Just Arrived

"Fine."

The bald man grinned. "I'll listen to you, Old Six. Let's head in and have some wine first."

With that, he threw an arm around Old Six, turned, pushed open the door, and entered the tavern.

Zhang Sanxian was left alone, curled beneath the eaves, half-dead as rain blowing in from outside drenched him.

Perhaps hearing the two men leave, Zhang Sanxian's taut, withered body finally relaxed. He released the sanxian he had been carefully protecting in his arms.

He let out a long breath at last, then raised his head, revealing a face carved with ravines of hardship, age, and suffering.

And within the two sockets on that bitter face, his eyes had long since withered away, leaving only two hollow holes without even a trace of eyeballs.

That was right. Zhang Sanxian was blind—a blind man who played the sanxian in taverns to scrape out a living.

"Heavens above..."

Zhang Sanxian gazed comfortably at the vast sky beyond the tavern—or rather, at the empty void before him—and said mournfully, "Zhang Sanxian has no eyes. Do you have no eyes too? Why must you humiliate me like this? Life in this world is so bitter..."

After that faint sigh, he drew, with a clang, a slender, gleaming two-foot narrow sword from somewhere within the tail of the sanxian in his arms. Weakly, he raised it toward his throat, intending to end his own life.

But at that very moment, time abruptly froze.

In that instant, rain, cold wind, moonlight—all things between heaven and earth—came to a halt.

Only a hazy phantom that had appeared from nowhere drifted slowly through the rainy night, heading toward the motionless Zhang Sanxian.

In the next moment, frozen time began to flow again. Zhang Sanxian, who had been about to slit his own