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Every year, heat takes more lives than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. The fatalities can sometimes go unnoticed, perhaps because the danger is invisible: There’s no twister that uproots a neighborhood and no flood that sucks it underwater, nor billions of dollars in property damage. Instead, heat’s imprint is seen in empty streets, work slowdowns, cognitive decline, and hospital bills. When autumn arrives and temperatures relent, heat leaves no discernable trace.

The Earth is getting hotter. In many places on the planet, summer is already two to three weeks longer than in the 1950s. By the end of the century, the warm season in the United States could last six months, and extreme temperatures could force us to spend much of it indoors. Supercharged heat waves will settle over cities for weeks at a time and cause many people to die. Others will suffer heart attacks, kidney disease, and brain damage. What we now call winter will be a brief, two-month interregnum that feels more like spring.

Reducing society’s consumption of fossil fuels is necessary for preventing worse-yet climate change. But even if every single power source becomes a renewable one and we stop emitting carbon, the planet’s surface won’t start cooling. The temperature will continue to rise for a few years before gradually leveling off. It will take “many, many centuries,” NASA estimates, to end the global-greenhouse effect. It is a sobering truth that cutting emissions isn’t enough. We also need to figure out how to live on a new Earth.

What if the key to that life is older than civilization itself? We need to manage heat to live. And we have an effective and democratic way of doing it: shade.

Shade makes long waits for the bus more comfortable. Shade helps keep farmworkers safe when they harvest fruits and vegetables under an unforgiving sun. And shade cools urban environments, improving residents’ chance of surviving blazing summers.

“We all know that cities are cooler when we have shade, but we’re not really planning for it,” V. Kelly Turner, an urban-planning and geography professor at UCLA, said on CNN. “In the future, that’s something that cities are going to need to do, is intentionally think about: What does shade infrastructure look like?”

Turner believes that shade could be America’s next long-term investment in public health. What safe drinking water and clean air were to the 20th century, shade could be to the climate-changed 21st. Scientific models bear her out. If we can get emissions under control and put the planet on a path to moderate warming, then by 2050, getting out of the sun could be the difference between unsafe heat and a livable environment.

One obvious way the planet can get more shade is more trees. We evolved in forests, and some of our oldest myths and stories unfold under their canopies. Hippocrates taught medicine under a plane tree, and Ovid found bittersweet beauty in a laurel’s leaves. The Mesopotamian goddess Inanna slept under a miraculous poplar whose shadow never moved, and Buddha found enlightenment by meditating under a ficus tree. Christian and Muslim heavens alike are cooled by trees’ perpetual shade.

Tree shade is where public space was born and civic identities are forged. In hot climates, people naturally prefer to confer, conduct commerce, and gossip out of the sun’s permanent glare. They spend far more time in shady parks or temple courtyards than in sunny ones. They linger and relax, and that engenders more interactions, and possibly even stimulates social cohesion. It’s true in arid cities, humid regions, and even temperate zones with short summers. People want to be in shade. They muse longer, pray more peacefully, and find strength to walk farther.

Perhaps because we’ve become so adept at cooling inside spaces with air conditioning, we’ve forgotten the importance of cooling outside spaces, too. There is no technology that cools the outdoors as effectively as a tree. These communal parasols are also misting machines that dissipate heat. It’s hard to feel that effect under one or two of them, but get enough trees together and an urban summer can be as fresh as a rural spring, a feat with major implications for energy use and public health.

Where tree-planting isn’t viable, cities must invest in other types of public infrastructure that cast shade. Throughout Los Angeles, on streets that are too cramped and paved over to support green canopies, the preferred protections aren’t arboreal but artificial, such as the pop-up tents of taqueros and the cheerful rainbow umbrellas of fruit vendors. In Phoenix, a desert city that struggles to nourish an urban forest, common tools include sidewalk screens, frilly metal filters, and soaring photovoltaic canopies. These interventions are more effective than many might expect. Ariane Middel, an Arizona State University urban-climate researcher who runs the school’s Sensable Heatscapes and Digital Environments (SHaDE) Lab, surveyed students and staff as they strolled through the shadows that solar panels cast on a Tempe campus thoroughfare. More than any change in ambient temperature, humidity, or wind, the mere presence of shade was the only significant predictor of outdoor comfort.

