The evening meal had been laid with the kind of meticulous care that was, in itself, a form of authority.
There were steamed buns in a bamboo basket, their skins still pale and yielding, releasing small curls of fragrant steam into the lamplight. A clay pot of braised pork belly sat at the center of the table, its glaze deep as lacquered wood, sweetened with rock sugar and star anise and the particular patience of someone who understood that good things required time and correct proportions. Pickled mustard greens arranged in an orderly row across a blue-and-white porcelain dish. A small bowl of ginger broth, kept warm by the coal brazier tucked beneath the low table. The rice had been steamed twice, the way Lan Qiang's disciples preferred it—soft enough to hold together, firm enough to have texture.
Everything was in its place. Every dish was correct. The cabin's interior smelled of ginger and pine smoke and the rice wine that had been added to the pork during the final stage of cooking, and outside, Pinefrost Village was settling into the quiet rhythms of early evening—lanterns lit in windows, smoke rising from cookstoves, the distant laughter of children being called inside.
And He Renxiao's chair was empty.
Mo Shuyi stood near the doorway and looked at it. Just looked, without speaking, without moving. He was aware that he had been standing there for longer than was natural, that Lan Qiang had already glanced at him twice across the rim of a teacup, and that Li Yuan had stopped eating in the particular tense way he had of stopping things—not dramatically, not with an announcement, but with a precise and pointed ceasing of motion that communicated his feelings without requiring a single word.
He's never late.
The thought arrived the way important things always did: not as a sudden realization but as a thing that had been true all along and had only now allowed itself to be acknowledged. He Renxiao was punctual to the point of being tedious about it. Mo Shuyi had watched him, in this life, set his cultivation sessions to end exactly when they needed to in order to wash, change, and arrive at the table not a minute before the food was ready and not a second after. He had watched him set aside mid-sentence a rare and presumably difficult text because it was time to eat. He had watched him, on one occasion, physically stop walking away from an interesting conversation between two Pinefrost Village elders—an ongoing discussion about the Jade Valley Sect's subtle maneuvering over trade licensing—and turn back toward the cabin with visible reluctance, because the hour had come.
He Renxiao was the sort of person who treated punctuality as a spiritual discipline. Being late for dinner was, for him, roughly equivalent to someone else failing to appear for a duel.
So where is he.
"Perhaps he lost track of time," Li Yuan said, for the second time in ten minutes, his voice carrying the particular quality of someone who did not believe what they were saying but had not yet decided to admit it. He lifted a steamed bun, turned it over in his fingers, and did not eat it. The gold embroidery at his cuffs caught the lamplight—neat and precise, the Li Clan's colors woven into the Azure Cloud Sect's navy, as though Li Yuan's entire wardrobe was a careful diplomatic statement about who he was and where he came from. "You know how he gets when he's working on his cultivation. Everything else goes—"
"He hasn't been meditating well," Mo Shuyi said, and then immediately wished he had not, because Lan Qiang set down his teacup with a quiet click and looked at him.
Those eyes. Pale brown hair slightly disheveled from the day's work, a smudge of ink near one wrist that he'd missed when washing up, wearing travel-worn navy and sky blue that was tidier than it had any right to be given the amount of walking he'd done earlier. Lan Qiang looked younger than his authority warranted—late twenties, which by sect standards barely qualified him to be giving lectures, let alone managing a long-term political operation in a contested village while simultaneously attempting to keep three direct disciples from destroying each other or themselves. He had the kind of face that forgot to look tired until it remembered all at once, and right now, looking at Mo Shuyi across the dinner table, it had remembered.
"You've noticed his difficulty with Li Yu," Lan Qiang said. It was not a question.
"It would be hard not to notice." Mo Shuyi moved finally, stepping properly into the room and sitting down in his own chair with the careful, measured ease he'd spent years cultivating. Composure as armor. He'd built it from scratch in his first life, dismantled it completely when that life ended in blood and rage and the particular kind of despair that only comes from loving something and losing it by your own hand. And then he'd built it again, in this second life, from better materials. Stronger joints. Fewer cracks.
