"I didn't— This wasn't something I ever thought could happen," Wei Wuxian said inside Jiang Cheng's head, which was awful for so many reasons—not the least of which was that Jiang Cheng had just watched his shixiong fall to his death—that for the first heartwrenching moments Jiang Cheng thought he was hallucinating from grief.

But no, Wei Wuxian kept talking, spilling out an increasingly panicked story about golden cores and demonic cultivation which was so tangled and familiar that—just for a moment—Jiang Cheng thought he'd be able to close his eyes and wake up from the worst dream he'd ever had to hear Wei Wuxian babbling about cultivation theory by the docks back home, like nothing had ever happened at all.

"I never meant to haunt you," Wei Wuxian said, voice full of helpless anguish, as Jiang Cheng turned away from the cliff—where Lan Wangji still knelt, frozen—and forced himself to walk towards the collapsing puppets Wei Wuxian had once controlled. "I only wanted you to live the best life you could."