Shade’s effectiveness is a function of physics. It depends on the material properties of the sun-blocking objects that cast it—how they reflect, absorb, and transmit different wavelengths of energy in sunlight. It depends on the intensity of that light and the extent of the shade thrown. (A telephone pole that casts a perfect shadow on your body does nothing to stop the solar heating of the surfaces around you.) And it depends on the biology of the person who receives it. Middel has come as close as anyone to adding up all these factors. She praises humble umbrellas and plastic sails, because their shade feels like taking 30 degrees off the afternoon sun, which is about as good as shade cast by a tree. Ultimately, she finds that a city itself can offer the most relief in the shadows of arcaded sidewalks and looming skyscrapers.

The Greek philosopher Onesicritus taught that shade stunts growth, a belief that presaged a modern fixation on the healthiness of sunlight. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, doctors and public-health advocates feared that darkness itself caused the poor health of urban slum-dwellers. It was a vector of disease, where contagions bred and spread, and the murkiness also encouraged licentiousness and other urban vices. Some literally believed sunlight was the best disinfectant. Solar codes were written into urban plans, and new materials and technologies allowed architects to design brighter buildings flooded with natural light.

Now we’re beginning to see how a solar fetish may be maladaptive. In New York, a recent summer saw a throng of neighborhood activists protest the construction of a 16-story office tower, with signs to Save Our Light. They did this while huddling in the shadow of another building.

As intense heat bears down, we have to see shade as a basic human right. We have forgotten that shade is a natural resource. We don’t grasp its importance, and we don’t appreciate its promise for a better future. Loggers and farmers cut down forests, forcing animals to flee and land to turn fallow. Engineers ignore time-honored methods of keeping out heat, locking us into mechanical cooling systems that fail during blackouts. And urban planners denude shady parks and pave neighborhoods with heat-sucking roads, only to drive us mad with the infernal conditions. But shade is a path to a better future—if we just learn to value it again, and design for it in the places we live.

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For the Doodle request can we please have a fluffy Jiang Cheng with baby Jin Ling?

The Jiujiu that stepped up o7 Thanks for the rq!!

[ID: A MDZS Doodle. Jiang Cheng dressed in his sleeping robes with his hair down, smiles softly and tiredly down at baby!Jin Ling. He cradles JL in one arm whilst the other hand is reaching towards JL allowing JL to wrap a hand around one of JC's fingers. JL smiles happily whilst doing this. End ID]

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Man. That last post is making me think about one of my most ~potentially controversial~ JGY hot takes, which is:

IMO, the reason he never thought of harming LXC is that there was never anything to be gained by harming LXC.

This is not to say that LXC doesn’t hold a special place in his heart! But one of the most interesting things about JGY to me is that he will, when the chips are down and his life itself is on the line, always choose himself. It’s not because he’s selfish, and it’s certainly not because he doesn’t care about other people; another interesting thing about him is that while he is capable of cruelty, he avoids unnecessary harm to others save for in extreme, visceral situations.

When he talks about “harm” re: LXC, we can assume that he means physical harm, not emotional or psychological harm, because otherwise it’s a silly thing to say. JGY isn’t stupid, and while his emotional responses may be out of sync with other characters’, he must know that NMJ’s violent death would be an incredible blow to LXC, and that LXC would view being kidnapped and having his meridians sealed as a traumatic betrayal.

So given that he means life-endangering bodily harm only… I truly do not think this indicates that LXC is given special status simply because he loves him. JGY loves lots of people! I doubt that JGY ever sat there and went “god, I wish I could kill my wife! that would rule!” about QS; if he had, he would’ve disposed of her instead of taking on the liability of their marriage in a misguided effort to protect her. But I 100% believe that “this would be easier if she died before the wedding” is a thought that crossed his mind. Ditto for JL; JGY is by all accounts nothing but loving towards his nephew right up until Guanyin Temple where he’s willing to take JL hostage to secure his escape. But at some point, he almost certainly wondered what JL’s existence meant for his own security. There is no evidence that JGY ever endangered NHS, but it’s likely he considered whether NHS as Nie-zongzhu was a liability in his own way. SMS is his righthand man and JGY values that, but SMS also knows too much, and therefore could become a liability if their relationship ever soured. Etc, etc.

