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“I did.” He laughs, and the sound is filled with misery and bitter irony. “For you, I did. And then you gave me what I worked so hard to protect, and what was it all worth, in the end? A sacrifice for a sacrifice, but yours negated mine. How much do I have to owe you? Why can’t it be enough?”
Jiāng Chéng sighs quietly, his mounting anger extinguishing just as fast as it’d begun to smolder. “In this world, I’d thought that everything was black and white, that there were no shades of gray to be found. But that isn’t true, is it? I want to hate you. For so long, I told myself that I’d kill you if you dared to manifest once more in this world. I wanted to prove to myself that I could, to avenge A-Jiě, to raze the debt between us, to prove that Yúnmèng Jiāng was upright and morally sound.”
He still hasn’t let go of Wèi Wúxiàn’s wrist. “What they all say about me interrogating and torturing Demonic Cultivators…none of that is a lie. I did those things. Some of them survived, if they swore fealty to me and they committed to doing proper Cultivation techniques. Others I slaughtered. I won’t pretend otherwise.”
His lips quiver. “But then once you did come back, aside from whipping you with Zǐdiàn and threatening you with Fairy, I did nothing. The tightly-woven falsehoods that I’d clung to with the desperation of a drowning man treading water begun to unravel at the seams. I was cruel; I was capricious, and in some ways, I don’t feel as though I was wrong for a few of my actions—such as when you and the ever-so-righteous, untouchable Hánguāng-jūn entered the Ancestral Hall. But others…”
Jiāng Chéng slowly exhales, almost hissing. “Our gatherings and partings in this lifetime seem just like a dream. I wanted to hold onto that the way that weeds choke out blossoms, the way that mud smothers lotus flowers when they reach toward the sun’s warmth and the blue skies above. But I can’t do that, can I?
You’ve moved on, but I’ve remained in the past. Wasn’t it you who told me to leave all of that behind? I suppose I left some of myself there, too. Part of me died a long time ago.”