The female cultivator's black hair fell like a waterfall. She wore a blue-green, waist-cinched magical robe that outlined her slender, upright figure.
A palm-sized Storage Bag hung from the jade-green belt at her waist, bearing faint traces of repeated, painstaking repairs.
Beneath her gray-blue veil, rough, dull cheekbones were faintly visible. A few inconspicuous sunspots dotted her forehead. On her back was a longsword whose weak spiritual glow barely qualified it as a first-tier upper-grade magical artifact.
Anyone who saw her dressed like this would have taken her for an impoverished late Qi Refining cultivator.
But a disguise of this caliber could not escape Chen Beiwu's divine sense.
Whether it was the second-tier middle-grade Breath-Concealing Spiritual Artifact or the deliberately conjured rough skin and callused hands, all were as good as nonexistent before a Nascent Soul True Lord's divine sense.
Without needing to peer deliberately, Chen Beiwu saw the female cultivator's face and smiled faintly, a trace of reminiscence entering his eyes.
Beneath the veil was an indescribably lovely face. Her elegant nose, pale pink cherry lips, and nervous gaze matched perfectly with the features of the girl in Chen Beiwu's memories who had climbed cliffs barefoot to gather herbs for her father. Only her eyes had lost some of their innocence and gained a measure of cold hardness and hesitation.
Time flowed on, and everyone met different fortunes.
The herb-gathering girl who had possessed decent fortune back then was now a Foundation Establishment early-stage cultivator blessed with tremendous fortune.
With such fortune, the girl might someday have a chance at Core Formation, or even become a Dao-Proven True Lord.
Of course, that depended on her obtaining a True Lord inheritance and sufficient cultivation resources, surviving safely, and not being swept up and killed in the Third Realm War.
After