He thought so, anyway.
Until I'm in the same room with the two of them and the whole structure starts making noise.
"He's been working at it every night," Mo Shuyi continued, filling his bowl with rice that he had no particular intention of eating. "After training sessions, after dinner, sometimes before dawn. Whatever Wei—" He stopped. Corrected. "Whatever Li Yu is communicating to him, it's clearly been enough to keep him trying. But I don't think it's resolved."
Li Yuan made a sound that might have been agreement or might have been something more fraught. He'd set down the steamed bun now, and was staring at the table with an expression Mo Shuyi recognized: the expression Li Yuan wore when he was genuinely worried about his brother but was constitutionally incapable of saying so cleanly. It was a family trait, Mo Shuyi had come to understand. Both He Renxiao and Li Yuan wore their concern like badly fitted robes—visible to everyone, acknowledged by neither.
He loves him. Just as much as he resents him. Probably because of it.
The Li Clan's particular genius for complicated feelings had apparently been distributed evenly across its bloodline, regardless of which mother had been involved.
"Ten more minutes," Lan Qiang said, and his voice was gentle in a way that did not quite obscure the sharpness underneath. "If he hasn't arrived in ten minutes, one of us should check on him."
Mo Shuyi looked at the empty chair. He had been looking at it for the better part of an hour, in the way you looked at a thing when you already knew something was wrong and were simply waiting for the appropriate moment to act on what you knew.
He's already gone.
He couldn't explain where the certainty came from. He had no proof—no vision, no message, no spiritual signal from across their bond as martial brothers. Just the empty chair, and the empty space where He Renxiao's particular quality of presence always lived, and the accumulated weight of knowing this person across two lifetimes with a thoroughness that Mo Shuyi had never wanted and could not seem to set aside.
He knew He Renxiao the way you knew a place you'd once lived. Not from remembering specific facts about it, but from the body's memory—the way certain rooms felt, the way light moved through specific windows, the particular temperature of air in spaces that had once been home. He knew the way Renxiao moved and the way he held his shoulders when he was thinking about something he didn't want to discuss and the way his handwriting changed when he was writing quickly versus writing for presentation. He knew the particular quality of his silences, which were more varied than most people's conversations.
He had known all of this in the first life, and loving it had destroyed him, and losing it had made him into something he didn't like to think about.
And now he sat at a dinner table in Pinefrost Village, in a life he hadn't asked for but had been given anyway, and the chair across from him was empty, and the certainty sat in his chest like a coal: He Renxiao has left. He has been planning this, or some version of this, and he is already gone.
Ten minutes passed. Lan Qiang rose from his seat with quiet precision.
"Mo Shuyi," he said. "Go and knock."
The walk from the main cabin to He Renxiao's door was forty-three steps on dry nights and forty-seven when the wooden walkway was swollen with rain. Mo Shuyi had counted it twice, involuntarily, in the first week they'd settled into the Pinefrost Village assignment, because his body had developed the habit of cataloguing distances between himself and He Renxiao without being asked to.
You're pathetic, he told himself, not for the first time. You've always been pathetic about this.
It was true, and it was not entirely something he could help. He had been, in his first life, the kind of person whose love came with an intensity that was difficult to manage even when things were going well. He'd understood that about himself, in the abstract, the way you understood a river's tendency to flood—you knew the capacity was there, but you assumed you'd have warning before the water rose.
He hadn't had warning. Not with Renxiao. It had simply been there one morning, fully formed and inconvenient and permanent-feeling, and by the time Mo Shuyi had fully acknowledged it to himself, they were already so thoroughly entangled that separating them would have required something catastrophic.
Something catastrophic had, in fact, occurred.
Don't think about it. Not now.
