Looking at CQL's timeline and... there's a chance LWJ might've been under intermittent house arrest from post-Sunshot to three years after WWX's death.

After the war, LWJ wants to go to Yunmeng but LQR refuses and bars him from leaving CR.

Then comes Phoenix Mountain.

LWJ attends with LXC - it would have looked very strange if he didn't, frankly, as LXC's current heir and a war hero in his own right.

But what does he do with that freedom? He follows WWX to Qiongqi Path and then lets him go free. And gets *royally* reamed out for it by LQR.

Not long after, LWJ shows up by himself in Yiling. He says he's "passing through on a nighthunt", which is an interesting way of describing sitting in a tea house eavesdropping on Yiling Laozu gossip. He prob grabbed the first nighthunt vaguely near Yiling as an excuse to visit.

So he meets Wei Wuxian. Then the very next scene of him we see he's being *publicly* punished in front of the whole clan in the snow.

A year passes and LWJ doesn't come back to Yiling. A *year*.

LWJ - who has already shown to be more than willing to bend the rules to go to WWX, who very clearly won't stop himself from doing so - doesn't come back, not even on the "just passing through" pretense.

Maybe because he couldn't.

Like the time post-Sunshot, maybe he was forbidden from leaving CR unless under supervision for sect occasions.

Then the ambush happens, and the fight in Nightless City. WWX dies and LWJ ends up sentenced to a whipping and is forcibly secluded in the back hills of CR for 3 years

After he's finally released, LWJ rebuilds his life and reputation - he becomes the one who goes where the chaos is (and pointedly doesn't engage with sect politics.)

But "goes where the chaos is" is so interesting to me because it's exactly what he WASN'T allowed to do before.