For the time being, Shen Xuan took Lu Junheng back to his residence.
Shen Xuan quickly stripped off Lu Junheng’s upper clothes and carefully treated all of his wounds.
The wind in early spring was a little cold. Lu Junheng stretched out his uninjured right hand and struggled to put his clothes back on.
Shen Xuan moved his hand away. “Don’t move. The medicine hasn’t dried yet.”
Lu Junheng could only continue sitting there in the cold. He asked Shen Xuan, “What did Master say today?”
After checking that the soundproofing formation in the room was working properly, Shen Xuan told him everything that had happened in his conversation with Yan Hechun.
“I think there’s something wrong with Master’s dream. For example, perhaps it hinted that you were the mastermind behind the destruction of the world or something like that.”
As he spoke, he reached for Lu Junheng’s left arm and checked the condition of his bones.
Lu Junheng sucked in a breath of cold air. “Ow! Be gentler, be gentler! That hurts!”
Shen Xuan held him down and forcefully reset the dislocated bone.
“Bear with it.”
Lu Junheng moved his newly fixed arm. Once the pain subsided enough for him to think again, he said, “This should actually be two separate things.”
Shen Xuan frowned. “Two things?”
Lu Junheng nodded. “The dream is one thing. The negative things about me were added separately.”
He took the initiative to talk to Shen Xuan about their reincarnation.
“The fact that we returned to this point in time has something to do with me. You probably figured that out already, right?”
Shen Xuan nodded without surprise.
If the last person he had seen before his death in his previous life had been someone else, Shen Xuan would never have guessed that something as unbelievable as reincarnation could have been caused by another person.
But the person standing before him now was Lu Junheng.
Lu Junheng was a true genius, although he had used most of his talent on forbidden things.
During the more than seven hundred years he had served as Shen Xuan’s deputy, he had been carefree and undisciplined, casually skipped group activities, constantly argued with his own Palace Master, secretly engaged in all sorts of irreverent schemes, and had crossed countless people throughout the cultivation world.
And yet, strangely enough, when most people thought of him, their first impression was still that Lu Junheng was a pretty decent person.
He lacked the sharpness expected of a genius or someone in a position of power. He was never distant from ordinary people and was even willing to help shoulder the Palace Master’s anger.
Most of the time, he stood half a step behind Shen Xuan, appearing as his assistant. Because of this, many people overlooked the fact that he had always been a peerless genius no less talented than Shen Xuan.
Within Shen Xuan’s judgment, Lu Junheng was capable of being responsible for any bizarre phenomenon, no matter how absurd it sounded.
Shen Xuan took out the white crystal Yan Hechun had given him and placed it on the table.
“This is something from the Third Divine Hall. The divine pillar worshiped by the Third Divine Hall belongs to the water element. The Water Divine Pillar has one particularly important authority—time.”
He looked directly into Lu Junheng’s eyes.
“Lu Junheng, tell me honestly. Does our being here have anything to do with the Water Divine Pillar?”
Unexpectedly, Lu Junheng shook his head firmly.
“No.”
He slowly explained, “I did use the authority of the divine pillars, but not the Water Divine Pillar. I used the part of the Metal Divine Pillar related to rules and the part of the Wood Divine Pillar related to life and death. The Water Divine Pillar would indeed have been the best medium, but unfortunately, it was destroyed too early.”
“You should have guessed it when I asked for your heart and your sword, right? I wouldn’t gamble with your life for fun when there were still other possibilities. This was originally an emergency plan—a last resort after every other option had failed. I can’t predict the future. I could only use what I had available.”
“And besides… what’s happening now wasn’t actually part of my plan.”
“According to my plan, we had a ten percent chance of returning to a hundred years ago. The other ninety percent meant we’d simply die on the spot.”
Lu Junheng casually skipped over the ridiculously low survival odds they had faced in their original plan and continued.
“But now we’ve returned to when we were sixteen. That can’t be explained as an error. I’m certain the formation I constructed didn’t have enough energy to do this…”
“Another force must have intervened.”