He knocked on the door. Three raps—unhurried, appropriate for a shixiong checking on a junior who had simply lost track of time during meditation. He waited. He listened to the night sounds of Pinefrost Village and the particular quality of silence from within the room, and the silence told him everything, in the way that silences sometimes do.
"Renxiao." His voice was level. It was always level now. "Shizun wants you at the table. The pork belly's getting cold, and you've been known to make faces at the texture when it cools improperly, so for all our sakes."
Nothing.
"I know you can hear me."
Nothing. And there—yes, very faint, the kind of nothing that felt different from ordinary nothing, more deliberate, more like absence than quiet. The absence of breath near a door. The absence of the subtle ambient sounds that a person in meditation still produced. The room did not contain He Renxiao. Mo Shuyi knew it the way he knew his own heartbeat, which was not a metaphor he particularly enjoyed using.
He tried the door. Latched from within.
Of course.
"I'm coming in," Mo Shuyi said, to the door, to the night, to whatever version of Renxiao might be listening in the space between the present and the past.
He gathered qi in his shoulder with practiced economy and drove it against the latch—not enough to splinter the door, just enough to pop the simple wooden bar on the other side. The door swung inward with a crack and a groan, and cold air rushed out to meet him, and Mo Shuyi stepped into the room and stood still.
The window was open. Not cracked for ventilation—open, its paper screen torn from the frame in a clean horizontal rip at chest height, as if someone had gripped it from inside and pulled. The night air moved through the room like a slow tide, carrying pine and distance and the smell of horses from the stable further down the slope. The lamp had been extinguished. The sleeping mat was rolled. Everything that He Renxiao considered essential—the secondary writing brush, the specific inkstone that had survived two years and several missions, the small travel case he used on assignments—was gone.
The desk was not completely bare. A single sheet of paper, weighted with the jade inkstone, glowed white in the moonlight that fell through the open window.
Mo Shuyi crossed the room and picked it up.
He read it once, quickly. He read it again, more slowly, the way you re-read something when you are hoping the second reading will produce a different meaning than the first.
Shizun,
Forgive this disciple's rudeness in departing without proper farewell. An urgent matter has arisen that requires my immediate personal attention, connected to the mission currently assigned to us. I will return as soon as I am able. Please do not be concerned on my behalf. This disciple is well-prepared for what lies ahead.
Your unworthy disciple,
He Renxiao
P.S. The braised pork belly is in the pot on the left. Please ensure it is eaten while it is still warm.
The postscript was, in its way, the most characteristic thing about the letter. He Renxiao apologizing for his sudden departure in language precise enough to appear in a formal sect communication, and then, at the end, a note about the pork belly. Because He Renxiao had spent the better part of a childhood not knowing where his next meal was coming from, and he had never, in either life, been able to treat the preparation of food as something less than significant.
Mo Shuyi stood with the letter in his hand, in the cold air from the open window, and felt something move through him that was complicated enough that he didn't bother naming it.
Footsteps behind him—quick, controlled, Li Yuan first and then Lan Qiang's quieter tread.
"He's not here," Li Yuan said, taking in the room in a single sweeping look, his voice going flat in the way it went when he was frightened and refusing to show it. "The window—he went through the window? What in the—"
"There's a note," Mo Shuyi said. He set it back on the desk rather than handing it over, and stepped back to let Lan Qiang approach.
Li Yuan read over their shizun's shoulder, his jaw tightening with each line. By the time he reached the postscript, the expression on his face was somewhere between furious and devastated, which was the expression Li Yuan wore most often when his brother was involved in anything.
"He left a note about the pork belly," Li Yuan said.
"He did," Mo Shuyi agreed.
"He snuck out through his own window in the middle of a covert mission in a politically sensitive village in disputed territory and he left a note about the pork belly."
"He is nothing if not thorough."
"I'm going to kill him."
"You'll have to find him first."
