Wei Jiande was a man whose thoughts ran deep.
Applied to a fifty-six-year-old man, that description sounded a little affected.
When White Wolf was still alive, he had once said of him, "Old Wei looks like a tough guy, but underneath, he's as meticulous as a young woman."
Old Wei was observant and a man of few words. He always followed silently behind everyone else, making no fuss, yet he could often lay bare the heart of a matter with a single sentence, leaving everyone astonished.
So when White Wolf discovered that Wei Jiande was the Internal Ghost Branch No. 1 had planted in Branch No. 9, he was partly shocked, but mostly felt that it only made sense.
In that sense, Wei Jiande had failed.
His supposed "identity as the Internal Ghost" was, in the eyes of certain attentive people, never truly concealed at all.
He hid too much in his heart, and that defeated the purpose of his disguise.
Thus, when Gu Xingjian later approached him alone, Wei Jiande fell silent. He also had no choice.
He still wanted to live, even if this was all his life would ever amount to.
Whenever he faced a choice, Wei Jiande always remembered that vast, desolate expanse of white snow in the northeast.
His father was buried on that seemingly endless plain, where the snow never melted.
Some said that while Wei Jiande's father was felling trees, a century-old tree had crushed his back, and he had frozen to death in a snowdrift.
Others said that on the night he returned from logging, a black bear had licked away half his head in one stroke.
Whatever the truth, Wei Jiande, who was raised by the logging camp and should have followed his father's path, grew up with a shadow over