There is one advantage to having lived through the same pattern nine times: you know what the other person does not know you know.
Meng Wei had met me, across several lives, in various configurations. In my fourth life, we had been neighbors — adjacent households in the same quarter, a proximity that had given him an excellent view of my daily patterns and a false sense of having assessed me completely. In my sixth life, we had briefly been on the same side of a court dispute before it became clear that our interests were not as aligned as he had initially calculated. In my eighth life, I had never met him directly at all, but he had known of me, and that had been enough.
In this life, we had met exactly once, at the court assembly where I had first registered his presence with that particular attention that nine lifetimes had trained me to pay to him.
