Inside a private room by the window on the top floor of Immortal Gathering Tower in Tianbao City.
Shen Xiuyong and Qiao Hongyun sat facing each other. The spiritual tea before them had already gone lukewarm, yet neither had touched it.
From time to time, their gazes met. Their eyes were complicated, holding both the anticipation of old friends reuniting after many years and a trace of tension and melancholy.
They had both received Ruan Lingxiu's message, inviting them to meet here.
"Seven or eight years, wasn't it?" Shen Xiuyong rubbed the teacup between his fingers and quietly broke the silence.
"Mm."
Qiao Hongyun gazed out the window, his eyes seeming to drift far away. "Ever since we parted in the Ten Thousand Poisons Swamp, she returned to her family, and there was no news from her afterward. Who would have thought... she had already become the ninth-ranked True Disciple of the Tianbao Supreme Sect."
His tone was filled with emotion, but beneath it lay a deeply buried loneliness.
The gentle woman who had once traveled with them, laughing and chatting, was now someone they needed to look up to.
Ninth among the True Disciples—she stood at the summit of Tianbao Supreme Sect's younger generation, a height Qiao Hongyun would find difficult to reach in this lifetime.
Joining the Tianbao Supreme Sect and becoming an elder of the Haisha Sect had once made him high-spirited, but as he sat here waiting, he finally realized with absolute clarity that an insurmountable chasm had long since separated them from her.
That chasm was the foundation of a Millennial Family, but also the gulf carved by personal opportunities and fate.
The flutter in his heart from his youth now seemed more like a wisp of green smoke that could never be grasped.
And