The downpour came without warning, drowning everything when it arrived.
The whole world was being soaked. The damp air was unbearably oppressive, and as Xie Zheng stared at the curtain of rain pouring across the windshield, a powerful sense of suffocation gripped him.
He sat quietly in the passenger seat, listening to the taxi driver curse and rage at this unnatural downpour, feeling as though a boulder weighed on his chest.
The world outside the windows had ceased to exist, swallowed whole by the torrential rain.
Blurred beyond recognition, consumed by chaos—not just the world, but Xie Zheng's heart as well.
Xie Zheng had always been one of the more outstanding members of Tong Guan's faction. Although his methods were clearly at odds with theirs, he had always gotten along with them reasonably well.
He knew perfectly well that Tong Guan employed him to do things Tong Guan himself could not.
He knew even better that he had chosen to follow Tong Guan to secure a more advantageous position in the Seventh Branch.
Their arrangement had originally been an equal exchange, an exceptionally balanced relationship. Yet everything had changed on that mountaintop where the dried-up well lay hidden.
He had exhausted every means to find the threshold of survival and sent Tong Guan through it, but Tong Guan had never come back to look for him.
That was when Gu Qingyun found him.
"Doesn't Tong Guan pride himself on being a gentleman... Why were you the one who saved him, yet also the one he abandoned?"
Xie Zheng's injuries then had been even more horrifying than they were now. The right half of his body had been devastated. He was barely alive, moments from death.
Gu Qingyun had saved him, not Tong Guan.
Hatred was inevitable.
Perhaps Gu Qingyun had