The instant that eye opened, time seemed to be clutched tight by an invisible hand.
Wang Xian froze in midair. Even his breathing stopped.
No—to be precise, his Divine Soul had been forcibly torn from his body and swept into an indescribable vortex.
That eye—or rather, the thing that should never have been called an eye—
—it was like a well leading into the abyss, reflecting countless fragments of shattered time and space.
Wang Xian's consciousness drifted within it, like a skiff on a storm-lashed sea, utterly lost.
A dream within a dream, layer upon layer.
He saw his fifteen-year-old self leave the Imperial City of Jinling with a pack on his back, the clip-clop of hooves ringing clear along the bluestone road.
It was neither escape nor pursuit, only a young boy's hazy yearning for the world of martial heroes.
His master walked beside him, dressed in white embroidered with several pear blossoms. She held a yellowed ancient book and occasionally pointed out wildflowers and weeds by the roadside, telling him of their medicinal properties or the stories behind them.
Half a year passed in his memory as no more than a few flickering images.
The three Lineages of Huiwen City locked in fierce rivalry. First, he had brought the Lai family to heel, then gone to the Duanmu family to celebrate the old madam's birthday.
Beneath a tree, the fortune-telling old man Xuanyuan had traced a broken hexagram in his palm with his withered fingers.
The long stone steps outside Hanshan Temple, which seemed to go on forever...
But revisiting it now, everything was different.
He clearly "saw" the details he had overlooked back then: the fleeting venom in Lai Er's eyes when he was defeated, a hatred that didn't belong in the eyes of a young boy.