On the day the final episode of " Travel to That Unknown Place " wrapped up, before dawn, most of the lights in the manor were already on.
Workers were dismantling equipment, and cables were being coiled up one by one in the corridor. Occasionally, a few words of dispatch could be heard over the walkie-talkie, spoken in a very low voice.
The guests packed their luggage one after another and said goodbye to each other at the main entrance.
One car after another drove out of the manor gate, their taillights gradually becoming invisible in the morning mist.
Qiguan Yuan stood on the steps, the morning breeze ruffling the stray hairs on his forehead.
Pei Yubai brought out a coat from inside the house and draped it over his shoulders.
Qiguan Yuan adjusted the collar of his coat and turned to look at him.
I want to go back to Cloud-Hidden Town tomorrow.
Pei Yubai looked at him for two seconds and nodded.
I'll go back with you.
That evening, Pei Yubai found Shen Lingyi and told her that he wanted to get married with Yuanyuan in Cloud-Hidden Town.
Shen Lingyi adapted quickly to the change of wedding venue.
She refunded the deposit for the island wedding and immediately began researching the process of a traditional Chinese wedding.
Pei Zhongkang, wearing reading glasses, was flipping through a thread-bound book on wedding customs beside Shen Lingyi, occasionally reading a passage aloud. The two discussed it earnestly, sometimes even arguing over a detail.
Pei Yubai simply said from the side, "Do whatever Yuanyuan likes."
Shen Lingyi didn't even look up. "I know, I know, you've said it eight hundred times."
The next morning, Pei Yubai and Qiguan Yuan returned to Cloud-Hidden Town.
The two walked together through the woods and returned to Qiguan Yuan's residence.
Qiguan Yuan stood in the courtyard for a while, then raised his hand and made a hand seal.
A faint light emanated from his fingertips, spreading outwards in concentric circles like ripples from a pebble dropped into water.
Not long after, the courtyard gate was pushed open from the outside.
Lu Zhao stood at the door and peeked inside.
He was carrying the Marriage Register when he pushed the door open, and a section of the red thread from his sleeve was sticking out. He was walking so fast that he almost tripped over the threshold.
Qiguan Yuan was sitting in the pavilion drinking tea, and Pei Yubai was sitting next to him. Their hands were resting on the stone table, their fingers loosely intertwined.
"Senior," Lu Zhao called out, stepping into the pavilion and sitting down opposite Qiguan Yuan.
Then he glanced at Pei Yubai, wondering why Senior Qiguan had brought Brother Pei along.
Wouldn't Brother Pei be very sad if he saw Senior Moon Official?
But Lu Zhao didn't dare to say anything more.
He took the teacup Qiguan Yuan handed him and took a big gulp, then put his hands on his knees, straightened his posture, and his expression became serious.
"Ready?" Qiguan Yuan asked.
Lu Zhao nodded, took out the Marriage Register from his sleeve, and turned to the page for the Northwest. The veins of vows spread out densely on the paper, with a faint red light flowing around them.
Qiguan Yuan stood up, walked to the open space outside the pavilion, and took the Dust-Settling Red Cord off his wrist, wrapping it around his fingers.
He turned and glanced at Pei Yubai.
Pei Yubai remained seated on the stone bench, still holding the teacup that Qiguan Yuan had half-finished drinking from.
" Pei Yubai," Qiguan Yuan called to him, "Come here."
Pei Yubai put down his teacup and walked to his side.
Qiguan Yuan reached out and gently tugged at the red thread on Lu Zhao's ring finger, then turned to Lu Zhao and said, "The medium doesn't need your divine essence. Let him do it."
Lu Zhao was stunned. He blinked, his gaze darting back and forth between Qiguan Yuan and Pei Yubai several times. "Senior, Brother Pei is a mortal; he doesn't have divine status..."
"He has it," Qiguan Yuan said calmly, "But he hasn't gotten it back yet."
Lu Zhao's mouth was agape, his expression shifting from confusion to blankness, and from blankness to disbelief.
He looked at Pei Yubai, and suddenly all the fragments in his mind came together.
The thought in his mind when Qiguan Yuan first brought Pei Yubai to him: Senior Qiguan was able to directly use his divine power to protect Senior Moon Official Moon Official's divine power.
They waited for him for over eight hundred years, how could they possibly find a substitute when the Moon Official's divine status was restored and awakened?
And then there was the sight of those red threads that seemed impossible to untangle unraveling on their own in Pei Yubai's hands.
Lu Zhao suddenly stood up from the stone bench, looked at Pei Yubai, and opened and closed his mouth repeatedly.
" Brother Pei... Brother Pei is Senior Moon Official?!" His voice rose a half tone, his eyes widened, and several red threads in his sleeve popped out and fluttered above his head as he became excited.
"I...: I always thought Brother Pei was a stand-in! I even gave him those two books so he could learn how to please Senior Qiguan!"
"I even told him to secretly tie a few more red threads tighter when Senior Qiguan isn't around! I also..."
