Chu Wanning knew that he had no other choice, so he put on a thick fox fur coat, opened an oil-paper umbrella, and went into the main hall of Wushan Palace.

     Inside the hall, the silver lamps were shining brightly, the ninety-nine lights as bright as a sea of stars reflecting the brilliance of the entire main hall of Wushan Palace. The attendants on both sides of the hall were accustomed to seeing Chu-zongshi at his bedside, so when they saw him enter, they all lowered their eyes and greeted him.

     Chu Wanning walked expressionlessly through the side door of the veranda and towards the rest area of the back hall. When he reached the carved lacquer door, he stretched out his hand and pushed it open.

     The room was very warm, different from the cold rain outside, and there was even a rich aroma of wine, which assailed his nose. Mo Ran was lying languidly on the couch, his jade white fingers holding a small red clay jar as he drank the wine.

     “You’re here.”

     “...”

     “Sit.”

     Chu Wanning walked to the bamboo mat furthest from him, sat down, and closed his eyes.

     Mo Ran didn’t force him to come closer. He was already a little drunk, and his pale face was tinged with red. He squinted his eyes, bits of light flowing through his dark, purple-ish pupils. After another lazy sip, Mo Ran looked up at the ceiling carved with dragons and phoenixes, his fingers tapping lightly on his knees.

     He suddenly asked, “Do you still know how to make wontons?”

     Chu Wanning’s eyelashes trembled, but he still eventually said, “No.”

     Mo Ran was a little unrelenting. “You did. It was that year… the year he left.”

     “I can’t do it well.” Chu Wanning’s face was expressionless. “You’re right—just trying to imitate others.”

     Mo Ran narrowed his eyes. “Are you trying to remind This Venerable of his hatred?”

     “No.”

     “Then what if This Venerable One orders you to make one now?”

     Chu Wanning didn’t speak, but Mo Ran looked at him with a searing gaze. “I’m asking you a question. If I ask you to make one now, would you still be willing?”

     “Even if I did.” Chu Wanning finally opened his eyes and looked at him coldly. “Would you eat it?”

     Mo Ran didn’t expect to be rebelled against like this. A layer of red immediately appeared on his face, as if he was drunk but also angry. In short, the emotions in his eyes suddenly became very blank, and he was in a daze for a while before reacting. He then gritted his teeth and threw the wine cup from the table with a violent clatter, spilling the fine pear blossom white wine all over the floor.

     Mo Ran stood up gloomily, his figure like a mountain. He stepped over the broken shards and strode to Chu Wanning, grabbing him by the lapels.

     “You and Song Qiutong.” Emperor Taxian-Jun gritted his teeth. “You—both of you—are making This Venerable One unhappy.”

     He let go of Chu Wanning and circled around like a vulture, pacing back and forth.

     Suddenly, his footsteps stopped.

     He turned his head and stared at Chu Wanning, then asked, “When did you teach me the sentence ‘seeing this letter is like seeing you’?”

     At this moment, Taxian-Jun was already half drunk, and his speech wasn’t rational at all; he just said whatever he thought.

     “How come I don’t remember at all?”

     Chu Wanning’s wrist was then grabbed by a large, cold hand. Mo Ran dragged him to the desk. He spread out a pile of scrolls.

     Mo Ran said, “Write for me. Teach me again.”

     Chu Wanning was already suffering from a low fever, and being forced by him like this made him feel even more stifled in his rage. His face flushed red, and he started to cough.

     Mo Ran put the brush in his hand and said sullenly and irritably, “Write.”

     He urged impatiently, “Hurry up.”

     Chu Wanning’s spiritual core had been broken in the previous battle between master and disciple, and his body was still in bad condition. As he coughed, blood gushed from his throat.

     Mo Ran was stunned. He stared at the specks of blood, then slowly let go of his hand.

     “It’s just a casual greeting letter; what’s the point?” Finally, Chu Wanning stopped coughing. He let out a long sigh and wiped the blood from his lips with a handkerchief.

     He looked up, took a deep breath, and looked at Mo Ran. “In the past, you would write this at the beginning of every letter. But I’m afraid you haven’t written for too long, so you forgot.”

     “I… wrote a letter?” Mo Ran stared at him with his dark eyes. “To whom?” He said almost angrily, “Who did I write to? Who else can I write to in this world? You’re making it up… just making it up… It’s all nonsense!”

     When Mo Ran said these words, he was tired and frustrated, his eyes flashing with a misty luster.

     It was at that moment that Chu Wanning vaguely felt something was wrong. However, he didn’t think too much of it at the time, just thinking that Mo Ran was drunk and had a bad memory. So he only frowned and didn’t answer.

