With Yali leading the way, Zhou Yang looked around the house he would be living in for some time to come.
The interior was clean and tidy, with simple furnishings. Plain yet pleasing to the eye, it had a distinctly lived-in warmth. Clearly, Yali took very good care of the house.
"This is your room."
Yali opened a door and gestured inside, smiling with an indescribable gentleness and warmth.
Zhou Yang was a little bewildered. He did not understand the sense of closeness Yali exuded, but he still nodded and entered the room.
The room had an ordinary layout without much decoration, but to Zhou Yang, no decoration was the best decoration.
As soon as he lay on the bed, he felt its comfortable softness. He rolled over slightly and felt it with his hand. It was springy and conformed to his body, while the workmanship and fabric were exceptionally comfortable. The bed was clearly of excellent quality and craftsmanship.
As expected of a Titled Douluo's house. Even this bed probably wasn't cheap, was it?
Zhou Yang could not help recalling how, in his previous life, a single bed could cost one or two hundred thousand. That was something Old Zhou, an ordinary working stiff, could never have afforded.
Even after coming to the Douluo Continent, he had never thrown money around on such things.
Although he lived with the intention of enjoying life, he had never planned to budget for such meaningless expenses.
Now, it seemed he had been wrong. Those hundreds of thousands really did buy something worthwhile.
Zhou Yang felt his body, which always unconsciously remained tense and alert, finally relax at this moment. His eyes instinctively narrowed, and he went limp against the bed.
I feel like I'm about to be corrupted by wicked capital.
Watching Zhou Yang lie sprawled on the bed, grinning helplessly like a child, Yali covered her mouth and chuckled. Meanwhile, the screen of an unidentified Soul Tool she held quietly lit up.
Seeing this, Na'er rushed over too, leaping into the air and landing on top of Zhou Yang.
"No fair! I want in too! Hyah!"
"Pff-argh!"
Relaxed as he was, Zhou Yang clearly had not expected Na'er to act so suddenly and suffered a heavy blow from her flying elbow drop.
"Thank you, Senior Yali. I really like this room."
Na'er's attack brought Zhou Yang back to his senses. Remembering that this was someone else's home, he scratched his slightly flushed cheek in embarrassment and offered a compliment.
"As long as you like it."
Hearing Zhou Yang's words, Yali smiled gracefully, her voice sounding happy as well.
"If you like it, you can stay here forever..."
"You could even stay for a lifetime."
"Uh, that's a little much... I'd feel embarrassed myself if I really did that."
"Haha, I'm joking."
"Zhou Yang, you don't need to be so polite. Just make yourself at home."
Zhou Yang nodded and thanked Yali for her kindness. He simply had not expected her to make a joke like that, talking about a lifetime right off the bat.
I'm just a kid staying here temporarily. How could I possibly stay for a lifetime?
Could it be that if I keep staying here, I'll end up being sent to Shrek?
His wandering thoughts quietly veered off course.
"Speaking of which, where is it? I spent all day in the car, so I'd like to wash up."
"The bathroom is over there."
Yali pointed in a direction, and Zhou Yang got up and headed over.
The machine heated the water quickly, bringing it up to temperature in no time. He had to admit, a fantasy world was quite convenient in these respects.
Warm water poured over Zhou Yang's head, bringing a cleansing sense of comfort.
Zhou Yang's mind, always full of wandering thoughts, slowly quieted as he began reviewing what had happened to him.
Yesterday, he had only meant to help Tang Wulin replace her Spirit Soul and then make a run for it. He had never expected to run into Na'er after arriving in Eastsea ahead of time.
This girl should originally have appeared beside Red Mountain Academy when she was six.
Yet he had only run into her now.
Even more unexpectedly, the teacher accompanying her was Yali.
He had thought it would be Yun Ming, that spear wielder. After all, Na'er's Martial Soul was the Silver Dragon Spear.