" Lu Zhao," Qiguan Yuan interrupted him lazily, "If you keep yelling like that, the whole of Cloud-Hidden Town will know you sent me erotic pictures."
Lu Zhao's face turned from red to an even deeper red.
He buried his face in the Marriage Register for a long while before finally raising his head again, his ears so red they looked like they were about to bleed.
He cleared his throat, forcing himself back into a businesslike state, and turned to the required page in the Marriage Register.
"Since Brother Pei is indeed Senior Moon Official, then the issue of the medium is resolved. Senior Moon Official's divine fragment is within the Tree of Fate."
"Using fragments of one's own divine essence as a catalyst to draw back the complete divine essence is much smoother than using external divine essence to complete it."
The entire process requires a great deal of Power of Marriage to propel it forward, and that's where Senior Qiguan's help comes in."
"Ready." Qiguan Yuan unfurled the Dust-Settling Red Cord, and the red rope slowly floated in the air, its red light changing from a dim red to a dazzling bright red.
"Is the combined power of the wishes from the Northwest, plus the Spiritual Power of this Tree of Fate itself, enough?"
Lu Zhao quickly flipped through a few pages of the Marriage Register, nodded, and said, "That's enough. Senior, let's begin."
Qiguan Yuan walked to the Tree of Fate and placed his hand on the trunk.
At the same moment, all the red lines on the tree canopy lit up, and the entire tree moved automatically without wind, each line glowing, as if the whole tree had suddenly been set on fire.
Lu Zhao drew the power of wishes collected from the Northwest from the Marriage Register, poured it down his arm into the tree trunk, and then through the trunk to the roots underground, where it merged with the ten-thousand-year-old Spiritual Power of the Tree of Fate that had been transplanted from the Heavenly Realm.
The two forces merged, compressed, and condensed within the tree's core until the entire tree began to emit a deep hum.
" Pei Yubai." Qiguan Yuan turned around and glanced at him.
Pei Yubai walked to his side, Qiguan Yuan withdrew his hand from the tree trunk and instead grasped Pei Yubai's hand.
He channeled the Power of Marriage into Pei Yubai's body. The power flowed gently yet firmly through Pei Yubai's meridians, finally converging at his heart, where it resonated with the remaining fragments of Xiu Yun Yin's divine essence within the tree.
Lu Zhao sat cross-legged under the tree, with the Marriage Register spread out on his lap and his hands forming a mudra.
He closed his eyes and probed the tree with his divine sense.
The fragments in the tree's heart are scattered among the roots and annual rings. Some are only the size of a grain of rice, while others are as fine as dust, but each one gleams with a silvery-white light.
He used his divine sense to gather them one by one, guiding them to float upwards along the flow of sap, from the roots to the trunk, from the trunk to the branches, and finally converging in the center of the canopy into a complete, dazzling silver star.
The fragments drifted out of the tree trunk, slowly moving towards Pei Yubai's chest following the direction of the pulling force.
The silver light grew brighter and brighter, illuminating the entire Tree of Fate and the faces of the three people beneath it.
A thin layer of sweat had already seeped from Lu Zhao's forehead, but his hands, which were forming hand seals, remained steady, and his divine sense tightly locked onto the moving fragment of the divine core, preventing any power from leaking out.
Pei Yubai paused for a moment as the shard pierced his heart.
He closed his eyes, and in the instant his divine essence and soul completely merged, memories flooded in like a tidal wave.
Unlike the scenes Qiguan Yuan had shown him before, this wasn't the feeling of watching someone else's story.
Rather, they are genuine memories, imbued with warmth.
On the day the Tree of Fate split open, he emerged from the moonlight and the first person he saw upon opening his eyes was...
Yuanyuan in red, stood in front of him, tilting her head and asking him his name.
His own reflection was mirrored in those fox-like eyes, cunning and with a touch of innate willfulness, as he said, "Since you were born because of me, then bear the fates I don't want."
He said "okay." He didn't tell Qiguan Yuan that his heart had already been pounding because of Qiguan Yuan even before he said that "okay."
He remembered waiting for Qiguan Yuan in the snow of the Heavenly Realm every winter.
The person was afraid of the cold, so they huddled among the branches of the Tree of Fate, wrapping themselves into a ball with their nine tails, leaving only their two wet eyes showing.
He stood under the tree, not urging him, just waiting for him to peek out from behind the tree trunk.
He warmed the osmanthus wine and put it in a white porcelain pot. When Qiguan Yuan jumped down from the tree, his nine tails spread out and caught the snow falling from the tree, and also caught him.
The two huddled together, Qiguan Yuan would take a sip of wine and then snuggle an inch closer to him, his tail wrapping him up tightly, saying, "Yun Yin, you're the best."
He looked down at the person in his arms and thought to himself, "The best person isn't me, it's you."
But he didn't say it aloud, because at that time he felt he wasn't qualified.
From birth to death, everything about him and Yuanyuan.
There are other memories as well.
It is not nothingness after it dissipates.