By contrast, there is never a point at which LXC’s continued existence poses a threat to JGY. LXC doesn’t ask questions or know any compromising secrets about him. Gusu Lan is self-sufficient and indebted to Lanling Jin for its reconstruction, so LXC doesn’t cause any political headaches. He’s a valuable ally and mediating force.

LXC is JGY’s beloved sworn brother and supporter, full stop. And since JGY doesn’t get off on hurting people for its own sake, why would he ever consider harming LXC? It’d only be harming himself, both emotionally and politically.

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opened bird cages

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"Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has signed a bill into law banning AI therapy in the state. This makes Illinois the first state to regulate the use of AI in mental health services. The law highlights that only licensed professionals are allowed to offer counseling services in the state and forbids AI chatbots or tools from acting as a stand-alone therapist. HB 1806, titled the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, also specifies that licensed therapists cannot use AI to make 'therapeutic decisions' or perform any 'therapeutic communication.' It also places constraints on how mental health professionals may use AI in their work, such as specifying that its use for 'supplementary support,' such as managing appointments, billing or other administrative work, is allowed. In a statement to Mashable, Illinois State Representative Bob Morgan said, 'We have already heard the horror stories when artificial intelligence pretends to be a licensed therapist. Individuals in crisis unknowingly turned to AI for help and were pushed toward dangerous, even lethal, behaviors.' The law enshrines steep penalties in an effort to curb such outcomes, with companies or individuals facing $10,000 in fines per violation. 'This legislation stands as our commitment to safeguarding the well-being of our residents by ensuring that mental health services are delivered by trained experts who prioritize patient care above all else,' said Mario Treto Jr., secretary of the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. The bill passed the Illinois House and Senate unanimously in a sign of overwhelming bipartisan support. The legislation is particularly notable as the Trump administration’s recently-revealed AI plan outlines a 10-year moratorium on any state-level AI regulation. It also comes as OpenAI has said it is improving the ability for its models to detect mental or emotional distress and will ask users to take a break during unusually long chats."

This is correct and more states should do the same

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A sleepy/cuddly kiss on the neck/shoulder with Kinn and Porsche for me? Or, alternatively, with Phayu and Rain if you've seen LITA? Pretty please with a cherry on top?

(also this is such a fun idea I love that you're doing this!)

Hi @doyou000me!! Thank you for requesting and Happy valentine's day! I picked Phayu and Rain for you, I hope you like it!

Updates and Shop and Commissions Here: Juniper's Gap Kofi

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thinking about rain love in the air. tiny little trembling deer with no thoughts. huge eyes. baby.

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AN: hi guys ^-^ i don't like how lz was beaten so i changed it hehe!! ummmm this is a lemon don't like don't read!!! i don't own my bb lz or any of his icky family, all credit to our lady mxtx!! i do own one direction tho o.o

Lan Qiren said, "Wangji, the elders sold you to One Direction."

OMG, Lan Wangji thought. "OMG, Shufu."

"If you had did your chores and not beat up great great grandma I could have blocked the sale or at least got you to go to Lady Gaga," Lan Qiren smoothed his goatee angrily with anger

Lan Xichen said, :bUt Wangji is a baby. A little angel. It's that Wei Wuxian's fault, Shufu."

Lan Qiren tugged his goatee. That meant the argument was over.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Liam Niall Harry and Zayn smirked at Lan Wangji and he felt like a stupid temple girl. Louis grimaced sympathetically. Then Harry said, "too good for laundry, innit?"

"That's not how innit is used," Louis corrected gently. His eyes are so warm or perhaps cool, the author doesn't know what he looks like even though they just looked up members one direction.

Zayn laughed meanly. "If you're in love with this twink, just say so, Louis."

They glared at each other homoerotixally while Lan Wangji blushed cutely. Then Lan Wangji tripped. Oh he's sooo clumsyyyy