Li Yuan made a sound that managed to encompass both profound exasperation and something rawer underneath, and turned away from the desk to go to the window. He leaned out, looking down at the ground below with the deliberate focus of someone searching for tracks, and after a moment said, without turning around: "Scuff marks on the sill. Fresh. He went out fast." He pulled back in, brushing grit from his gold-trimmed cuffs, and his voice had changed slightly. "I'll check the stables."
He was gone before anyone could answer.
Lan Qiang set the note down carefully, squaring its edges against the corner of the desk with the same automatic precision he brought to everything. He stood for a moment looking at it, and then looked at the open window, and Mo Shuyi watched him and thought, not for the first time: You know something.
He'd been watching Lan Qiang for months—for almost this entire second life, to be accurate, from the first moment of returning to awareness in his younger body with a mind full of memories that shouldn't have existed—and the evidence had accumulated with the patience of geological process into something he could no longer dismiss as coincidence or wishful interpretation. The small adjustments Lan Qiang had made to training schedules and mission assignments, just slightly ahead of when those adjustments would have been obviously necessary. The way he occasionally paused in the middle of a conversation as if hearing something that wasn't audible to anyone else, some distant echo of an event that hadn't happened yet in this timeline. The night, two months ago, when he'd told He Renxiao to work on his sword forms from the left rather than the right—something He Renxiao had not asked about and Lan Qiang had offered without apparent reason—and then, three weeks later, He Renxiao had been challenged to a sparring session by an older disciple visiting from a sister sect who favored exactly that approach.
Lan Qiang was reborn. Mo Shuyi was almost certain of it now.
And Lan Qiang did not know that Mo Shuyi knew.
A convenient asymmetry, Mo Shuyi thought, studying his shizun's profile in the moonlight from the window. You're trying to fix things. Adjusting the variables. Making small corrections, hoping the outcome changes. You don't know that I'm doing the same thing, from a different angle, with different information.
He wondered sometimes what Lan Qiang remembered. Whether he remembered the same events Mo Shuyi remembered, or a different selection of them. Whether he remembered what he'd told Mo Shuyi—the lie, the words delivered with such apparent sorrow that Mo Shuyi had not thought to question them until much later, when he was already burning and there was nothing left to question.
He's gone, Mo Shuyi. He Renxiao. The mission in the eastern borderlands—he didn't come back from it. I'm sorry. I should have sent someone stronger. I should have gone myself. I failed him.
Mo Shuyi's hands tightened, briefly, at his sides. Not enough to be visible. Just enough to feel the pressure of his own bones.
He'd believed it. That was the part that still had a particular quality of bitterness, years later, lifetimes later—he had believed it because it was Lan Qiang who told him, and in the first life, before everything, Mo Shuyi had trusted his shizun with the particular absolute quality of a person who had no one else to trust. Before He Renxiao. After his own family's complicated indifference. Lan Qiang had been steady and attentive and had believed, consistently, that Mo Shuyi was worth teaching and worth keeping, and that trust had been the foundation everything else was built on.
When it broke, it broke everything.
He had found out later—much later, in the ruins of everything he'd built in his rage, when he was already the Invincible Venerable and information arrived from directions he'd once thought closed to him—that He Renxiao had not died on that mission. He had been injured. Badly, possibly, but alive—alive and recovering and, from what Mo Shuyi had been able to piece together across the chaos of the sect wars, confused by Mo Shuyi's sudden transformation and subsequent disappearance.
He was alive. And you told me he was dead.
Why. That was the question Mo Shuyi had turned over for years, in his first life and in this one: why had Lan Qiang lied. The answer he'd eventually arrived at was the one that had lodged in him like a splinter, too small to remove cleanly, poisoning everything it touched: because Lan Qiang had wanted Mo Shuyi to leave. Had wanted to sever whatever was between Mo Shuyi and He Renxiao, cut the connection cleanly, ensure that Mo Shuyi would not come back—would not search for him, would not find him, would not pull He Renxiao into the spiral of Mo Shuyi's own destruction.
You wanted to protect him from me. So you killed me for him, in the only way available to you. You told me the thing that would hollow me out and leave nothing that could love him.
