After casting divination hexagrams several times over, they had gone through goodness knows how many jars of Cheng Hua liquor.
Yun Zhou sat in despondent silence, reasoning that since this matter involved people, they had to investigate it starting with people. Thread by thread, a clue must have been missed somewhere and it could surely be found.
Seeing Yun Zhou in such low spirits, Xiang Su felt a pang of sympathy. He gently tugged on the red blindfold ribbon draped behind Yun Zhou’s back to snap him out of his trance.
Although Yun Zhou could not see Elder Xiang Su’s expression, he could still sense that the other man was looking right at him.
He turned his head away awkwardly, but Xiang Su kept staring. Frustrated, Yun Zhou used his two tails to cover his face entirely, his fox ears flattening backward.
Realizing he had teased Yun Zhou into shyness, and figuring that his friend had finally snapped out of the previous anxiety, Xiang Su felt a tinge of melancholy as well. To tell the truth, although this provided plenty of material for his writing, he still genuinely hoped that the young couple could simply be together.
Xiang Su took a sip of wine, propped his chin in his hand, and stared dreamily into the distance before suddenly speaking up: “Immortal Venerable, let me tell you a story.”
Yun Zhou had an instinctive hunch that this story was out of the ordinary. Seeing Xiang Su finish off his remaining wine, give the empty jar a shake, and toss it casually to the side, he listened as the elder continued.
“The Pinglan Sect selects promising young seedlings from both the cultivation world and the mortal realm every year.
“I had a friend who entered the Pinglan Sect through internal selection as a young scion of an aristocratic family. Here, he encountered a young woman he had once offended.
“He had been far too wild back then. At a family gathering, he noticed the girl feeding fish by the pond and, feeling curious, walked over to strike up a conversation. She neither responded in time nor wished to give him her name, which momentarily angered him, causing him to accidentally push her into the nearby pond.
“Panicking, he jumped in to fish her out. Expecting her to file a complaint against him, he instead received a fierce slap across the face from her, with no further fallout afterward.
“Meeting her again here naturally felt awkward, and the girl would simply brush past him, unwilling to pay him any mind.
“As they spent more and more time together day after day, he noticed that the girl was growing increasingly outstanding. Wanting to catch up to her, he completely shed his arrogant, profligate ways and transformed into a prodigy in the eyes of others. Secretly competing with her, he wanted to surpass her and capture her attention. Gradually, he became the most… troublesome… friend by her side.
“Without realizing how or when it began, he fell in love with the girl, yet he refused to admit it and lacked the courage to voice it aloud.
“Once, while everyone was drinking heavily together, he asked the girl what she liked. She replied that she enjoyed unusual anecdotes and strange tales from across the world, rather than spending every day cooped up in a room staring at piles of mental cultivation manuals and being required to achieve perfection in everything she did.
“He remembered those words.
“Later on, he scoured the realm for all sorts of oddities and presented them to her. Looking surprised that he could be so kind, she received them. He told her: ‘These are just things this young master didn’t want and had no use for wasting, so I’m giving you a chance to look at them.’
“He also wanted to know whether the girl would ever be willing to take a cultivation partner. One day when they crossed paths in the snow, he said: ‘Your hair and mine have both turned white will we grow old together like this in the future?’ What he actually wanted to say was: ‘Can we walk through the snow together until our hair turns white?’ The girl did indeed ponder his words before replying: ‘We’ll definitely turn white together though by then, you’ll probably still be just as incorrigible.’ That seemingly wasn’t the response he was hoping for.
“What he didn’t know was that the girl wanted to respond in kind, but because she didn’t want to drag him into the complicated troubles weighing down her own family, she pretended not to understand.
“Later, a crisis struck the girl’s family, forcing her to return home to take charge and stabilize the wolves and tigers circling her clan.
“One morning, he discovered that the girl was gone, and he desperately wanted to offer his help. He drove himself mercilessly in his cultivation, knowing that strength was everything, and pushed to break through his minor realm. At the same time, he begged his father to go and back her up, using his family’s prestige to overawe the crowd.
“As for the young woman, she had overused medicinal aids to accelerate her potential, causing her cultivation to skyrocket. Through sheer martial might and external suppression, the internal chaos was swiftly quelled. Once she had painstakingly nurtured and established a new successor, she was finally able to rest and chose to live in seclusion.
“During the period of her seclusion, he frequently went to visit her. He wanted to ask whether they could become cultivation partners, yet feeling that he still wasn’t good enough for her, the words died on his lips.
“He constantly told himself: ‘Wait a little longer, I mustn’t burden her mind. Wait a little longer, until her health recovers.’
“By chance, one day he came across the girl’s wooden storage box, which recorded many things. Regarding that snowy day, the girl had written: ‘I wanted to respond to him, but I didn’t dare.’ Regarding that morning of her departure, she wrote: ‘Once I finish handling these matters, it will be fine.’ And after entering seclusion, she wrote: ‘I love him, but my time is running out. I am not worthy of him.’
“He didn’t dare read any further. He dashed out, bought the pastries the girl loved, brought back the hair hairpin that symbolized the principal wife of a clan heir, and used it to bind the girl’s hair. He asked her: ‘Are you willing to become my cultivation partner?’ There were no overly embellished words, but they understood each other’s hearts completely.
“Afterward, the girl accompanied him for five years. Following her passing, he went everywhere to see and hear all the strange tales and wondrous anecdotes of this world, just as she would have wished.”