But... Louis caught him (=>_<=)!!!

~~~~\\~~~~~~~~~

"I used to pluck at a guqin, but I'm not a real musician like you, Louis," Lan Wangji murmured demurely

"I can teach you," said the older man. "My guqin teacher came from the Moling Su sect, so no one could be better."

Wow, rhe Moling Su sect!!! Everyone knew they were thy greatest guqin musicians in the whole world.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

The End... for now!!!!!

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Rating Scum Villain Characters By How Much I Cheer When I See Them Depicted With Grey Hair

It goes without saying that this list is highly subjective. But it makes me happy! I have not actually seen all these characters with grey hair, i don’t think. Listed ages reflect end of book except where stated otherwise.

Mobei-jun: 2/10. Age: fuck if I know. We’ll say he’s like 39. I understand the whole ice prince aesthetic makes silver/white haired Mobei-jun attractive to some people but I personally think it’s really funny if he just looks absurdly young forever. Assigned youngest child.

Shang Qinghua: 6/10. Age: like 40 or 80 if you count his first life. Shang Qinghua’s perpetual state of total stress is one of his most defining characteristics so grey hair for this character makes sense. Also jives well with his whole sleazy uncle kind of vibe. When paired with above, it can make MBJ look like SQH’s inappropriately younger boyfriend, which is deeply funny to me. Unfortunately, the twinkification of this character in fandom limits my opportunities to experience this kind of joy.

Luo Binghe: 0/10. Age: like 25. It just feels wrong.

Shen Jiu: 8/10. Age: depends, we’ll say 40. If Shen Jiu had grey hair he would dye that shit so fucking fast. Yue Qingyuan would try to re-assure him that oh, shidi, grey hair is nothing to be ashamed about!! And Shen Jiu would be like you stupid fuck it’s clearly caused by my terrible shitty cultivation GET OFF MY FUCKING MOUNTAIN!!!!!!!! But fun fact! It is actually caused by his constant hyper-vigilance, PTSD, and meteoric stress levels. 🙏💚

Ning Yingying: 1/10. Age: also like 25. Gets 1 point for the hilarity of a character named baby ending up prematurely grey.

Ming Fan: 5/10. Age: 27-ish. This kid is so fucking stressed. Obviously this more applies post-jump, not to volume 1!Ming Fan. There is excellent potential here though for every time something happens to Shen Qingqiu, Ming Fan shows up looking greyer and more haggard.

Liu Mingyan: 0/10. Age: like 25. Idk it just doesn’t inspire me.

Sha Hualing: 1/10. Age: also like 25. I was gonna say 0/10 and then i thought about Luo Binghe-wrangling giving her grey hair and her furiously dyeing it black again and I thought it was funny. Sue me.

Gongyi Xiao: 2/10 Age: ??? Dead anyways. See, if the depiction of GYX gives him grey hair, that means he lived long enough to have grey hair 🥺

Yang Yixuan: -10/10 Age: Baby. Reason: Baby.

Tianlang-jun: 10/10. Age: I don’t fucking know, man. Lots of great reasons to give TLJ some greys. # 1, it helps distinguish him visually from Binghe. # 2, appropriate since he is an evil DILF. # 3: my guy got crushed under a mountain for like twenty years I think that entitles him to some grey hair. # 4: I think he’d be completely ridiculous about it. I am imagining him frantically denying he looks his age and demanding Zhuzhi-lang tell him he still looks pretty.

Zhuzhi-lang: 3/10. Age: ?????? On the one hand, ZZL is probably old enough and stressed enough to have grey hair. On the other other hand, his hair is typically depicted as mostly green, partially snakes, so, like, ymmv.

Su Xiyan: 6/10. Age: dead, would probably be in her 40s/50s if she were alive. Look, I cannot deny the appeal of giving some grey hair to the dead dilf mother of all time. Tianlang-jun would also, unfortunately, be staggeringly horny about it.

Mu Qingfang: 7/10. Age: 40s-ish. *Nods approvingly*

Liu Qingge: 4/10. Age: 30-45. Liu Qingge is the assigned baby of the peak lords, so giving him grey hair always feels weird to me. He would look pretty with like a cool silver streak tho. I do also see some appeal to him acquiring grey hair during the five year time skip due to the *hand waves*.

Qi Qingqi: 7/10. Age: 40s-ish. MILF.

Yue Qingyuan: 16/10. Age: 40s-ish. Makes absolutely perfect sense. This is one of the most stressed men alive. He’s very literally the assigned da-ge by the narrative. His cultivation is a total mess because of Xuan Su! Frankly, I’m surprised his hair isn’t totally white by the end of this book! because it would make sense!! within its literary and cultural context from what I know!! Also, it would work with his wardrobe.

Shen Qingqiu: 10/10. Age: 27-ish, technically, except also in his 40s, except also immortal so who really knows. Similar to YQY and TLJ, this makes sense. Shen Qingqiu’s abysmal physical health and terrible mental health are persistent throughout the text, and things like Without A Cure and the widow arc are perfect excuses for SQQ to have grey hair. It makes him look older, which is fun in SQQ’s context for a variety of reasons, including the fact that LBH would find it hot. Elegant, Beautiful, Graceful, Scholarly Qing Jing Peak Lord Shen having grey hair is a beautiful thing indeed 💚