It had not worked the way Lan Qiang intended. Nothing did, when Mo Shuyi was involved.
Because the hollowing-out had not produced cessation. It had produced something worse—a love that had no object left to rest on, that had transformed under pressure and isolation and the particular agony of believing you had been abandoned by the two people who mattered most, into something that looked much more like hatred than it was. A need to hurt that wore love's face. The shape of obsession that exists in the space between wanting to protect someone and wanting to make them understand exactly what their absence had cost you.
In the first life, Mo Shuyi had sought He Renxiao out after rising to power. Had found him. Had spent months in his company, a strange and violent and unbearable time that Mo Shuyi did not think about if he could avoid it, before everything came to its final point. He had not hated He Renxiao, not purely, not cleanly. He had loved him with the same intensity that had always characterized his love for him, and he had resented him for being alive when he had been told he was dead, and he had needed him to understand what that lie had done, and he had been furious at him for the choices he'd made in Mo Shuyi's absence, and underneath all of it he had still wanted, desperately, for things to have been different.
They had not been different. The history between them—the junior's death, the imprisonment, the trial, the years of separation, the way He Renxiao had maintained his silence when silence was the thing that had cost Mo Shuyi everything—had not become different simply because Mo Shuyi had survived long enough to gather the power to confront it.
At the end of it, he had killed him.
He had not enjoyed it. He needed to be clear about that, at least to himself, in the privacy of his own memory. He had not enjoyed it. But he had done it, deliberately and with full knowledge of what he was doing, and the knowledge of that act was something he carried in this second life the way he imagined you would carry a scar in a place that didn't show—not painful exactly, not always, but permanently present, permanently altering the way certain movements felt.
I killed you, Mo Shuyi thought, looking at the note on He Renxiao's desk with the pork belly postscript. Deliberately. Because I loved you and hated you and I needed you to have stayed. And now you're here again—you're here, alive, annoying, earnest to the point of satire, leaving notes about dinner—and you don't remember any of it.
He was not sure which part of that was harder to live with.
"Mo Shuyi." Lan Qiang's voice was careful, measuring. "What do you think he means—'connected to the mission'? Do you have any sense of what he might have found?"
Of course you ask me. Because in your accounting, I'm the one closest to him. The shixiong. The most trusted.
The absurdity of it might have been funny, if anything about the situation were funny.
"He's been struggling with Li Yu," Mo Shuyi said, keeping his voice as even as the stone floors. "The bonding difficulty has been weighing on him more than he's admitted. It's possible Li Yu guided him somewhere." He paused. "He Renxiao is not the kind of person who ignores his spiritual weapon's guidance, even when it's inconvenient."
Especially when it's inconvenient. Especially when following it requires him to inconvenience everyone else, which costs him significantly more than inconveniencing himself ever would.
"He took enough supplies for a few days," Lan Qiang said, half to himself, turning from the window to scan the sparse contents of the room again. "He's not being reckless. Reckless people don't leave notes."
"Reckless people don't take the time to secure their secondary inkstone before climbing out a window either," Mo Shuyi agreed. "He planned this. Not extensively—the note is too brief for extensive planning—but he knew what he was doing."
"He should have told us." Li Yuan appeared in the broken doorway, slightly out of breath, the gold at his collar catching the lamp glow from the corridor. His expression was the one Mo Shuyi had catalogued as He Renxiao has done something and Li Yuan is going to pretend he is only angry—jaw set, eyes too bright, hands not quite steady. "He took his horse. He's been gone at least an hour, maybe more—the stable master didn't see him leave directly, but the mount is gone and there are tracks heading north. Toward the forest."
"Pinefrost Forest," Lan Qiang said.
"Pinefrost Forest leads to the Far Jade Mountain approach," Li Yuan said. "Which leads to—" He stopped. Something crossed his face. "Shizun. The old temple. The one in the reports we reviewed last month—the Ruined Jade Temple."
