"Oh? What happened to your mother?" Su Shi'er asked calmly, his gaze falling on the child's small hand clenched tightly around the corner of his clothes.
"Mother is sick. The money the academy gave me was stolen by other people too. If I don't bring food back, Mother will starve to death."
The child lowered his head, his voice growing softer and softer. His toe unconsciously ground a small stone into the dirt, and his heart was filled with unease.
"Where is she?" Su Shi'er narrowed his eyes and asked again.
"At the village at the foot of the mountain."
The child answered, raising his head to point toward the mist-shrouded foot of the mountain, a faint and barely perceptible hope in his eyes.
"Then don't you have to climb up and down the mountain every day, running back and forth?" Su Shi'er asked with a smile.
"I'm very healthy. Running a few extra trips doesn't matter. Besides, I won't delay my academy studies either."
The child spoke with utter seriousness. By the end, he was even solemnly swearing a guarantee.
His stubborn appearance at that moment was like a blade of grass that struggled desperately to grow even from the cracks between stones.
"Could it be... that no teacher has ever asked you these things?"
His gaze resting on the child before him, Su Shi'er fell into thought.
Judging from the name alone, there seemed to be nothing unusual about it.
Yet now, observing the child up close, from the bearing in his speech—
The unconscious furrow between his brows, the resolve and purity shining from his eyes—
He could see a trace of the exact same essence once possessed by Xiao Wujian, that senior of the Sword Dao.
This feeling was by no means a resemblance of outward