The most important authority of the Metal Divine Pillar was rules. Its core function was to ensure that the rules governed by all the divine pillars could either take effect or cease to function.
But no matter what, it wasn’t the divine pillar specifically responsible for the laws of time. Its influence over time was limited. Being able to turn back roughly a hundred years had already been the result of Lu Junheng pushing its abilities to their absolute limit.
Lu Junheng rubbed his chin.
“At first, I thought my formation had accidentally encountered some external factor. But now it seems that my formation itself was the external factor…”
“Do you know when the first petal of the Mirror Flower of the Third Divine Hall appeared?”
“The first century of the New Calendar.”
Shen Xuan paused before stating the conclusion Lu Junheng had left unsaid.
“You mean that after the destruction of the world, time itself began to reverse, and the endpoint of that reversal was the beginning of the New Calendar?”
Lu Junheng spread his hands.
“Who knows? But Master’s dream should have been caused by that strange force. The reversal of time brought back fragments of the future that had already happened or something like that.”
“If I’m right, then the closer someone is to a divine pillar and the higher their cultivation, the more likely they are to be affected. I can sense that the power is of the same origin as the divine pillars.”
“But this influence can only reflect a future that has already happened. So the part concerning me must have been embellished by another unknown existence.”
He dropped his head onto the table, instantly abandoning his serious demeanor.
“How scary. I’m just an ordinary person with no cultivation. Why do I have to carry such a huge black mark?”
Shen Xuan kindly offered him a suggestion.
“I have an idea. To avoid getting me involved, why don’t you secretly find some time I don’t know about and leave on your own? How does that sound?”
Lu Junheng immediately clarified, “…I have no intention of doing that.”
Shen Xuan was genuinely puzzled.
“Don’t you always like leaving without saying goodbye?”
“Hey! How old is that story? Why do you still remember it?”
Shen Xuan’s eyes curved slightly.
“Bad habits need to be brought up from time to time. Otherwise, they’re likely to come back. Especially when some people aren’t very clear-headed and have already shown signs of relapsing.”
Shen Xuan was referring to something that had happened before he became the Palace Master.
He had always known that although Lu Junheng had been the one to insist on joining the Divine Hall, Lu Junheng had never originally planned to stay there for long.
That was simply the kind of person Lu Junheng was.
He naturally had few attachments and never felt that he truly belonged anywhere. He was like a seed drifting in the wind, never intending to take root anywhere.
So from the very beginning, Shen Xuan had been prepared for the day Lu Junheng would leave.
Lu Junheng did not disappoint him.
From time to time, in the middle of their busy lives, he would randomly disappear for several days without leaving Shen Xuan any message.
Naturally, Shen Xuan wasn’t very enthusiastic about Master’s suggestion that Lu Junheng become his deputy either.
One day, after Yan Hechun brought up the matter of a deputy as usual, Shen Xuan decided to ask Lu Junheng what he actually thought about it.
Coincidentally, Lu Junheng had disappeared that very day.
No one knew where he had gone, when he had left, what he had gone to do, or when he would return.
Shen Xuan suddenly realized that if he accepted Lu Junheng as his deputy, then for countless years to come, he would have to accept this habit of Lu Junheng’s as well.
One or two days, three or five months, or even longer…
Leaving without saying goodbye was still leaving without saying goodbye.
The Divine Hall was not Lu Junheng’s home. Sooner or later, there would come a day when Shen Xuan would lose all trace of him without warning.
He didn’t need a deputy like that.
Three days later, Lu Junheng returned and found a token on the table.
The token granted access to the documents on the highest floor of the First Divine Hall’s library.
It was an authority that Lu Junheng had pestered Shen Xuan for a long time to obtain, using every possible trick, yet had never managed to get.
He thought for a long time but couldn’t figure out what he had done recently to make Shen Xuan happy.
In fact, given their relationship, as long as he was alive, he probably wouldn’t be able to make Shen Xuan happy.
Could it be because he hadn’t been in the Divine Hall for the past few days, and Shen Xuan had been in a better mood because he couldn’t see him?