Silence settled in the room, not quite comfortable, not quite tense. The kind of silence that occurred when three people had just arrived at the same conclusion simultaneously and none of them particularly wanted to be the first to say what it implied.
"Yes," Lan Qiang said at last, very quietly.
Li Yuan's hands had stilled. "Then we go after him."
"No."
The word landed with precise weight—not loud, not harsh, but absolutely final. Li Yuan's head came up sharply, the protest already forming on his face.
"Shizun—"
"I said no." Lan Qiang turned from the window to face them both fully, and the lamplight from the corridor fell across his face and made him look, for a moment, exactly as tired as Mo Shuyi suspected he was. "Sit down, Li Yuan. Both of you."
Li Yuan did not sit down. He took a breath, held it, and remained standing with the stiff propriety of someone who was complying with the form of an instruction while vigorously contesting its substance. Mo Shuyi, who had nowhere in particular to be and no reason to take a public position on anything, folded himself into the desk chair and waited.
"He's my brother," Li Yuan said. Each word had the quality of being placed very carefully, like moving objects in a room where everything was breakable. "He's out there alone, at night, heading into mountain terrain, on a mission nobody assigned him, toward a location that's been flagged in our intelligence reports as a site of unusual spiritual activity—"
"Yes," Lan Qiang said. "I know."
"Then why—"
"Because if we leave this village tonight—any of us, in any combination—our cover collapses." Lan Qiang's voice was steady and deliberate, the voice he used when he was being unmistakably the person in authority and needed that to be understood.
"We are here under a specific arrangement. Three cultivators from the Azure Cloud Sect, traveling under informal capacity, maintaining a presence in a contested territory. The Jade Valley Sect has informants in this village—we know this, we've confirmed at least two with reasonable certainty. If a group of cultivators departs dramatically in the middle of the night and leaves the village empty—or worse, if we are seen clearly pursuing one of our own—they will know something has broken down. They will use that knowledge. They have been waiting for exactly this kind of opportunity."
"Then send one person," Li Yuan said. "Me. I can track him without—"
"You are the heir of the Li Clan," Lan Qiang said. "Your face is known. Your coloring is known. The Li Clan colors you wear are known. If you are seen moving through this region alone at night heading toward Jade Valley Sect-monitored terrain, the political implications are significantly worse than three Azure Cloud disciples maintaining their cover in a village." A pause. "You know this, Li Yuan. You've read the same reports I have."
Li Yuan knew it. Mo Shuyi could see the precise moment it landed—the slight shift in his posture, the internal recalculation, the way his jaw tightened fractionally before releasing. Li Yuan was not stupid. He was, in fact, quite good at this—at the political arithmetic, at weighing individual desires against collective requirements. He simply liked He Renxiao less than he liked himself, most days, as a matter of careful public record, which made the genuine fear underneath his anger more visible than he'd intended.
"He could get killed," Li Yuan said. The gold-and-navy fabric of his robes caught the lamplight as his hands closed at his sides. "He's—he hasn't resolved his bonding difficulty with the new weapon. He doesn't have full access to his spiritual abilities. He's going alone into—"
"He has Li Yu," Mo Shuyi said.
Both of them looked at him.
Mo Shuyi kept his voice neutral with the ease of long practice. "Li Yu is not simply a weapon with a bonding difficulty. Whatever is housed in that rope dart has been working consistently since He Renxiao received it—pushing him, guiding him, keeping him stable. He Renxiao may not have full access to the weapon's power yet, but the weapon's consciousness has full access to him. He won't be alone in any sense that matters for immediate survival." He paused, then added, because it was true and also because saying true things was the best way to hide everything else: "If something in Li Yu is directing this journey, He Renxiao is doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing. Interfering with that prematurely might cause more harm than the risk we're currently worried about."
Lan Qiang looked at him for a long moment. That look again—the one that saw too much and was careful not to show what it found.