     There was a letter box in Wushan Palace’s study. All the letters at Sisheng Peak were sealed in a qiankun pouch and filed inside. Mo Ran moved like a trapped beast in a cage, pacing back and forth. After a while, he suddenly remembered the existence of the letter box. He took out the sealed box and opened the old letters one by one.

     Most of the letters had been written by the disciples of the sect and were categorized according to the elders they studied under. Most of the people who wrote the letters had already died the year Mo Ran betrayed the sect. Among them, Yuheng Elder had the fewest disciples—only three—and soon, Mo Ran found a stack of three letters.

     He opened them with trembling hands.

     His handwriting wasn’t bad. It was childish and crooked, but he wrote earnestly. He looked at the letters one by one; on each letter were the words “seeing the letter is like meeting in person and seeing your comforting face.”

     Every one.

     Mo Ran’s fingers were trembling, and his eyes shone with a strange light.

     Mother, seeing the letter is like meeting in person and seeing your comforting face.

     Xun-jiejie, seeing the letter is like meeting in person and seeing your comforting face.

     Those distant names made him shudder and feel uncomfortable. His eyes narrowed, and dark clouds gathered on his handsome face.

     Chu Wanning stood at the side. Initially, he still didn’t pay much attention to it, but as the moment stretched out, the look on Mo Ran’s face made him feel that something was amiss… He couldn’t help but lock his gaze on the man in front of the desk flipping through the old letters like he was on the verge of madness.

     A kind of minuscule terror reached out and tapped Chu Wanning’s heart.

     Something was wrong.

     He walked over slowly and looked at the blank and crazy look on Mo Ran’s face as he read the letter.

     …What’s wrong?

     “My mother is already dead…” Suddenly, Mo Ran murmured and looked up at Chu Wanning. “Why would I write to her?”

     Chu Wanning stood at the side, watching his every move. The terror pierced his heart as if some kind of bloody darkness was about to break out of its shell.

     Dark clouds were descending.

     It was so strange to forget the words “seeing the letter is like meeting in person,” which had been written many times, but it wasn’t impossible.

     But to forget so many letters he had written and have no impression of them, this was too strange.

     Mo Ran was still reading the contents of each letter: “seeing your comforting face… seeing your comforting face…” The luster shining in those dark, purple-ish eyes was so painful, so contradictory.

     It really did seem like an important part of his memory was missing.

     It was as if he could hear the sound of a hard shell about to crack.

     Chu Wanning held his breath, and his spine was almost numb. Apart from the two of them, there was no one else in the study. In the dead silence, Chu Wanning’s lips moved, and he then said softly, “Don’t you remember? You said that although your mother could no longer receive the letters, you still wanted to write to her.”

     Mo Ran suddenly looked up.

     Chu Wanning only felt his blood turn cold bit by bit as his breath turned to ice.

     “The first name you learned to write was not your own.”

      Mo Ran was stunned and asked in a low voice, “Then what was it?”

     “The first name you asked me to teach you to write was ‘Mother’.”

     Outside, lightning flashed and thunder roared. The wind howled mournfully, as if countless ghost claws were scraping against the window, causing the window frame to rattle.

     A bolt of lightning struck, illuminating the world.

     Emperor Taxian-Jun muttered, “...You taught me? …Why don’t I have any impression of it… at all?”

     The wind blew, causing the trees to fall and the shadows to sway. The mountains and courtyards were filled with ghosts and vengeful spirits.

     Chu Wanning’s face was pale as he stared at Mo Ran intently, his eyes as sharp as a falcon. “You… don’t remember at all?”

     His heart pounded like a drum.

     After a moment of silence, Mo Ran asked almost confusedly, “Remember what?”

     The drum stopped.

     The tiny beak of terror pecked through the shell, and the terrifying aura of terror swept towards the only conscious person in the room, crashing on the shore with great force!

     Chu Wanning’s scalp went numb. He doesn’t remember? How can he not remember?!

     Back then, Mo Ran said that he wanted to write to his mother. He wrote over three hundred letters, saying that he wanted to collect a total of one thousand letters, so he could burn them during the Ghost Festival for his mother in the underworld…

     How could he forget more than three hundred letters so easily?!

     His lips trembled slightly, and he suddenly had an extremely terrifying suspicion. Chu Wanning said hoarsely, “You… Do you remember what you said when you first saw Tianwen?”

     “What did I say?” Mo Ran said. “How long has it been? How could I possibly still remember it clearly?”

     “You said that you also wanted such a holy weapon,” Chu Wanning said. “You wanted to have Tianwen too.”

