"I guess I'm not blessed enough to appreciate his performance."
The old man laughed at himself.
"His performance was wonderful."
"He..."
The old man couldn't help swallowing.
He had thought of a very important question.
A question he had long overlooked.
"What exactly...?"
That was right.
Even now, the old man still had no idea who—or what—had been playing the pipa.
Was it human?
Probably not.
The old man shook his head inwardly.
He was human too.
How could someone fail to see another person?
But...
If it wasn't human, how could it play the pipa?
Huh?
The old man's thoughts had reached a dead end.
He couldn't make sense of it at all...
The old man gave up trying to figure it out himself.
He looked at the young man before him, waiting for an answer.
"It wasn't human."
Xiao Xiao smiled.
Just as he thought.
The old man nodded.
That being really hadn't been human.
He'd guessed right.
Since it wasn't human...
"Then what was it?"
Did anything other than humans exist in this world?
And one that could even play human music?
For a moment, he really couldn't think of anything.
Xiao Xiao smiled faintly.
"A monster."
Xiao Xiao said the two words very softly.
A breeze could easily have drowned them out.
Yet they exploded in the old man's heart like a bomb.
His ears even seemed to ring.
The old man reached up and rubbed his ears.
He instinctively wondered if he'd misheard.
The old man looked at the young man before him, whose expression was perfectly calm, as though he had no idea he'd just said something so "shocking."
"What did you say?"
The young man's appearance had given him the wrong impression.
He'd truly