Calming spells are the worst. He keeps reaching for his anger and finding nothing, so instead all he has is a deep sense of shame. 

"I just wanted to show Tomonori my whip."

"I understand that," Lan Xichen says, "it's a beautiful artifact and it was your mother's."

What is happening. Why isn't he being yelled at. Why hasn't anyone called him a worthless pathetic child who is a disgrace to the Shanghai enclave and to his family name. Jiang Cheng has no idea how to react to any of this.

"I'm... sorry?" he says, because that's usually safe.

"I know you're sorry," he says, "what I want to know is that it won't happen again."

"It won't," Jiang Cheng lies.

"Why didn't you ask Tomonori if he wanted to see your whip instead of doing something that looked so threatening?"

The question only increases Jiang Cheng's bone-deep sense of shame.

Sullenly: "I didn't think of it."

"Is there something I can do to help you remember?"

"No."

"All right. You're an excellent member of the enclave and I know you're going to think things through more going forward."

"Thank you, Xichen," he says and bows clumsily, then flees before he can be empathized with again.

This is the worst torture he has ever experienced. What was happening. At least when you're being called a useless despicable dog you know what's going on.

He hates Xichen. And Tomonori. And Nie Huaisang.

Lan Xichen dismisses the calming aura and, enclave business attended to, heads down to the library to study before his maintenance shift.

Masozi is there. He's currently occupied doing a thorough check for mals, but he sees Lan Xichen and beams at him. 

Lan Xichen smiles back in a way that, to the experienced eye, is far happier than his usual calm pleasant smile.

"How are you?" he asks.

"Good! I did a lot of practicing Mandarin last night and I can figure out what three of the sentences on the first page of my meditation book mean!" 

"You're learning very fast."

"They're the really short sentences and I might be reading them wrong. There are lots more where I can recognize some characters but I can't figure out what they mean in the sentence." 

"Even so! It's impressive."

Masozi isn't sure what being told it's impressive accomplishes, here - he's still very very far behind and if he can't catch up fast he's going to die here - so he just shrugs. 

"I bet we can find you book that's intended for teaching Mandarin, if you want to learn faster than language lab allows."

"That would be really good! I don't actually have that much language lab, I have so much math." 

"It is also less likely to eat you, which I appreciate." He walks over to the Mandarin section. 

Masozi is following him, keeping a lookout for mals and also trying to look at everything in the library at once. 

"Oh, this looks helpful." The cover of this book announces that it is Mandarin Primer: An Intensive Course in SPOKEN CHINESE, by Yuen Ren Chao.

Masozi eagerly examines it. 

"...Do you know where I'd find a book about how to make mana storage?" he asks a moment later. "I think I should do that soon. ...Nie Huaisang did say I could maybe trade fucking with someone for getting mana storage? But he thought you might say it was bad for the dignity of the enclave and it also sounds complicated to figure out who."