"You're Meng Po?!"
Ye Ducheng's eyes widened like a tiger's as well. He stared fixedly at the old woman, his sky-piercing martial intent churning violently around him.
"This old woman is indeed Meng Po."
The old woman—or rather, Qin Zhong's great-grandmother—slowly nodded.
The eyes that had seemed clouded with age suddenly revealed an unfathomable depth the moment she admitted her identity, impossible to look at directly, as though they reflected countless epochs of birth and destruction through reincarnation.
The murky, dark-yellow soup in the large, coarse porcelain bowl she held appeared perfectly still. Yet, upon closer perception, countless souls could be sensed faintly rising and sinking in its deepest reaches, struggling before finally subsiding into an eerie stillness.
Forgetting past lives, cleansing karma.
This was the aura of the origin of reincarnation.
Li Xiang stood rooted to the spot. Though [Withered Wood Seals the Acupoints] held his heartbeat firmly in check, he could feel his blood surging through his veins at an inconceivable speed.
It was too staggering.
It felt even more absurd and incomprehensible than hearing Zhang Yunqing say that the Commander-in-Chief had vanished.
"Meng Po... there really is a Meng Po in this world?"
Li Xiang's Adam's apple bobbed with difficulty. Looking at the ordinary old woman before him, who had once shuffled through the streets of Linjiang County with a stooped back and a basket of groceries, even haggling with vendors over a few copper coins, he simply could not connect her to the legendary Netherworld Orthodox God who stood at the head of the Naihe Bridge and governed the memories of all beings passing through reincarnation.
It was not just Li Xiang.
At that moment, Lin Xuanshu's Dao heart suffered an unprecedented shock.
He came from the Orthodox Maoshan Lineage and had immersed himself in Daoist