     The drunk man asked him, with a hint of mockery in his eyes, “What would I want Tianwen for? To murder? Interrogate?”

     Chu Wanning whispered, “Earthworms.”

     Long ago, outside the Red Lotus Pavilion, a young boy smiled as he held up an oil-paper umbrella and said, “To save the earthworms.”

     But at this moment, Emperor Taxian-Jun narrowed his wolf-like eyes and asked in confusion, “What earthworms?”

     Outside, thunder broke through the sky, and purple lightning flashed through the night.

     There was a loud rumble.

     Chu Wanning suddenly pursed his lips, his brown eyes quivering slightly.

     He felt a bone-piercing chill.

     That night, Mo Ran actually didn’t do anything to Chu Wanning. He only drank a little too much, then held the letters in a daze.

     Later, Mo Ran fell asleep in front of the table. While he was asleep, he still muttered, “What earthworms? …There are no earthworms…”

     Suddenly, a strong wind blew open the window, and with a bang, the mountain breeze and heavy rain poured inside, abruptly extinguishing the few lights by the window.

     The room suddenly became very dark.

     Chu Wanning stood beside Mo Ran, his lips and teeth cold. He lowered his head to look at the sleeping man. The uncertain thoughts in his head became clearer and clearer. Why didn’t Mo Ran remember these scattered past events? Why did he selectively forget about some of the pure past?

     Was it because he was drunk? Was it a coincidence? Or… had someone deliberately erased the goodness from his heart?

     Taxian-Jun, who was sleeping on the table, murmured softly, “Cold…”

     Chu Wanning’s blood was cold, and his entire body was numb. When he heard Mo Ran say it was cold, he instinctively walked slowly to the window.

     He raised his hand and closed the window to block out the wind and rain outside.

     After doing all of this, Chu Wanning didn’t leave. He was in a daze and put his forehead on the window frame engraved with bat and deer patterns, his knuckles as white as jade.

     After a while, he slowly took out a crumpled talisman from his lapel.

     The Rising Dragon Talisman.

     He no longer had a spiritual core, so Mo Ran felt that he couldn’t use any spells and didn’t bother to take away the talismans Chu Wanning already had.

     In fact, Mo Ran was right. Chu Wanning bit the tip of his finger and dripped more than ten drops of blood onto the Rising Dragon Talisman, almost soaking it, before the little dragon finally floated out listlessly.

     Its entire body emitted a weak light, and it raised its head feebly. “Ah… Chu Wanning… long time no see…”

     The little dragon could not stand steadily. It took a few steps off the paper with its dragon claws before collapsing back onto the paper with a thud. It felt both wronged and confused. “Why haven’t you summoned This Venerable One for so long? Why did you only give This Venerable One a tiny bit of spiritual power? Ugh, it’s actually spiritual energy… It can’t even be considered spiritual power… What’s the matter with you?”

     “It’s a long story, so let’s not talk about it.” Chu Wanning gently picked it up and put it on his palm. “Please, do me a favor.”

     “You only summon me when I’m of use to you.” The little dragon sighed, but its power was closely related to Chu Wanning, so it didn’t even have the strength to complain too much. Its head drooped as it said, “Tell me, what do you want This Venerable One to do for you this time?”

     Chu Wanning took it and placed it next to the sleeping Mo Ran’s temple.

     His fingers clenched into fists and sank into his palms. Chu Wanning’s already ashen face became even paler. “Do your best to see if there are any spells on his body that shouldn’t be there.”

     In fact, that brilliant and tame youth who couldn’t even bear to kill the earthworms had actually become a devil in the end.

     As his Shizun, how could he not have the slightest suspicion?

     He could only watch helplessly as his disciple killed Xue Zhengyong, Madam Wang, Jiang Xi, and Ye Wangxi.

     Rufeng Sect was massacred.

     The bones were trampled.

     He watched as Mo Ran killed—saw Mo Ran’s hands covered in blood, saw his bloodied body and face as he stood among the pile of corpses and looked back at him with a sinister grin.

     He felt pain in his heart, but how could he not find it strange?

     Mo Ran was originally not such a person.

     But when the little paper dragon did its best to paint the spell on the paper, even though he was prepared, Chu Wanning was still shocked.

     Affection Spell.

     Mo Ran actually had an affection spell on him?

     After the little dragon finished drawing the spell, it lost the last of its strength. It turned into a wisp of smoke and disappeared into the Rising Dragon Talisman again. In his other hand, Chu Wanning held onto the thin piece of paper. It was as if a mountain had been cracked inside his head.

     However, after forcing himself to calm down and looking at it over and over again, Chu Wanning found that the image of the affection spell was wrong—

     It was actually upside down.