"Ours," he hastens, in the way of an animal that learns late its nips and mouth's teasing have earned blood unduly spilled — in the way of an animal that might lick that hurt now, ease it. He did not intend — but Yiling is a coreless ground, made funerary hearth for misplaced intentions. Here, the twisting and turning of weeds in a space small, confined, is the reorganisation of pale geometries around dangers and weapons and cruel, timeless assault. Here, they suffer no feet's prints, only invasion, and what is Wei Ying, but Yiling lent flesh?

We worked you well, ground your bones, tattered your flesh. We worked until no more of you persisted.

"To town. We will want to see the reverberation. The spread of spiritual poison." Too much of the mark here, roots and forests and decay of shades grown and expansive, and Wei Ying, the deathless king, whose presence stokes them. In the low fluorescence of candid light, a brokered morning, Wei Ying is like threads of old silk, frayed at the ends of him, and each ghost comes to suckle at its mother's teat, and he has them, his children, his belly barren and his arms full. They must yet see what has become of the village, suffused so long in the toxicity of spiritual energies, cloyed and thickened.

Lan Wangji rises first. He has this, ever: back ripped, knee's joints that do not yield. One part of him, sustaining the whole, his hand drifting out less to anchor Wei Ying than make the victor's offer — come, then, be lifted. Make an attendant of the chief cultivator. "You will have a ribbon now, if I have a daughter later."

Stay, he needn't negotiate, then. It does not end with vows and territory, with pretty, worthless mimetism of rites Wei Ying smooths and folds and lays distantly cold across his body, like winter's mantle. Yiling is a step on long stairs, and no conclusion.