A trail he can follow, walk the line of progress over unfamiliar hills, in the learning of himself. Has he not but recently set out doing the same? Finding pieces of himself, pieced together, stitches that aren't pretty so much as patchwork and beautiful for their borrowed wholeness.

"It takes time for any person to know themselves. I'm still learning," he says, admitting it with the same cavalier grace in which he's named himself a half-wrecked cultivator, he who has the techniques and the teachings and the methods and the limitations of his body's own natural qi to use any of the above. Power in those moments, or the metred use of that finite resource. Time has given him the means of its effectiveness, even while he has not needed to fill his empty cup with resentful energies for years.

Oh, but he had, once. Had again when he'd sought out his own death, at the hands of those who had been so greedy for it, for the power they thought he held indiscriminate, so that they in turn could wield it with righteous terrorism.

"The young grow together, and the old, we learn to walk together. Companions, and not saviours. It's long past my turn to be the one who waits, Lan Zhan." A smile, small and true and tired, for sixteen dark years and sixteen years of plunging into chaos, and children, their numbers growing one by one.