Still, it did not matter either way. The Douluo Continent had few secret techniques to pass down anyway. Constrained by the existence of Soul Skills, practically everyone on the Douluo Continent was hopeless when it came to skills. Only a handful at the very top would create cultivation methods of their own.
In a place like the Douluo Continent, cultivation teachers were unlike the masters in other traditional cultivation novels, who would teach their disciples cultivation methods and techniques.
Cases like Tang Wulin learning the Nine Forms of the Scarlet Dragon from Elder Chi in the original story were rare among rarities. Those were purely techniques and moves, and she had only been able to learn them because of her Golden Dragon King bloodline.
Martial Souls on the Douluo Continent came in all manner of strange varieties. Without connections or an influential background, finding something suitable was difficulty piled upon difficulty.
Even the Mysterious Heaven Skill, one of the Douluo Continent's few top cultivation methods, had been stolen by a certain God King from some second-rate minor sect in his previous life.
Although, over ten thousand years, there had always been some extraordinarily gifted people who created cultivation methods and left them behind for later generations to keep refining, such things were ultimately few and far between.
Never mind learning them-doing so practically always required signing away your life.
Thus, rather than masters, teachers on the Douluo Continent were more like guardians who provided resources and broad cultivation knowledge.
Now Na'er seemed to have taken Yali as her teacher, and the world line had changed dramatically. Who knew what else awaited him?
Zhou Yang had no doubt that even if the Time Jackers jumped out right now, he could keep his composure.
Right now, he just wanted to see what kind of great storm the flapping wings of a butterfly like him, this unexpected variable, would bring.
After washing himself and returning to the changing room, he casually picked up the towel on the changing basket and began drying himself. Only halfway through did he realize something.
If I remember right, there wasn't a towel here when I came in, was there?
And wasn't all this a little too seamless?
Wait, where are my clothes? My Soul Tool?
The clothes and Soul Tool he had left in the laundry basket were gone.
"There's a towel in the changing basket, and the clothes I prepared are inside. I've taken your dirty clothes to wash."
A gentle voice sounded from outside the door at just the right moment, carrying a motherly affection that seemed capable of embracing everything and made one want to call her Mom.
Yet cold sweat appeared on Zhou Yang's forehead, and his body even trembled a little.
For the first time since awakening his Martial Soul, Zhou Yang experienced an emotion called fear.
Holy crap, this is kinda scary.
Compared to an unknown enemy, this meticulous gentleness and acceptance, seemingly capable of swallowing up everything about you, understanding all of you, and melting you away, was what truly grew more terrifying the more you thought about it.
Yet that excessive, effortless warmth gave Zhou Yang a strange illusion, as though what lay hidden behind it was something capable of crushing everything.
This was not concern with an ulterior purpose. He could feel that it was sincerity from Yali's heart. If she had treated him well just to send him to Shrek, he would have run away long ago.
Rather than "taking him away," he felt Yali wanted him to "stay."
Fortunately, he had Tang Ziran's family as a shining example before this.
Perhaps kind people all had something in common.
After all, Yali was someone who had once rescued countless refugees and poor people from fire and water, helping others freely and without compensation, an existence comparable to a saint.
His previous life had made Zhou Yang extremely sensitive to malice. He could sense that Yali truly bore him none and simply wanted to look after him.
This is probably just a compensatory response brought on by losing something important.
Zhou Yang remembered that, in Yali's original storyline, she seemed to have treated ordinary people without rest during a great plague, ending the epidemic and saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
Even if the world line had changed, this particular event had indeed remained unchanged. Zhou Yang was absolutely certain of that. After all, there were piles of old news reports on the Federation's network; a casual search would turn them up.
Even in Douluo, this achievement deserved praise.
But the price had been exhausting her body so badly that she could not conceive, one of Yali's greatest regrets.
Having lost the chance to have children, she compensated for that desire to love a child by caring for children. That was not incomprehensible; otherwise, she would not have adopted Na'er.
Zhou Yang convinced himself.