On top of Lefeng Mountain, inside the bamboo hut, Luo Jiujiang said goodbye to the two people in the hall and left. Zhen Shuangliu looked at his back, which still had the lively posture of a young man, and let out a long sigh.

"Like a demon," he said of his disciple.

Gong Yizhu was sipping his tea when he heard this and burst out laughing, splashing the tea in his cup a few times. "How interesting! You're the one saying that?"

Zhen Shuangliu understood the implication of his words, looked back at him coldly, and waited for his next words.

"'What's so good about that snake? Why does it make you so obsessed that you spend half the year with it in the most dangerous places, and the other half on the road looking for it.' - I thought such words were only said by my younger self."

Gong Yizhu slowly scraped the foam from the cup with the tea lid. He glanced toward the door with a wistful look. "How familiar! Seeing Jiujiang like this now, it's like it was just yesterday, isn't it?"

"..." Zhen Shuangliu's arms, resting on his knees, tensed nervously. He clenched his teeth, each word escaping him like a simmering blood and rage. "Is that yesterday worth reliving?"

"Don't you think it was worth it?" Gong Yizhu smiled faintly. "Yes, for you and me, this past is worse than nothing. If Cangjiang had never met you, and hadn't suffered that fateful fate for you, we'd both be happily enjoying our lives today, one of us wandering the mortal world, the other smiling in the grave, both of us. But if Cangjiang were to be reborn, knowing all the dangers ahead, do you think he'd meet you again?"

“…” Zhen Shuangliu remained silent.

Gong Yizhu smiled knowingly: "You know he will. Cangjiang is just that kind of person."

"So what's the point in interfering?" Gong Yizhu advised slowly, "Today's Jiujiang may not be the same Cangjiang as yesterday, and today's Han Qianling may not be the same Zhen Shuangliu. Yesterday, I saw him briefly in the peach forest on the west slope, and I thought he at least looked much smarter than you."

Zhen Shuangliu said nothing, slumping himself into the rosewood armchair, his eyelashes and eyelids half-drooping, casting two faint shadows on his under-eye bags. He still looked melancholy, but the mention of the word "Cangjiang" simply made him unwilling to speak further.

Seeing him looking half dead, Gong Yizhu couldn't help but hit the drum hard with the hammer.

He placed the cup flat on the hardwood table, dipped it in the tea, and wrote down the names "Luo Cang" and "Luo Jiang." His tone was filled with a hint of sarcasm. "If I hadn't learned your alias and 'brother' from Jiujiang, I wouldn't have known you'd become such a self-deceived person—the same determination you had back then to poison my tea, put a poison under my pillow, place a snake in my quilt, and nail a row of hidden weapons to the eaves of my door just because you disliked me, just because you didn't want me to die."

Zhen Shuangliu's brows suddenly furrowed as if in pain!

He certainly wasn't feeling sorry for trying to kill Gong Yizhu when he was a teenager. His pain was because Gong Yizhu mentioned the time when he used the alias "Luo Cang".

Gong Yizhu said that he was deceiving himself, but that was not the case.

Before Cangjiang died, he asked him to live for him, and to see all the mountains and rivers and drink thousands of cups of wine for him from then on. However, Zhen Shuangliu was really incompetent. When he dragged his two broken legs and reached the small world of Qidao, he had not seen half of the three thousand worlds, but he was exhausted by the endless grief after Cangjiang's death.

But the remaining half of his life was bought by Cangjiang at the cost of his life. Since Cangjiang wanted him to live, he dared not die.

So Zhen Shuangliu settled on the nearby Daimao Island. With his cultivation level, even if he was on the verge of exhaustion, a simple opening would still be a grand spectacle to ordinary cultivators. There were five surnames on Daimao Island, but only "Luo" contained the radical "Cangjiang."

"Your last name is very good." Zhen Shuangliu said to the then young Luo clan leader, "Are you short of a guest official?"

In just one sentence, the Luo family had a new guest official.

The Luo clan leader respectfully asked him for his title, but what title did he have? Was he the "Cing Twenty-three," the codenamed "Spirit Snake Master" of the Xuanwu Realm, a man who only lived up to his name and was a scribbler? Or was he the Pillow Frost Flow that belonged only to the Que Cang River?

Cangjiang is dead, Cangjiang died for him, so how can this body that is still alive in this world still have the nerve to have a name that belongs only to him?

"I don't have a name." Zhen Shuangliu said in a daze, "Does your Luo family have a family tree? Show it to me."

His fingers indifferently flipped through the yellowed pages of the family tree, his eyes carelessly tracing the lines of ink-stained characters, barely able to focus. That was until the words "Cangjiang" suddenly caught his eye, like a heavy hammer blow to his bewildered soul.

Zhen Shuangliu calmed down a little: the genealogy was written in vertical lines, but he had just been scanning it randomly. Now that he looked carefully, he found that the two words "Cangjiang" connected on the left and right were actually the names of a pair of collateral brothers.

The younger brother was named "Luo Jiang" and unfortunately died in a shipwreck. The older brother was named "Luo Cang". He did not believe that his younger brother was dead, so he went out to sea all year round and his whereabouts were unknown.

The radical of Cangjiang, Cangjiang's name. Perhaps this was fate, a destiny that condemned him to the death of his parents, a fate that made him a pawn in the survival of his parents, and then to Cangjiang's sudden death, a shattered soul, to shield him from disaster. The two characters "Cangjiang" now appear in the Luo family tree, not as another act of fate, but as a mockery of heaven.

Zhen Shuangliu laughed out loud, he laughed so hard that he fell back and forth, and finally fell on his two broken legs.

He thought that his laughter was cold, sarcastic and rebellious, and the sound must be crazy and ridiculous, loud enough to drown out the waves of the blue sea behind him and tear his throat into a hoarse and congested state.

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