Jiangli woke up.
This time, however, it had lost its former playfulness upon waking.
Not only did it refrain from playing around, it was far too quiet.
Yang Qing could not help worrying. Had something gone wrong with Jiangli's health again?
Yet however worried he was, Yang Qing had no way of examining Jiangli properly.
Jiangli was a divine beast. Over the past thousand years, who had ever heard of an expert capable of treating a divine beast's illnesses?
Naturally, there had been none.
And that only made Yang Qing more anxious.
Yang Qing kept thinking about his journey. He had pressed on through wind and rain, through life and death, meeting so many people and encountering so many things. Yet those people had ultimately left him, one after another.
Through all those rises and falls, only Bu Er and Jiang Zhizhou remained by his side.
As he looked around in bewilderment, waves of sorrow welled up in Yang Qing's heart.
Perhaps the Half-Immortal who had once divined his fate from a written character had been right. He was destined to wander through hardship and live out his life lonely and forlorn.
He might have a few close friends beside him, but in the end, they would all leave him.
Yang Qing had never believed those words before.
He had always believed that his fate lay in his own hands, not Heaven's. If Heaven wanted to take his life, he would fight it even if he had to be flayed alive.
A tree lived for its bark; a man lived for the spirit within him.
It was precisely that spirit that had kept Yang Qing stumbling onward all these years, bringing him to this day.
But as he looked at the listless Jiangli nestled in the crook of his arm,