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It's very important to my understanding of all three characters that Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli see Wei Wuxian as their sibling, and he sees them as his. But I think it's also important that he is not their sibling, legally or socially.

When Jin Zixuan snaps "If you like Jiang Yanli so much, why don't you ask her father if you can marry her", I think the implication is pretty clear that this is in fact a thing Wei Wuxian could have done if they'd felt that way about each other. (And Madam Yu would no doubt have flipped a table at the "son of a servant" daring to suggest such a thing, but Jiang Fengmian would probably have been delighted.) No one reacts to this comment like JZX just said something insane or implied WWX is into incest.

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Art for omiii2025 event that illustrates wonderful (gorgeous, fantastic, delightful) story The whole world was ready to return by @oceaniads

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apparently I'm not done with my newly resurrected chengqing bullshit -

semi crack semi angst idea that wen ning did to his sister what wen qing did to wwx, aka: wen ning had listened to wen qing all his life, but by god he was not gonna like her die for his mistake.

wen ning went to lanling by himself maybe with the rest of the wens.

in any case when the cultivators stormed the burial mount after wwx's demise, lwj found a-yuan, jiang cheng found wen qing.

just imagine the awkward lock-eye between these two dumb bitches

I won't snitch if you don't snitch.

obviously wq and jc has to work through some stuff but like...

very quickly jc realizes ppl straight up don't recognize wq. Think about it. She showed up for 35 seconds at Cloud Recesses and never attended class. And then... the war happened and she was never really a player. Probably some ppl met her, but how many of them are still alive?

Sure jc had to hide wq the first couple of years, but after jgs mysteriously bit the dust... things relaxed by a lot.

Jc being that bitch that stares everyone in the eye whilst lying to their faces: how dare you accuse my wife of being a dead war criminal.

Jgy: she is clearly wen qing.

Jc: Prove it.

Lqr *furious* : wangji, is this not wen qing?

Lwj: .....it is not.

Lxc & lqr: ????????

Wwx's resurrection would be wild.

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Sometimes Jiang Cheng's past reminds him of itself, but now he doesn't have to be alone in his pain, because Jin Ling will always be by his Jiujiu's side

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Concept where Bingge basically ends up the same way Meng Mo did.

After his incredibly long and dramatic reign as the demon emperor, eventually he runs out of narrative leash (the story ends) and the protagonist halo stops protecting him. Of course he's still got his incredibly overpowered everything to help keep him from being toppled, but no one is eternally vigilant. Sooner or later some plot or scheme against him works, and his body gets destroyed or sealed away in some trap he can't escape from.

But Bingge's not limited to just his physical form. So he escapes into dreams.

Time moves strangely in dreams. That's always the case, but in the beginning, Bingge used to be pretty good at enforcing order over the chaos and keeping track himself. It was part of mastering them. As an untethered spirit, however, Luo Binghe finds that he can't really do that anymore. He and Meng Mo go their separate ways, with him no longer able to offer the dream demon anything, and that's the last Bingge sees of the old master. Whether he disappears into realms deeper than dreams or avoids him or just finally fades away, Bingge's not sure, but before he goes he leaves a parting warning that in this sort of state, Luo Binghe will find it more difficult than ever to preserve his sense of self. The dreams will want to unmake him, sleeping minds will have more ability to sense and fight him off as an intruder, and there are many dark things that feed upon the energy of wayward souls.

In a way, it's not unlike being back in the Endless Abyss. Bingge is lost in a tumultuous sea of illusions and traps, unable to return to himself because the only territory left for him to traverse is comprised of other people's dreams. Even when he escapes some trouble or finds some refuge, it's in the mind some of other being, and he can never stay for long. Either he'll get caught and exorcised or he'll feed off of the host's energy too aggressively and they'll die.

In the real world, centuries pass. The damage done by merging the realms takes root, and over time the demonic energies colliding with spiritual ones causes them to degrade each other, eventually resulting in a world with barely a whisper of its original abundance. Bingge's spirit tends to feed on whatever powerful demons or cultivators remain, resulting in their eventual mortality and further loss of strength. Over time, even he runs out of targets capable of sustaining him, and his presence weakens to that of a shadow lurking on the edges of nightmares.

