The moment Shen Xuan stepped into the main hall, a teacup lid came flying straight at his head.
He tilted his head slightly. The lid grazed his temple, leaving behind a shallow cut.
The main hall was decorated in a dark, gloomy style. Even on a bright day, sunlight could barely penetrate the room, making the atmosphere inexplicably oppressive.
Shen Xuan walked forward a few steps and looked at the dignified middle-aged man seated above them. He bowed respectfully.
“Father.”
Shen Chenghe looked at him with a dark expression.
“What a fine son I have. You even dared to escape from confinement. What exactly have you been doing these past two days?”
It was no secret that the Palace Master, who was dutiful and highly respected within the academy, seemed to have two completely different faces when dealing with other people and with his own son.
Shen Xuan was already used to his attitude. His voice remained calm and respectful.
“Father, I already told you. I was taking care of some personal matters.”
Shen Chenghe raised his hand and slapped him across the face.
“Is that how you speak to your father?”
He never held back when hitting Shen Xuan. One slap was enough to leave half of Shen Xuan’s face numb.
Shen Xuan obediently apologized.
“I’m sorry, Father. But you asked me a question, and I answered it. I don’t think there was anything disrespectful about that.”
Shen Chenghe raised his hand again.
“Fine, fine. Let’s talk about your escape from confinement. Where exactly do you place the academy’s rules?”
Shen Xuan stepped back and avoided the second slap.
“Father, have you forgotten? I never violated any of the academy’s rules. I was only locked in confinement because we had an argument.”
Before being sent to the confinement room, Shen Xuan had clearly stated that he had no intention of becoming Shen Chenghe’s successor.
Shen Chenghe immediately launched into a long speech about how much he had sacrificed to make Shen Xuan his successor, inevitably mixing in plenty of criticism and belittlement.
Shen Xuan patiently listened until he finished, then sincerely suggested,
“Father, have you ever considered that I’ve never said I would remain at the academy after graduation? Wouldn’t it be better to cultivate someone who genuinely wants to stay at the academy as your successor? Someone like Senior Brother Yu, for example.”
In his previous life, after Shen Xuan left, Yu Le had done an excellent job.
Shen Chenghe instantly flew into a rage. He slammed his hand against the table and stood up.
“If you don’t stay at the academy, where else can you go? The temples? If you die outside, no one will even collect your body!”
His overwhelming negative emotions were beginning to wear down Shen Xuan’s patience.
To prevent the situation from getting even worse, Shen Xuan looked up at him and struck directly at the heart of his bluster.
“What are you afraid of? Are you afraid that I’ve escaped your control, or are you afraid of the shadow from all those years ago?”
Shen Chenghe had been struck exactly where it hurt. His pupils suddenly contracted. After taking several hurried breaths, he looked at Shen Xuan with a cold, sinister gaze.
“Go and take fifty lashes, then get back to the confinement room!”
He no longer looked at Shen Xuan like a son. He looked at him more like an enemy.
“Father,” Shen Xuan reminded him, “I signed up as one of the supervisors for this year’s entrance examination. I need to leave the confinement room before the examination begins.”
Shen Chenghe called someone over and ended their conversation with a single sentence.
“Get out!”
Someone soon came to take Shen Xuan away to receive his punishment before escorting him to the confinement room.
The female senior disciple knew how harsh the Palace Master was toward his son, so she felt somewhat sorry for Shen Xuan and deliberately left some medicine for him.
Shen Xuan thanked her.
There were no windows, tables, chairs, or benches inside the confinement room. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but emptiness.
Once the door was closed, the formation began to operate. The spiritual energy and sound in the air disappeared completely. Even if one muttered to oneself, the words would vanish before they could leave one’s lips.
For most people, absolute silence itself was a form of torture.
But Shen Xuan didn’t care.
He casually found a place to sit down and treated his wounds.
In his previous life, he had often visited this place as a child whenever his father wanted to “correct” him. By the time he was a teenager, he was rarely sent here anymore.
Lu Junheng, however, occasionally came here to spend a little time.
The moment Shen Xuan thought of Lu Junheng, his mood darkened.
People’s perception of time could easily become distorted inside the confinement room. He had no idea whether Lu Junheng had caused any trouble outside.
Shen Xuan knew very well that ever since his mother died, his father had always harbored resentment toward him.
This wasn’t some clichéd story about a man unable to accept the death of his beloved wife and therefore taking his anger out on their youngest son.
In reality, it was difficult to say whether Shen Chenghe and his wife, Shen Xuan’s mother, had ever truly loved each other.
Shen Xuan’s mother was named Song Huayin.
Before her death, she had been one of the most prominent figures of her generation—the brightest jewel of the Fourth Divine Temple. Both her talent and appearance were extraordinary.
