The night was thick, the bright moon hanging high above the sea like a jade flask. Pure moonlight spilled down, and the ocean shimmered with rippling gleams.
Splash!
The icy seawater was pushed in by the night wind and washed over her ankles.
Near the coast of the Southern Abyss, Yu Zhiwen walked barefoot over the shallows, then suddenly bent at the waist and reached out to pick something up.
It was a white seashell, dotted with blue spots, exceedingly beautiful, like an eye that could glow.
"For you."
Yu Zhiwen still remembered that year when she was six. The first gift she had ever given away had been a seashell.
She was a daughter of the sea. She yearned for freedom, and thirsted for freedom too.
Only, she had been born on Gui-Zhe Holy Mountain. Gui-Zhe had no sea, only a lake, and she had been confined amid the mountains by that incomparably magnificent Holy Spirit Lake.
Ever since she had become sensible, her master, Dao Xuanji, had never once been willing to let her descend the mountain. There had only ever been cultivation, cultivation, and more cultivation; the art of heavenly secrets, the art of heavenly secrets, and still the art of heavenly secrets.
The first time Yu Zhiwen saw the sea, she had not even known it was the sea.
Grandpa Yu had said that the Southern Abyss was the sea, that it was their home. Yet the home in Yu Zhiwen's memories had only Gui-Zhe Holy Mountain, only the Dao Department. She did not know the Southern Abyss.
That year when she was six, Grandpa Yu brought her along and secretly took her away from the mountain for the first time. She had not even experienced the process of descending the mountain. She only felt her