Arriving for the Appointment

"Where is it...?"

In the room filled with bookshelves, the short, stout Jing Hongchen muttered to himself as he searched aimlessly. Every so often, he pulled out one of the seemingly identical books, flipped through it briefly, then stuffed it back.

"I already searched these last time... Where exactly did I see that face... A photograph?"

As he spoke the last two words, his eyes lit up. In a flash, he arrived before an exquisitely crafted yet somewhat old-fashioned desk. Though his body was corpulent, the speed he unleashed was not slow in the slightest.

Recalling fragments of his childhood, he pulled open the drawers and began searching through them.

"A photograph... There should be one."

Ever since he had first seen Huo Yuhao at Spirit Academy, he had felt a strange sense of familiarity, as if he had seen the other man somewhere before. During the year Huo Yuhao had worked at Spirit Academy, Jing Hongchen had also investigated his origins. The result was as expected: this mysterious man seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Before Zhang Lexuan discovered him in the Star Dou Great Forest, there had been no record of him whatsoever.

It was not as though there had never been cases of reclusive masters before. Some sects liked sending their disciples to train in remote, uninhabited places—or even deadly forbidden zones—where they would emerge with terrifying strength.

But this case was simply too exaggerated. Furthermore, while such people might have no records, one could often trace their origins through scattered clues—for instance, inferring their parents or family from their surname. After all, with talent this extraordinary, their parents could not possibly have been ordinary.

Thus, he had specifically paid attention to whether there were any powerful figures on the continent surnamed Huo. In the end,