"We'll monitor his spiritual signature," Lan Qiang said finally. "We maintain cover. We continue the assignment. And we prepare—quietly, without drawing attention—the ability to move quickly if his signature indicates genuine distress." He picked up He Renxiao's note, read it once more, and set it back down. "He Renxiao is not someone who makes large errors in judgment. He makes small ones, frequently, out of conviction that he is doing the right thing and that explaining himself in advance would only cause arguments he doesn't have time for. He has not, in my experience, ever been wrong about what he was capable of."
In your experience, Mo Shuyi thought. Which includes more than you're showing.
"He left instructions about the pork belly," Li Yuan said, and his voice had changed—not soft exactly, but less armored, the fury thinned enough to show what it was covering. "He thought about the pork belly."
"I know," Mo Shuyi said.
"That's the most He Renxiao thing he's ever—" Li Yuan stopped. Turned away sharply, pressing one fist briefly against his mouth. When he turned back, the armor was reinstated, not quite perfectly. "If he gets himself killed out there, I'll never forgive him."
If he gets killed, you won't be the only one, Mo Shuyi thought.
He looked at the note. At the empty room. At the open window with the torn screen fluttering in the cold night air, and the empty space where the inkstone had sat, and the particular quality of absence that He Renxiao left in his wake—sharper than most people's absences, more dimensional, the kind that made a room feel architecturally different rather than simply less occupied.
I'm not going to lose you again, he thought. I'm not—I won't—
But he didn't say it. He never said things like that. Saying things like that was what had contributed, in its way, to everything going wrong in the first life—the intensity of it, the way his love announced itself whether or not it was convenient, the way Renxiao had eventually grown frightened of it rather than held by it. Mo Shuyi had spent months, in this second life, learning to be quieter. Learning to want things in a more controlled register.
It wasn't forgiveness. He needed to be clear about that—at least to himself, in the silence behind his eyes. Restraint was not forgiveness. Choosing not to pursue was not absolution. He could let Renxiao go—let him ride into the forest and toward the temple and whatever was waiting for him there—and still hold everything that had happened in the first life without releasing a single degree of it. He could worry about him and hate him and love him and resent the fact that he still loved him and keep all of that contained simultaneously, because Mo Shuyi had learned, the hard way, that the human heart was not particularly interested in being logically consistent.
You don't deserve my worry, he thought, in the direction of the empty window. You don't deserve any of what I still feel for you. But here we are.
"I'll take first watch tonight," Mo Shuyi said, standing. "So both of you can sleep."
Lan Qiang looked at him again. That look. The one that Mo Shuyi was increasingly unable to sort out, in this life, because it came from the same face that had lied to him and broken something permanently, and yet the face itself was—younger here, more uncertain, wearing its care more visibly than it had in the first life, and Mo Shuyi kept finding, to his profound irritation, that he noticed things about it that he should not have been noticing.
The way Lan Qiang held his shoulders when he was tired. The particular quality of his attention when he was worried about one of his disciples, the full weight of it, how it felt to be on the receiving end of it. The brown of his hair in lamplight, slightly warm, not the severe scholarly figure Mo Shuyi had built from memory and anger but someone younger and more fallible and more—
Don't.
Mo Shuyi filed that thought away in a locked place and walked past both of them out into the corridor, and behind him, he heard Lan Qiang say, very quietly, to no one in particular: "He'll be alright. He's always been more than he looks."
You say that like it's comfort, Mo Shuyi thought. You say that like you didn't send him somewhere that killed him, once.
He stood in the corridor and breathed the cold mountain air for a long moment before moving toward the watch post.
He'd better be alright, he thought, allowing it exactly once, in the privacy of the cold and the dark. He'd better be, because I am not doing that again. I refuse to do that again.
He doesn't deserve my grief any more than the first time. And I still—
He stopped the thought before it could finish itself.
He went to stand watch, and the night was quiet, and He Renxiao was already deep in the forest, and Mo Shuyi counted his own breathing and waited for dawn like a man who had learned to survive waiting.