Then one night, he encounters a mind that tastes familiar.

It's been so long that he can't place why at first. But it's also been so long since he'd found a mind that felt like he knew it from before that it's striking. There's nothing in the dream itself that offers answers. The dreamer also doesn't seem all that remarkable or familiar -- just some weak young master who occupies himself with books and the electronic pursuits of the era, trying to escape some of the unpleasantness of reality and his physical frailty through fiction and dreams.

Bingge, on a whim, decides to indulge this inexplicably familiar stranger and nudges his mind towards conjuring up the desires lurking in his unconscious. Maybe they'll offer some clues to the mystery. Bingge is expecting the usual parade of vices to make their appearance, for his target to dream of sex, or violence, or feasts of endless delights, etc.

He is decidedly not expecting his target to dream of him.

The first time it happens, Bingge startles so badly he accidentally dissolves the dream and gets knocked out of his target's mind, and into a neighboring dreamer. He has to disentangle him from the neighbor's subsequent nightmare before he can get back. He almost convinces himself that it was some error on his part -- after all, how would this random human's mind even be able to accurately recreate Qing Jing Peak during Luo Binghe's disciple days? The peak was burned centuries before the realms were merged by Xin Mo, and he knows from other dreamers that such events have long since been forgotten to the world's history. People have shorter lifespans and shorter memories to match.

But when he tries again, the results are the same. The dreamer dreams of Luo Binghe.

These dreams aren't always exclusive to the usual indulgent kinds, of course. But in a way the sexually charged dreams where Luo Binghe whisks the pretty fuerdai off to some lavish bed chamber or hand feeds him decadent treats are more explicable than the others -- at least the style of hedonism makes sense, even if Bingge's own involvement is a fascinating mystery.

It's the other dreams that are more confusing. After a while, Bingge realizes that matters were not as clear as he first perceived. The dreamer doesn't dream of Qing Jing Peak exactly as it was. There are signs, when he's not too shocked to look closely, that this is more of an approximation of the peak than an accurate reflection of it. Bingge's memories are pretty well-preserved, if nothing else, and he can compare them and readily see that the dreamer probably isn't drawing from memory. Something else, like a description or vision, is probably where the imagery is coming from. But since Bingge is there, he has to stop his own mind from filling in the details he recollects where the dreamer has only blank or vague ideas.

So this person knows of Qing Jing Peak, but was never on it. And for some reason he dreams of it, and of Luo Binghe.

Particularly, the dreamer seems to infrequently dream of slapping Shen Qingqiu and carrying a young Luo Binghe away, taking him through some doorway or across a bridge or down a path that often seems to lead to the dreamer's own living space. Them little dream Binghe is sat down in comfort and peace, given food and medicine, wrapped up in warm blankets and settled in front of some modern electronic device or handed a colorful booklet suited to children. The dreamer pats his fluffy hair and assures him that he'll be perfectly alright from now on.

Bingge is... baffled. Threatened. Insulted. Extremely jealous. He hasn't even cracked the mystery before he starts possessing baby Binghe's dream avatar. He tells himself it's part of the investigation as he watches this "Shen Yuan" dreamer curse out Shen Qingqiu and gently wipe hot tea out of Binghe's hair for the dozenth night in a row.

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An organization representing victims of abuse by priests is urging the new Pope, Leo XIV, to take a firm stand against pedophilia in the Catholic Church — and to demonstrate his commitment by setting up a fund to help survivors. Activists point out that, when the current pontiff was a cardinal in the United States, his diocese often looked the other way in such cases and never launched full-scale investigations. At the same time, Leo XIV is credited with playing a key role in dismantling one of Peru’s most notorious Catholic pedophile sects. Still, reports of rape and abuse keep surfacing from countries where the Catholic Church holds strong influence. For survivors, the road to justice is painfully long — sometimes stretching out for decades — and victories are rare. The previous pope, Francis, also faced criticism for his lenience towards priests accused of abuse. In his own homeland of Argentina, the future Francis declined an opportunity to pursue a pedophilia case. Now, many are hoping the new pope will break with that tradition: listen to victims, open up the Church archives, and cooperate with the courts.