Beautiful magic absolutely takes precedence over food.

Tomonori doesn't particularly resist Nie Huaisang touching him, now; it's really the path of least resistance to just go along with whatever kind of affection his new friend prefers. Also it's easy to just accept things when he is being offered the chance to look at the sword!!!

"Thank you so much," he says, which maybe he has already said multiple times but it bears repeating.

Nie Huaisang sits down at the table. "Lan Zhan! Show Bichen to Tomonori."

"No."

"Lan Zhaaaaaaan, I promised.'

"Mn?" asks Tomonori.

Lan Zhan isn't very good at people but he knows when he's being mocked.

"No."

"Lan Zhaaaan." Nie Huaisang makes the puppy dog face. "He helped me in lab! I could have been eaten by a homework! Aren't you grateful?"

"Mn," Lan Wangji says, but he unsheathes his sword and hands it over to Tomonori for inspection.

Tomonori inspects (!) the sword (!!)!

It looks- really complicated, actually, he'll need to stare at it for a while. So he does, smiling widely and not looking at Lan Wangji or Nie Huaisang the entire time.

Tomonori is very cute, especially when he's looking at magical objects. (Who is he kidding when he says he can do whatever, he's clearly an artificer.) 

But Lan Zhan is also very cute, and more importantly has a very big sword, an affinity for killing mals, and a known high level of tolerance for Nie Huaisang. 

So Nie Huaisang scoots up very close to Tomonori, their thighs touching, and says in a very interested tone of voice, "can you tell me about it?"

Oh good Nie Huaisang has a friend.

Dammit, he also has a completely flat affect. How is Nie Huaisang supposed to know if this is working.

"You're very disciplined," Tomonori says wonderingly, because wow this sword has a lot of dumb rules, maybe Lan Wangji is just too stressed about them to say more than a syllable at a time? "Did it choose you, or did you choose to become what it needed, first?"

"The Lan family traditionally collects mana by following three thousand rules. It's so many rules. I don't think I'd be able to remember them all. A lot of them are duplicates though. Or kind of vague. 'Do good things, don't do bad things...'"

Maybe he should put his head on Tomonori's shoulder to see if Lan Wangji is jealous now.

Oh, that's nice.

What?

Why is Nie Huaisang's head on that guy's shoulder? 

He's not even an enclaver. And he's fat. Nie Huaisang is so much prettier than that guy is and he deserves someone as pretty as he is. And he's ignoring Nie Huaisang in order to stare at Bichen! If Nie Huaisang's head were on Jiang Cheng's shoulder Jiang Cheng would not ignore him in favor of even the coolest sword in the world, because Jiang Cheng understands the minimal standards of how you should treat your boyfriend. And Jiang Cheng is a real artificer trained by the Shanghai zongzhu himself and not this random fat Japanese kid who doesn't even know what track he wants. 

Jiang Cheng has no feelings here it's just that, objectively, Nie Huaisang deserves better.

It's nice that his questions are still getting answered even though Lan Wangji can't answer them. This is one of the other things that would be nice about being in an enclave. There are so many more of those than ways of getting into one.

Tomonori did not think people who just became friends put their heads on each other's shoulders but it doesn't seem wrong to return the gesture. He leans into it.

"Do you know how old the enchantments are? They must have been extremely difficult..."

Of course he's already trying to think how he could do them. Not with what he knows how to do now, but maybe he can reason from what he does know- too much of his knowledge is theoretical. His parents only let him do as much supervised lab work as they thought was safe, and now he's probably behind everyone else-

Ha. SUCCESS. Nie Huaisang will successfully have Extremely Cute Lab (And Possibly Shop?) Homework Boyfriend even if he doesn't have Extremely Hot Sword Boyfriend.

"Bichen is incredibly old, it's been passed down in the Lan family for generations."

He twists around to see how Lan Wangji is reacting to this.

Awwwwww.

Well, that's unhelpful.

Stop asking him about swords!!!! Nie Huaisang doesn't care about swords!!!! If JIANG CHENG was Nie Huaisang's boyfriend he would listen to him talk about art ALL DAY and not talk about swords even a little bit. Except maybe their artistic value. Maybe once they graduate they would go to a museum of swords together and look at them from an artistic perspective. NOT that Jiang Cheng is interested in Nie Huaisang, because he isn't, but you know. Hypothetically.

"There must be so many artifacts in the enclave. I've only ever really seen my glasses. A family friend made them for me. I helped, but she did the really dangerous work," Tomonori says, with obvious disappointment in his voice.

"Oh, I'm glad she did the dangerous work, I wouldn't want you to get hurt."

Nie Huaisang, that's not how things work for normal people.