The two had met on the battlefield.
Shen Chenghe had not always been the way he was now.
When he was young, he refused to follow the path his family had arranged for him. After graduating from Taiyi Academy, he took the entrance examination for the Fourth Divine Temple. After passing, he went to the battlefield and remained there for many years.
The year Shen Chenghe became the youngest elder of the Fourth Divine Temple, an unprecedented wave of monsters erupted on the front lines.
Song Huayin was transferred from another location to Shen Chenghe’s post, where the two worked together to defend against the monsters.
Extreme circumstances often made it easy for people to develop an excessive sense of intimacy with someone else, and people often mistook that feeling for love.
The two quickly formed an emotional bond in that distorted environment and soon became Dao companions.
Several years later, the fighting on the front lines eased. The couple finally had a temporary reprieve from battle and were able to spend time together like ordinary couples.
That was when the problem became apparent.
They were incompatible.
Whether in personality or in the trivial details of daily life, they simply did not suit each other.
That wasn’t to say that either of them was a bad person. In fact, both Shen Chenghe and Song Huayin had excellent reputations.
But two fundamentally decent people coming together did not necessarily mean they would have a good ending.
In a short period of time, they had completely ruined each other’s lives.
Amid all the chaos, they finally realized that the so-called “love” they had felt before had merely been an illusion created by their environment.
They had never loved each other.
They had never even truly understood each other.
Their marriage had been a mistake from beginning to end.
They argued with each other, and day after day, those arguments gradually turned into hatred.
Yet neither was willing to take a step back.
They continued tormenting each other for years.
Shen Xuan was born into that situation.
He had never been able to understand why two people who tormented each other would still choose to bring an unwanted child into the world.
Then, during a monster attack, Song Huayin personally pushed Shen Chenghe into the middle of the monsters.
Her final words to him were filled with hatred and a curse.
“Go die. Once you’re dead, we’ll finally have some peace.”
But that was precisely where fate became cruelly ironic.
When the battle ended, the person who survived after being pushed among the monsters was Shen Chenghe.
Song Huayin, meanwhile, died not far away while trying to save a group of young cultivators who had recently joined the Divine Temple.
Shen Xuan looked much more like his late mother, and this had been obvious since he was a baby.
For a long time afterward, Shen Chenghe was terrified of seeing this child who shared his blood.
When he was delirious, he would sometimes grab the child’s neck.
Then, after waking up, he would wonder where the injuries on Shen Xuan’s body had come from.
The worst incident happened during winter.
Shen Chenghe threw Shen Xuan outside.
The young child was abandoned in the freezing snow, his face turning blue and purple from the cold. He almost died.
If someone hadn’t happened to pass by and rescue him in time, Shen Xuan probably would never have survived to this age.
After that incident, Shen Chenghe finally realized that something was seriously wrong with his mental state.
He spent a long time suppressing his inner demons and forcing himself to accept his own son, trying to stop being afraid of his son’s face.
Although Shen Xuan suspected that he had never truly managed to suppress it—he had merely learned to appear somewhat normal on the surface.
Afterward, Shen Chenghe took Shen Xuan away from the Divine Temple and returned to Taiyi Academy, going back to the path his family had originally arranged for him.
During the more than ten years he raised Shen Xuan, Shen Chenghe never mistreated him materially.
At the same time, however, he was unable to suppress the hatred and desire for control he felt toward the child.
Whenever he looked at Shen Xuan, he couldn’t help seeing through him—
His own wrong choices when he was young.
His dead wife.
All the bloodshed and death he had witnessed during the first half of his life on the battlefield.
And himself, repeatedly coming within a hair’s breadth of death.
Sometimes Shen Xuan wondered what exactly he meant to his father.
Was he simply his biological son?
A reminder of the wife they had grown to hate each other?
Or perhaps even a symbol of the battlefield he despised?
None of it really mattered anymore.
What mattered was that even after leaving the battlefield for more than a decade, the soul of the man Shen Xuan called his father was still wandering across that blood-soaked battlefield.
When Shen Chenghe was too close to him, he would always see the shadow of his own inner demons reflected in Shen Xuan’s face. He couldn’t help trying to control and hurt the child.
Ironically, it was only after they grew apart in Shen Xuan’s previous life that they were able to preserve some semblance of an ordinary father-son relationship.
Shen Xuan was not someone who remained trapped in the past. If he had been, he would never have achieved what he did in his previous life.
But this family environment had inevitably left its mark on him.
And no matter how unwilling he was to admit it, he had inherited certain destructive traits from his parents.
He had witnessed those absurd endings, so he instinctively tried to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
…
Fortunately, he and Lu Junheng had never defined the feelings born between them in the face of life and death as love.