Lu Junheng couldn’t understand it at all, but that didn’t stop him from happily accepting the token.
After that, their lives continued as usual.
They argued, fought, worked together on various missions, and then continued arguing and fighting.
Once, after returning from the front lines, Shen Xuan went to help Yan Hechun deal with some documents while Lu Junheng finished writing the mission report himself and brought it to Shen Xuan.
It was midsummer that day, and Shen Xuan’s office was pleasantly cool.
After delivering the report, Lu Junheng didn’t go back to rest. Instead, he found an empty spot beside Shen Xuan, lay down, and refused to move.
Shen Xuan read through the report Lu Junheng had written. Then, he suddenly asked, “When are you planning to leave?”
Lu Junheng woke from his brief nap and lazily yawned.
“What? You haven’t even become Palace Master yet, and you’re already planning to kick me out of the Divine Hall? How heartless. I’m going to tell Master.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the pen Shen Xuan had placed nearby. He casually moved his fingers, and a strand of Thousand-Spirit Thread crawled silently onto the table and stole Shen Xuan’s pen.
Surprisingly, Shen Xuan didn’t get angry.
He simply reached over to the nearby pen holder and took another pen, his tone and expression equally calm.
“Leave sooner rather than later. If you don’t leave, I’ll always have to prepare myself for the possibility that you might disappear at any moment. It’s too troublesome.”
Lu Junheng seemed to understand something and fell silent.
He rested his chin on one hand and turned his head toward Shen Xuan.
He stared at the clean, handsome profile of Shen Xuan’s face for a long time without saying a word.
The summer cicadas sounded especially clear in the silence.
Then Lu Junheng stood up, opened the door, and left.
The pen in Shen Xuan’s hand paused for a moment, leaving a slightly heavier blot of ink on the paper.
Following that blot, he calmly continued writing his instructions as if the brief pause had never happened.
After that day, Shen Xuan thought he would soon receive news that Lu Junheng had left.
Whether he had defected or simply left through legitimate means, it didn’t matter. If Lu Junheng wanted to leave, there were countless ways for him to do so.
But the next day, Shen Xuan received a summons from Yan Hechun first.
Yan Hechun got straight to the point.
“Xiao Xuan, I know you used your status as Young Master to give Junheng access to the library.”
Shen Xuan lowered his head.
“Master… please punish me.”
“I have no intention of punishing you.”
Yan Hechun’s voice was gentle as he poured him a cup of tea.
“I’ve always wanted Junheng to become your deputy. It’s perfectly reasonable for a Palace Master and his deputy to share certain permissions.”
Shen Xuan was silent for a moment before shaking his head.
“His work in the Divine Hall is already finished. Master, I don’t need a deputy who has already decided to leave.”
Yan Hechun exclaimed in surprise.
“Ah? But… I called you here to tell you something. Yesterday, Junheng specifically came to see me and told me that he agreed to become your deputy.”
Lu Junheng had never directly answered this question before.
Yesterday was the first time.
Shen Xuan looked up in astonishment.
Yan Hechun gave a knowing smile, and there was a hint of teasing in his gaze toward his young disciple.
“What? You two still haven’t talked about it? Having a misunderstanding with the person closest to you isn’t a good thing. If you have something to say, you should tell each other directly. It’s not a good idea to keep making me pass messages between you.”
Lu Junheng was not the person closest to him.
Shen Xuan lowered his eyes and silently argued in his heart.
Lu Junheng was the person he hated the most.
After that, whenever Lu Junheng left the Divine Hall, he still didn’t follow the proper procedures, but he would at least tell Shen Xuan.
If he could say where he was going and what he was doing, he would tell Shen Xuan. If he couldn’t, he would at least give him a rough estimate of when he would return.
From the very beginning, Shen Xuan had accepted that the two of them would only travel together for part of the journey.
It was Lu Junheng who had taken it upon himself to make that journey last much longer.
Shen Xuan could always count on Lu Junheng returning within the expected time.
That was, until a hundred years ago, when Lu Junheng only told him that he was leaving—but gave him no date for his return.