A part of his consciousness remained in that Tree of Fate, scattered like fragments among the tree's rings and roots.
From his perspective inside the tree, he saw everything.
He saw Qiguan Yuan sitting alone under the Tree of Fate, still holding his hand, for a very, very long time, so long that countless cycles of sunrise and sunset in the Heavenly Realm had passed.
Then Qiguan Yuan uprooted the Tree of Fate from the Heavenly Realm and carried him step by step to the mortal realm, planting the tree in the front yard of the house where Yun Yin lived.
He saw that Qiguan Yuan was following Xiu Yun Yin's example, giving himself a jar of osmanthus wine every year and burying it under a tree.
And the frown on Qiguan Yuan's brow when he first drank Longtuan Shengxue, and the soft "It's not bitter after all" he uttered long after he finished drinking it.
There's also Qiguan Yuan looking drunk.
That was the first time Qiguan Yuan got drunk. He leaned against the Tree of Fate, hugging a wine jar, with his nine tails scattered around the tree roots.
He thought that Xiu Yun Yin in the Tree of Fate, so he talked to the tree over and over again.
" Yun Yin, I helped a couple find their perfect match today. They were so happy. Watching them so happy, I felt like I didn't feel anything myself..."
" Yun Yin, I drank the osmanthus wine you used to brew today. I made it myself, and it tasted awful. It wasn't as sweet as yours. The wine is almost gone, and there's no one left to brew wine for me..."
" Yun Yin, when are you coming back? I miss you so much..."
Pei Yubai saw that Qiguan Yuan would stand in front of the osmanthus tree for a long time every time he went to bury wine under the tree, with his nine tails hanging quietly behind him. His Yuanyuan was very sad.
Yuanyuan reached out and touched the tree trunk, her fingers slowly tracing the texture of the bark, as if she were touching a person's face.
And those thirteen times of forgetting.
Each time he cast a spell, Qiguan Yuan would carve his name on a marriage divination slip and bury it under a tree.
However, the spell can only seal the memory for fifty or sixty years. After fifty or sixty years, the memory will return, and the memory will be more vivid and painful than before.
Pei Yubai clearly saw those nights when his memories returned.
Qiguan Yuan sat alone under the tree, curled up into a ball, his nine tails wrapping around him.
Several empty wine jars lay scattered around him, and the broken red thread was still tied to his ring finger. Under the moonlight Qiguan Yuan softly called out " Yun Yin," his voice very soft, as if afraid of being overheard, or as if he were calling out to someone who would never respond to him.
He was very anxious inside the Tree of Fate.
He wanted to hug his Yuanyuan, but he couldn't.
So he could only try to control the red thread on the Tree of Fate to touch his Yuanyuan.
Pei Yubai opened his eyes; his eyes were very red.
He didn't cry, but a sharp pain somewhere in his chest made it almost impossible to breathe.
So this is how his Yuanyuan went after he disappeared.
A person waited for eight hundred years, suffering repeatedly between forgetting and remembering, and after each bout of drunkenness, confided his innermost thoughts to a silent tree.
In every moment he thought Xiu Yun Yin could hear him, he poured all his longing into a tree.
He, trapped in that tree, heard every word, yet was unable to respond with even a single syllable.
" Yuanyuan." His voice was so hoarse it didn't sound like his own.
Qiguan Yuan was still holding his hand tightly, and Pei Yubai reached out and pulled him into his arms, so tightly that Qiguan Yuan's body went numb.
He buried his face in Qiguan Yuan's neck, his shoulders trembling slightly, and Qiguan Yuan felt his collar being wet with warm liquid.
"I remember now." Pei Yubai's voice muffled in the crook of his neck.
Every word seemed to be squeezed from the depths of his chest, "Every time you spoke to the tree, I heard it. You collapsed drunk under the tree, and I wanted to help you up, but I couldn't."
"You told me Yun Yin I arranged a particularly good match for a couple today, and I heard it. You said your own wine tastes terrible, not as sweet as mine. You said don't forget me..."
I heard everything.
"I'm sorry, Yuanyuan, it's all my fault for making you wait so long."
Qiguan Yuan didn't speak. He raised his hand and placed it on the back of Pei Yubai's head, his fingers running through his hair and gently stroking it downwards.
After a long while, he finally spoke, his voice very soft, with a hint of lazy laughter, but with a very subtle tremor at the end, which he hid so well that it was almost imperceptible.
"Stop crying. If you keep crying, Lu Zhao will think Moon Official is a crybaby again."
Pei Yubai did not let go.
Qiguan Yuan let him hold her, let him wipe his tears on his collar, and continued to slowly comb his hair with his fingers.
"It's good that you heard it." Qiguan Yuan's voice was low. "Those words were originally meant for you."
Pei Yubai tightened his grip on her arm.
Pei Yubai.
Pei Yubai responded, "Hmm."
" Xiu Yun Yin."
He replied, " Yuanyuan, I'm here."
A tear rolled down Qiguan Yuan's cheek. "Welcome home."