Some Knots Need Time to Untangle

Under the night sky, the old district's streetlights were dim, slicing the narrow alleyways into fragments of interwoven light and shadow.

Hua Yin moved quickly, yet his steps remained remarkably steady.

The exhaustion and pain from special training seemed temporarily suppressed by the cold emotions surging within him.

He did not need to watch where he was going. He knew this neighborhood, where he had lived for years, down to his bones. Every turn and every pothole bore the imprint of his silent footsteps.

The closer he got to that familiar apartment building, the more stagnant the air seemed to become.

He could already imagine what that woman looked like now—perhaps her makeup was still immaculate, but her face would surely be streaked with tears, twisted by furious hysteria. The eyes that had once held only indifference or impatience toward him might now be filled with accusation and blame as she pounded on that old iron door, a door that would never open for her.

Fine.

He would sever everything completely at the doorway that carried all his bleak memories.

Yet just as he rounded the final corner and caught sight of the building's blurry outline, a tall figure leaning against a half-extinguished streetlamp by the roadside blocked his path.

The man had both hands tucked into the pockets of a black leather jacket, with what seemed to be an unlit cigarette between his lips. His face was impossible to make out in the darkness, but Hua Yin recognized that lazy yet sharp posture at a glance.

Bai Ye.

Why was he here?

Hua Yin halted, his brows drawing together slightly.

He had clearly been very careful when leaving the branch office.

"Instead of using the middle of the night to recover your spiritual power and figure out how to take fewer hits tomorrow, what are you doing in this godforsaken corner?"

Bai Ye's voice came from ahead, carrying its usual casualness as it precisely cut off Hua Yin's path.

"Personal business."

Hua Yin's voice was cold. He did not want to explain and tried to go around him.

But Bai Ye shifted, still blocking his way. The remaining streetlamp light barely illuminated half his face, and there was no amusement in those usually teasing eyes.

"Personal business?"

Bai Ye raised an eyebrow. "Going to the door of the broken place you used to live in, which is empty now, to handle 'personal business'? Or are you going to deal with a woman causing a scene there and disturbing the neighborhood, claiming to be your mother?"

Hua Yin's gaze sharpened as he looked at Bai Ye.

He knew?

And from the sound of it, he knew more than just that.

"I already called the police for you."

Bai Ye shrugged, sounding as casual as if he were talking about the weather. "Illegal entry, disturbing public order, picking quarrels and provoking trouble... enough to keep her busy with the police for a while."

"She's probably already been 'invited' to the station to calm down by now. What could you do by going back, besides make yourself miserable?"

"Argue with her? Or listen to her cry about how 'unfilial' and 'heartless' you are?"

Hua Yin fell silent.

Bai Ye's approach was simple and rough, but it was effective.

He did not want to see Li Xiulin, much less have any pointless argument with her under those circumstances.

"How did you know..." Hua Yin asked.

"How did I know about this place? Or how did I know that woman was your mother?"

Bai Ye tilted his head. "Don't forget, you're now a priority subject of the Special Affairs Bureau, codename White Butterfly. Your basic records, including family relationships and previous addresses, can be accessed by me as your temporary guardian and instructor. Besides—"

He paused, and something else entered his tone. "A neighbor called the branch office duty room looking for someone, and I happened to overhear it."

So that was it.

Hua Yin did not try to move forward again, but neither did he turn to leave. He simply stood there, with the night shrouding half his face in shadow.

Bai Ye studied him, from the tightly pressed corners of his lips to the bottomless chill in his eyes and the faint disturbance beneath his calm.

Then he suddenly asked a seemingly unrelated question.

"Hey, Hua Yin."

"I looked through your earlier records. You... weren't called that before, were you?"

Hua Yin's body stiffened almost imperceptibly.

Bai Ye seemed not to notice, or perhaps he simply did not care. He continued in that probing tone, "Your father named you Hua Xi. Xi meant light and dawn in ancient usage, and also carried the wisdom of Fuxi devising the Eight Trigrams. It was a nice name, full of hope and expectation."

He stepped a little closer. The dim yellow light fell into his eyes, carrying a piercing scrutiny.

"Why did you later change it to Hua Yin?"

"Yin means gloom, shadow, a place turned away from the sun. It suits your Pale Bewitching Butterfly ability well enough, but it seems to run completely contrary to your father's original hopes, doesn't it?"

The night wind passed through the alley, bringing with it the chill of darkness and the muffled noise of the distant city.

Hua Yin stood at the boundary between light and shadow, saying nothing for a long time.

Bai Ye did not urge him. He simply waited quietly. His manner was less like an interrogation and more like... curious listening.

At last, Hua Yin slowly raised his head and looked toward the night sky he had gazed up at countless times, now shattered by the silhouettes of old buildings.

His voice was soft, yet it carried the calm of someone cutting open his most vulnerable scar.

"Light... hope... I don't deserve them."

He paused, as if arranging words long buried away, words he had never spoken to anyone.

"Ever since I was born, the expenses at home kept growing. Formula, tuition, all kinds of things... My mother was always complaining that there wasn't enough money, always fighting with my father. Later... they divorced."

"My father raised me alone. He was never in particularly good health, but to earn more and give me a better life, he took every dirty and exhausting job he could. He worked at the factory during the day, helped guard warehouses at night, and sometimes went to construction sites..."

Hua Yin's voice did not rise or fall, as though he were telling someone else's story.

"Then, in the winter of my first year of middle school, he accidentally fell from scaffolding at a construction site."

"They couldn't save him."

The alley fell silent. Only the faint wail of a distant police siren made the desolation feel sharper.

