Wuwan asked in some surprise, "Li Qingniu is also an outsider?"
The storyteller nodded. "Exactly!"
Ban Chao asked doubtfully, "There are so many outsiders?"
The Storyteller explained with a smile, "You call them banished immortals—immortals demoted from the Immortal Realm into the mortal world."
"We call them Sinners."
Ban Chao's gaze shifted as he keenly caught the subtle change in the Storyteller's wording. "We?"
But Wuwan had already bluntly exposed the truth. "This Storyteller is himself a banished immortal.
"But what is a Sinner?"
This scholar was especially curious about matters beyond the heavens.
The storyteller sighed heavily. "Sinners are those bearing guilt. Just as the plays sing: when an immortal maiden is stirred by mortal feelings and violates the heavenly laws, she is banished to the dust of the world to undergo tribulations. We all bear original sin, but if we cannot see through the mystery within the womb—"
He paused, then smiled bitterly. "In the end, we remain muddleheaded, with no way even to speak of redemption."
The scholar pursued the matter with great interest. "Then, sir, you have yet to comprehend the mystery within the womb?"
The Storyteller gazed at the drifting clouds beyond the window, his eyes distant. "Two cycles of sixty years passed like a white colt glimpsed through a crack. I only knew that in a foreign land, one was a foreign guest. Who I truly was, why I came—there was no way to know."
His voice gradually lowered, becoming a nearly inaudible sigh.
"Had this world not undergone a change, perhaps we outsiders would never have understood ourselves in all our lives. Even now, there are only scattered fragments of memory..."
A faint, amused smile hung on Wuwan's lips as his fingertips tapped lightly against the table. "How interesting. You outsiders, with only