Ye Changqing paced around a few times, growing more agitated as he spoke, then grabbed another fistful of his hair.
"I can't make sense of it. None of the theories I know can explain this."
Zhou Xuan had been leaning against the wall, listening without interrupting.
He had studied the tree diagram Ye Changqing had drawn on the paper for a long time.
One generation branched into two, two into four, passing down generation after generation, its structure unchanged, its precision undiminished.
It wasn't a curse.
It wasn't a spell.
It wasn't any method known to the Cultivation World.
Because the Cultivation World had no such concept to begin with.
But Zhou Xuan did.
He had known it in his previous life.
The tree diagram flipped over in his mind and became something else.
Double Helix.
Base pairs.
The genetic code.
Genes.
Zhou Xuan opened his mouth, then closed it again.
He was organizing his words. What he was about to say was something no one in this world could understand.
"Ye Changqing."
"Hmm?"
"Try approaching it differently."
Zhou Xuan walked over to the table, picked up a pen, and drew a long, twisting line beside Ye Changqing's tree diagram.
"You've been wondering who put the formation patterns inside them, right?"
"Right."
"That's wrong. Nobody put them there."
Ye Changqing froze for a moment.
Zhou Xuan pointed at the line.
"There's something inside a mortal's body that goes deeper than bloodline, more fundamental than the soul. It determines what a person looks like, their height and build, their constitution, their talents."
"You mean their innate root bone?"
"Something even more fundamental than root bone."
Zhou Xuan drew several nodes along the line.
"Think of it as a book. Every mortal comes out of the womb carrying this book inside their