Sound gains flesh within him, like every cancerous growth. He finds screams coagulate, the instinctive and visceral revulsion that rewrites the cage of his ribs, pushes thin the barrier of his diaphragm. He drinks, and the whimper drowns, and he seems no more murmured than the wash of patrons that negotiate their first few tastes of their meals alongside them. And he finds Wei Ying's face, cut of his gaze blanched:

"No." And softened snow, "I do not wish to meet you unfinished."

As if he were a puppet absent strings, a clay thing losing the shape of his moulding. Paper burned. He cannot be a fickle, feeble thing, not when the years have battered and turned him. Poetry, empty verse, the judgement of faint, aged philosophies. What has he learned, if not himself? How to drink (poorly) and precepts.

"To be another tribe for Wei Ying's salvation." By name of Wen, or in their chaotic impossibilities to pursue progress without reconciliation, Jiang or Jin. Let them follow, blind-eyed and aimless and know Wei Ying will deliver them to virtue and balance and the cleansing of blood once spilled, the erasure of sins committed. How many steps down the paths of Lanling? Carp Tower will learn new slopes and tumbles.

"This is not the way of equals." They cannot be as they are, and walk a line, one behind the next.