Xianyu had more or less guessed Eric Fish's identity.
Was he the same person in his previous life and this one?
He believed he was.
Xianyu would not waste time on such a pointless question.
No matter how many Loops he had experienced, he was still himself.
Of course, all of that came with conditions.
If an identity from some past Loop offered him no benefit and saddled him with trouble he did not want to deal with, that was another matter.
Then Xianyu would have to agree with the Vidyadhara's point of view.
You're looking for Xianyu from some other Loop. What does that have to do with me, a Diviner of the Divination Commission?
Xianyu lowered his head and read on.
In his acknowledgments, Zandar exhausted every word of praise to extol Eric, as though no one in the entire Starsea could surpass him.
Reading it made Xianyu's scalp crawl. He had to pause every few lines, collect himself, then brace himself to keep reading.
Only in the final sentence did Zandar finally reveal his relationship with Eric.
[My heartfelt thanks to my teacher, Eric Fish. Without him, this Thesis would not exist. It seems I still came out ahead.]
Xianyu: "???"
How could someone as bad at science as him possibly have taught Zandar, a man who built an Aeon from scratch?
Xianyu knew himself. One look at those acknowledgments told him something was wrong.
Considering that Xianyu himself had added this to the fable, and that it carried more than a little personal sentiment, its authenticity was questionable.
Xianyu had almost certainly written the acknowledgments himself. As for that last sentence... had he deliberately included it to get under someone's skin?
The only thing Xianyu could be sure of was that he was not Zandar's teacher.