"The neighbors, and... some relatives from both my parents' sides, all said in private... that I was what dragged my father down. They said I was a jinx, that I brought disaster to my parents, that I had been born to collect a debt."

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Hua Yin tugged at the corner of his mouth, the curve cold and self-mocking. "At first, I didn't believe them. I thought they were talking nonsense."

"But later, when I lay alone in that empty house, looking at my father's portrait, thinking about his hands cracked open by the winter cold, thinking about his increasingly bent back, thinking about the little smile he had tried so hard to force out when he looked at me for the last time, telling me not to worry..."

At last, the faintest tremor entered his voice, but he quickly suppressed it, becoming harder and colder than before.

"I thought maybe... they were right."

"If it weren't for me, he wouldn't have needed to work so hard. If it weren't for me, this family might not have fallen apart. If it weren't for me... he might still have been alive and well."

"Hua Xi... that name was too bright, too clean. I couldn't bear it."

He turned to Bai Ye. In the dim light, those pitch-black eyes reflected no gleam at all, containing only unfathomable darkness and the resolve of someone abandoning himself.

"So I changed my name."

"Hua Yin."

"Yin, who lived in the shadows and brought misfortune..."

"That suited me better."

When his words fell, only the wind remained in the alley.

The frivolous look on Bai Ye's face had long since vanished.

He looked at the youth before him, who had just endured a day of hellish training and was covered in injuries without uttering a word, yet now calmly peeled open the bloodiest wound in his heart and spoke words that were almost self-destructive.

There were no complaints, no tears—only a cold self-judgment that seemed resigned to fate.

After a long while, Bai Ye let out a quiet breath. He removed the cigarette that had never been lit from his mouth and rolled it between his fingers.

"So,"

he said, his voice much lower than usual, "you think your father's death was your fault. You locked yourself inside the name 'Yin,' shouldering every responsibility and every misfortune yourself. Even awakening—something others would see as an enormous stroke of luck—probably carries the shadow of 'misfortune' in your heart, doesn't it?"

Hua Yin did not deny it. He merely remained silent.

"Stupid."

Bai Ye suddenly spat out the word. His tone was not harsh, but it carried an unshakable force.

Hua Yin looked up at him.

"Your father's death was an accident. The safety measures at the construction site were inadequate. It was one of countless misfortunes in this world."

Bai Ye stared straight into his eyes. "You took other people's fault, the unpredictability of fate, and heaped it all onto yourself. You punish yourself and torment yourself this way... other than making you live like a shadow that cannot bear the light, and making your dead father unable to rest in peace, what use is it?"

"You think changing your name to 'Yin' can erase the guilt in your heart? Can make everything that happened unhappen?"

Bai Ye gave a derisive laugh. "You're just deceiving yourself."

Hua Yin clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white.

Those words pierced the cold shell he had used to protect himself for so long like needles.

"You think you carry 'misfortune,' and that's why your Pale Bewitching Butterfly ability is so powerful?"

Bai Ye abruptly changed direction, his tone sharpening. "Bullshit!"

"Your strength comes from your talent, your will, maybe even something your father left you—something buried deep in your bloodline that even you don't know about! But it does not come from your self-righteous 'atonement'!"

He stepped forward, nearly face-to-face with Hua Yin. Those eyes that were always so lazy now shone with startling brightness.

"Hua Yin, or Hua Xi, I don't care what you were called before or what you're called now."

"But I'm telling you this: a coward who cannot face himself, cannot accept himself, and only knows how to hide in the shadows of self-blame will never become truly strong, even with an S-rank ability!"

"Your father named you Xi because he hoped you would have a bright future, not so you could carry some imaginary sin on his behalf and rot away in a gutter!"

"You want to grow stronger? You want to stop holding people back? You want to control your power?"

Bai Ye's voice echoed through the narrow alley, carrying a deafening force.

"Then get the hell out of this prison of 'Yin' that you drew around yourself first!"

"Pick up the Xi your father gave you! It isn't a burden—it's his blessing and his expectation!"

"Carry that expectation into battle, grow stronger, and live an even more brilliant life than he hoped for you! That would be the best comfort you could give him! Not changing your name like some turtle hiding in its shell and thinking you've paid everything back!"

After saying that, Bai Ye did not look at him again. He turned and walked toward the mouth of the alley, waving one hand behind him.

"That's enough nonsense. Go back and rest. Training continues as usual tomorrow. If I see you acting so lifeless and wallowing in self-pity again, get out."

His figure quickly disappeared around the alley entrance.

Hua Yin stood there alone, Bai Ye's merciless words still seeming to echo in his ears, every one of them striking deep into his heart.

The night wind blew past, cold enough to cut to the bone.

Slowly, he raised his hand and looked at his palm.

The redness and swelling from where the short baton had struck him during training still seemed to linger there, and he could almost see his father's rough, warm hands, gradually turning cold in the end.

Xi...

Yin...

The two names collided fiercely in his heart, like light and shadow.

For a long time, he had believed that exiling himself into the shadows was repentance for the past.

But now, someone had told him that it was cowardice, that it was escape, that it was the greatest betrayal of his father's intentions.

Bai Ye's words were like a brutal hammer, shattering the icy shell he had used to imprison himself and revealing the bloody, raw heart beneath—one that perhaps... still held a faint spark.

He did not know.

But he knew that tonight, he no longer needed to face that hysterical woman.

Some knots perhaps needed time to untangle.

Some paths required him to think things through himself before deciding how to walk them.

He took one final look toward the old building, then turned away. His steps were a little heavier than when he had come, yet some of the gloom that had long haunted him seemed to have faded.

The night deepened.

And the frozen pool of stagnant water in the youth's heart seemed to have been struck by a massive stone, sending unprecedented ripples across its surface.