He was older than He Renxiao by a number of years, 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, his robes immaculate, his posture easy and confident without being careless. He looked like someone's trusted older brother.
He looked 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, one of the most senior among them, studying alongside He Renxiao and Nan Fang under the same teacher 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 Gentle Snow 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 Gentle Snow 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.
"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! 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. 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 Liu Shibao 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 Liu Shibao 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.
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-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 Gentle Snow 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 in the particular shorthand that people develop for places they spend a great deal of time, 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, 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.