enough shared history to be easy in each other's company, who laughed at things that were only funny to them because of context that existed only within their particular small world.
He Renxiao listened and did not speak very much. He watched Mo Shuyi reach across the table to refill Nan Fang's bowl without being asked because she had been hesitating, watched Jing Peishi nearly knock over his tea and grab it at the last second with an expression of profound relief, watched the light shift through the pavilion window and lay itself across the table in long parallel bars.
He knew this was not real. He had not forgotten. The knowledge sat in him quietly, not intruding, simply present, like weather that you have already accepted and have therefore stopped fighting. He knew that this version of Mo Shuyi would not always be this person. He knew that Jing Peishi would die before he had the chance to become someone older. He knew that Nan Fang would not grow up.
He knew all of this, and he sat at the table with them anyway, and ate his soup, and let the moment be what it was for as long as it lasted. A last warmth before whatever came next. A final opportunity to see his Shixiong as he had been, before everything, to see his Shizun without grief in his eyes, to hold his Shimei and have her hug him back.
He was, he realized with a quiet that surprised him by its completeness, ready. Whatever came after this, whatever end had already been written for him in the real world that existed beyond this dream, he was ready for it. He had seen them all one last time. He had eaten soup at a table with people he loved. He had stood in the Gentle Snow Pavilion and heard his teacher's voice and felt the warmth of familiar spiritual energy moving through him.
It was enough. It was more than he had expected to be given.
He Renxiao set down his chopsticks and looked at the table, and at the people around it, and said nothing. The light moved. The conversation continued. The steam from the soup thinned and faded as the bowl cooled.