Pei Ye said nothing, quietly watching the distant lake.
Yes, once everything childish and hazy was stripped away, this was the oppressive mountain he had truly had to face all along.
Amid his confusion and agitation, he had actually already made the right choice by instinct. Now that the fog had cleared, he had merely seen it clearly, and remained powerless to change it.
Silence.
"No, that's not right," Pei Ye suddenly said. "Miss Qi, then why didn't you and Brother Cheng part ways?"
"..."
"...We could go to the Divine Capital together," Pei Ye said blankly.
"What?"
"We could enter the Divine Capital's Sword Cultivation Academy together-Piao Qing and I." Pei Ye turned to look at her, his eyes bright and resolute. "I'll make it happen."
A thousand miles west of Bowang.
The terrain sloped from high to low, the cliffs sheer and the sky dark, pale snow beneath a covering of clouds, the earth a grayish yellow cast from frozen soil.
"All three trails we've been keeping our teeth in have drawn back toward Shaolong." The man spoke softly, his voice low and sorrowful, as though he had spent his entire life in straitened circumstances. "Joy-in-Death Tower is retreating. Have they abandoned you?"
A silk headcloth, an angular hairpin, a gauze cap, a long gown, and broad robes-the man looked as though he had walked out of the previous dynasty, gone for six hundred years. Yet his attire was shabby and faded; even back then, he must have been someone who found no road forward and no door open to him.
"In any case... we can't give up on them." The younger man's arm was clasped by the man dressed as an impoverished scholar. The two swept across the ashen earth, the windblown dust rising for a hundred