"Dad!"
Hearing that loud form of address, Xu Shi felt his heart and lungs stop on the spot.
To be fair, this was not the first time someone had called him that. Xia Ke'an had called him that countless times along the way, and the girls had been teasing him with it these past few days too.
But.
The nature of it was different.
When other people said it, they were joking around—just playful banter between couples.
The Saintess meant it for real.
Xu Shi vaguely remembered a picture book he had read before. It said that when ducklings hatched, whoever they saw first would become their mother.
She was a little like that right now.
"Do you remember who you are?"
He tried to communicate with her.
"Mm..."
The Saintess tried hard to recall it, then shook her head pitifully. "Why are you being so mean to me, Dad? Are you abandoning me?"
Oh, right. He had forgotten that she had no name, only a codename.
After asking her all sorts of questions back and forth, Xu Shi finally confirmed one fact.
The kid had become stupid.
Or rather, her intelligence had regressed to the level of a five- or six-year-old.
At last, he understood what the "erasure" Heavenly Principle had mentioned meant. It seemed they had not killed her outright, but had instead removed her memories in a relatively gentle manner.
Pretty humanitarian of them, huh.
Xu Shi did not know what to say.
Looking on the bad side, in her current state, it was clearly impossible to get any information about Heavenly Principle out of her. That was probably their goal.
Looking on the bright side, she was not dead, and she even regarded him as family.
That was honestly not a bad thing. The Saintess was