the pale morning sings of forgotten things
Mu Qingfang offers him a small bronze mirror. Shen Qingqiu takes it—evidently there’s no more putting this off. He looks into the mirror.
A teenager, his hair and robes askew, his face streaked with blood, stares dully back at him.
Ah, he realizes.
Beneath the blood, half of it smeared across his face as though he had started to wipe it away at one point, he looks to be in his middling-to-late teens. Probably around seventeen or maybe eighteen—
Pain stabs deep in his chest. That’s how old Luo Binghe is.
Was.
or: at the edge of the Abyss, Shen Qingqiu has a qi deviation. When he wakes, he finds he has lost far more than he can bear--or than he realizes.