"Sorry, Lord Hoolay."
Modu sighed.
"This brother hit his head when he fell during the prison break. But rest assured, my lord, he can still fight."
"Hit his head? You saw it happen?"
"I was the one who brought him back. Those Nether Envoys pushed him off the top of Imprisonment Prison, and I happened to be at the bottom."
Modu said helplessly,
"I didn't expect him to survive. The fall left him a little simple, though."
"Mm." Hoolay nodded slightly and stopped dwelling on the gray wolf's apparent problem.
He turned to Jiaoqiu and said in a deep voice,
"Pitiful Foxian. For thousands of years, we allowed you to live. We gave you civilization."
"But for the freedom the Xianzhou people promised, you chose to betray us in the end."
"No matter."
"Once you catch your masters' scent, you always come crawling back to us... no matter how far you run."
Feeling the gazes around him, Jiaoqiu spoke calmly.
"Hoolay, have you ever wondered why it took them seven hundred years to think of rescuing you?"
"The age when the Buli Ren ruled unchecked is long gone. Before giving you hope of going home, did they tell you any of these sorry facts, Lord Hoolay?"
"Now they've been scattered by Yaoqing's Sky-Hitting General... by a Foxian, and they're hiding in the corners of the galaxy, trembling in fear."
"Like a wounded beast on the verge of drowning, they're desperately grasping for any imaginary lifeline. That lifeline is you."
Hoolay fell into thought.
The wolf pups really hadn't told him any of that.
"Yaoqing's general is a Foxian?"
"How interesting."
Hoolay looked at Modu.
"Modu, is everything he said true?"
Modu took a deep breath and had no choice but to tell the truth.
"...He wasn't lying."
"She was a