Xiao Yan had long suspected something about Zi Yan's relationship with her father. As someone who had been through it himself, he understood all too well the way both sides maintained silence amid such an awkward, strange atmosphere.
Though there was nothing time could not smooth over, even a relationship as awkward as this, Xiao Yan still did not want Zi Yan and her father to take any more unnecessary detours because of it.
Which probably meant he could not avoid saying a few extra words himself.
With that thought in mind, Xiao Yan felt that compared to when he had first roamed the Dou Qi Continent, he seemed to have become rather more talkative.
Although the years had not left marks on him like they had on his father, that did not mean he was still the same hotheaded youth from back then.
People had to make some progress eventually.
"I never expected there to have been something like that back then."
Zi Yan blinked, no longer seeming as resistant as before.
"Mm..."
Xiao Yan nodded, then heard Zi Yan murmur, "Then if... Old Yao hadn't been by your side back then, what would have happened to you?"
"Judging purely from my personality, I probably wouldn't necessarily have been the person you all came to know."
Xiao Yan pondered for a while. In his rare moments of leisure, he had considered this question more than once. The thought had reached its peak the instant he became a Dou Di and was able to glimpse countless possibilities beyond the Dou Qi Continent.
In that fleeting daze, he had caught sight of many figures both like and unlike himself. But the moment had been too brief for him to learn whether any version of himself from those possibilities had ultimately attained