#eirenical.screencaps

He wakes up and makes his way into town and to Sigumen's steps, overhearing all this terrible news as he walks.  People injured, homes destroyed, people killed, and so much of the blame being placed on all the sects, and on Sigumen in particular.  And as he walks, you can see it all starting to weigh him down, until he's literally bent over from the weight of it on his back.

And then the final betrayal.  His people, his friends, want to disband the sect.  They want to walk away.  They blame him and his hubris for this disaster.  And the coup-de-grace is Xiao Zijin asking Qiao Wanmian... "You don't like this place either, right?"

And the sad look on Qiao Wanmian's face finally breaks Li XIangyi of his paralysis and he turns away, back to the scene unfolding on those steps and drifts back to the shore, where he ultimately collapses.

And that's all we get.

We know he returned to Sigumen.  We know he overheard them wanting to disband the sect.  We know he left without a word.  And that's the end of the story as far as Episode 3 is concerned.

But this makes sense.  Li LIanhua is mid-Bicha attack and has just left Fang Duobing on the side of the road when this flashback comes on.  He's fighting his own body in a desperate bid for survival to complete the one task he's set himself and Fang Duobing has just dredged up all this stuff and gone off on a tear about how he's Li Xiangyi's disciple.  A road Li Xiangyi never got a chance to walk.  Another person he failed along the way.  And so he's focused on all the ways in which he is a failure in that moment, all the ways he doesn't live up to Fang Duobing's hero, Li XIangyi, all the ways that he is no longer that man.  So he zeroes in on the moment he lost it all: his reputation, his sect, his health, his power.  So that's the part of the flashback that we get.

But in Episode 9, we have an entirely different set of circumstances.  He's just saved his A-mian.  He's focused on helping her let go of the man he thinks she still loves.  He's putting himself aside to focus solely on her (or so he thinks—that's honestly a question for later, but bear with me, we'll get there ;D) and what she needs.  And we get dumped into this flashback again.

Only this time it doesn't start on the beach.  It starts here:

It starts with Li Xiangyi seeing his sect disbanded again.  Only this time, he remembers the words that come from Xiao Zijin differently:

There's no speaking out load of "you hate it here too, don't you?" or any similar sentiment.  Because at this point, Li Lianhua knows this isn't true.  She can't hate it there.  She lives there.  She didn't leave.  And she doesn't hate him because she very obviously misses him and mourns him.  So in his mind, he gives this moment a little less abrasiveness.  A little less fierceness.  But because he's so focused on A-Mian in this memory, we finally find out that there is an entire piece to this incident that we haven't gotten until now.

A-Mian's grief.

A-Mian's recognition that he was there.

And the letter.

The letter she wrote a month ago.

A letter Li Xiangyi NEVER READ.

We get to see A-Mian's regret.  We get to see her grief: both for her own sense of shame at being unable to keep up with the man she loved, and her sense of loss over her own innocence and the opportunities that they'll never have now to make amends.  And we get to see her break from her grief for just a moment to rush down those stairs because some instinct in her just won't quit.

Li Xiangyi had returned.

And she knew.

But it was too late.  She no longer trusted herself.  And Li Xiangyi, having heard her outpouring of grief, had already decided that he owed it to her and to everyone else to just… walk out of their lives for good. 

And he did. 

But he owed her one last thing first.

He owed it to her to read the letter that she'd written him a month ago and he'd never opened.

So before he goes back to that beach, he returns to his rooms in Sigumen to retrieve that unopened letter and read it.

On first watch, I had assumed this was after his healing with Monk Wuliao.  That he was RE-reading that letter, not reading it for the first time.  But these are clearly his rooms in Sigumen.  The desk he conducts business from is at the bottom right and the table he confronts Shand Gudao from is on the left. But unlike when we usually see these rooms, brightly lit during the day, they're now mostly in darkness, the sun clearly setting given the angle of the light coming into the room. This is the sunset of Li Xiangyi. The last moments of his life, in a way.

And the letter is very VERY obviously unopened when he first takes it out:

And reading that letter is the final nail in Li Xiangyi's coffin, I think.  Final proof that he'd failed in every aspect of his life: being a brother, being a lover, being a sect leader, being a friend, being a student.  After this, he leaves Sigumen and goes back to that beach to lay down where he washed back up initially, ready to let the death he temporarily escaped take him away.  And when the monk saves his life anyway, he still manages to kill off the part of him that was Li Xiangyi.  Li Xiangyi is dead, he insists over and over and over again, until he believes it himself.

Because in that letter—a letter he left unread FOR A MONTH—Qiao Wanmian manages to show him that he never really saw her at all.  That he never saw one of his dearest loved ones in pain right in front of him—pain that he finally witnessed on the steps of Sigumen as she poured out her grief and regret in sending this letter to begin with.  How ironic then, that a letter she'd sent intending to set him free of her to fly up to the heights on his own, was the final arrow that brought him down.  I don't think that's what she would have wanted at all.

But I really feel for her.  I do.

Just imagine sending this letter and knowing that it's sitting in Li Xiangyi's mail pile somewhere… and assuming that he read it and that's what spurred him on to this last desperate fight.  Because in that outpouring on the steps that clearly what she thought she did.  She thought this letter sent him to his death.  And in that moment she's wrong, because HE NEVER READ IT.  Not until long after that.  Not until after this moment.  And fucking HELL, but that just hurts me.

Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything if he hadn't witnessed that moment.  Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything if he hadn't read that letter.  Maybe he still would have felt that he'd failed enough to warrant death of some kind.

But maybe not.