[ he turns the electronic item over in his hands ( it's been ages, a decade and three, since he's smoked - he prefers to perform such a task at the desk, etching his studies and notes into a stack of papers the thickness of his wrist by the time of his first death -- yiling's manifesto, yiling's studies of demonic cultivation -- ), while cain remarks on his manner. it's less obtuse, like this.

his brows are softer, his expression a little more suitable for a man in his mid-thirties than the flush of youth that mo xuanyu had been in. it makes him look like he's trying hard, as he draws one last time on cain's strange little smoking stick and then hands it back. ]

It's all me, [ he offers, as if the knowledge that his high-octane joviality and the coiled spring of severity that overcomes him being one-in-the-same is a thing that eludes most: ] But, if it makes you happier, how can I resist? I'm surprised you find this "me" more soothing than the other, most people I knew found me threatening.

[ three lives, he counts them as. his first, the second that "ended" at koi tower, and this one, in new amsterdam: the third. ]

I didn't really have time for such things. Like you and Abel, I was also fighting a war before my first life's end. My second was - oh, barely a year long, I was so clumsy with it. This one doesn't seem to have room for love or sex either, I'm a nobody here, yet beholden to a great many. I can't let you outshine me, after all.