"Little fox, stay here." Lou Yunxiao set Ning Ke on the bed. "I'm going to the kitchen to cook."
Ning Ke jumped off the bed and followed Lou Yunxiao.
"You want to come with me?"
"Yip, yip!"
"All right." Lou Yunxiao opened the door, and Ning Ke followed beside him, his eyes surveying their surroundings.
The courtyard was small, with only two main rooms, a side room for cooking, an outhouse, and a woodshed.
Bai Wanru had already gone back to hammering metal.
Ning Ke narrowed his eyes slightly.
He could see dense spiritual energy churning around Bai Wanru.
Although he had lost his cultivation, he could still sense powerful spiritual energy.
As such, he could tell that Bai Wanru was extremely strong, on par with Lou Yunxiao.
And judging by her hammering technique, she was an Artifact Refiner through and through.
Artifact Refiners were exceedingly rare.
Even ten thousand years later, very few people could refine truly excellent magical artifacts.
Thus, ordinary disciples who wanted good magical artifacts had to search the Secret Realm for treasures left behind by their predecessors.
From the look of things, Bai Wanru was certainly one of the best among those predecessors.
Ning Ke followed Lou Yunxiao around the kitchen.
He watched Lou Yunxiao deftly wash and chop vegetables, stew fish, and cook rice.
Clearly, years of being worked to the bone by Bai Wanru had trained him well.
Once he finished those preparations, Lou Yunxiao crouched before the stove to tend the fire.
He asked, "Little fox, do you have a name?"
Ning Ke nodded, dabbed his paw in the dirt on the floor, and wrote the characters for Ning Ke.
"Ning Ke?
"You even have a surname and a given name."
Lou Yunxiao was not usually one to smile, yet now Ning