In a stretch of forest, Mr. Li set down the little girl he had been cradling, then turned to check his lower back.

Yu Jiuling saw Mr. Li’s reaction and was startled. He hurried over to help inspect the wound. When he lifted aside the robe, his eyes went wide.

Li Chi had given Mr. Li his own jade armor to wear for protection. Yu Jiuling knew all too well how tough that jade armor was — he had one himself.

Placing a jade plate on a great stone and striking it over and over again with a heavy blade would not break it. The blade’s edge would chip and crack before the armor yielded.

And yet now, one of the jade plates had a split running across it. It had not broken all the way through, but this alone was enough to show that without the jade armor, Mr. Li would have been in grave danger.

Even more alarming: the force of the strike had apparently driven the plate so deeply inward that it had been pushed entirely into Mr. Li’s flesh.

The area was now swollen up in a high, hard mound.

“What a heavy blow.”

The sight of the wound sent a chill running through Yu Jiuling.

Mr. Li produced a small mirror he kept on his person, held it behind his back, and used its reflection to examine the spot. When he saw it, a measure of retrospective dread came over him.

In all these years, he had never once encountered anyone capable of threatening his life. Today, he finally had — and it was a twelve or thirteen-year-old child.

“Still, it wasn’t entirely without gain.”

Mr. Li said, “It’s clear that the vast majority of the Yan clan people in Gubang County are being used.”

Yu Jiuling said, “Let’s head back, Master. Tell His Highness the Prince, and have him send troops — that takes care of it.”

Mr. Li shook his head, glancing at the little girl whose eyes were brimming with tears. “You take her back and send word to Prince Ning. I can’t go back yet.”

Yu Jiuling: “Master!”

Mr. Li said, “They’re bound to make their next move. Their leader will probably try to flee. They went through all this elaborate preparation to eliminate me here, and failed — now they’ll move to go into hiding again. If I don’t keep watch on them now, finding them the next time will be genuinely difficult.”

Mr. Li crouched down and looked at the little girl. “What’s your name?”

The little girl answered shyly: “Bamboo Leaf.”

She probably had the surname Pu as well — Pu Zhuye?

Mr. Li thought for a moment, then reached out and ruffled the little girl’s hair gently. “From now on your surname is Li. How about that? You’ll be called Li Zhuye.”

The little girl stared at him blankly, her big eyes still full of tears.

Mr. Li picked up little Zhuye and patted the child’s back softly. “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid. From now on, there will always be people to take care of you — quite a lot of people, I imagine.”

After a moment, he passed little Zhuye to Yu Jiuling. “Go on. Get the child settled and then come back.”

Yu Jiuling took the little girl. “Master… please, please take care of yourself.”

Mr. Li smiled. “No one can trick me twice.”

He took a deep breath, then turned and swept away.

Yu Jiuling held the little girl, looking at the child with a surge of tenderness, involuntarily thinking of his own childhood.

He looked back toward the direction Mr. Li had gone. There was no trace of him left.

*Within Gubang County.*

The refined man glanced at Pu Cao, whose expression showed a trace of quiet dejection, and said with some dissatisfaction, “You are my only disciple. The reason I took you on was precisely because you were mature enough. The way you look right now is not satisfying.”

Pu Cao asked, “Master — who is that man?”

The refined man glanced at his subordinates who were packing up, and issued an instruction. “Once you’re ready, leave. This location has been exposed. I’ll go ahead — don’t dawdle.”

His subordinates acknowledged and quickened their work.

“Keep up with me.”

The refined man said the words to Pu Cao, then turned and walked toward the north gate.

As he walked, he spoke to Pu Cao. “I have been cultivating you for six years. Over those six years, what you have learned surpasses anything that belongs to this era — and so your ability to understand should also far surpass that of anyone in this era.”

He spoke in an even tone. “Let me give you an example. When one nation’s power is so far beyond every other nation that the gap can only be described in terms of time — say, thousands of years ahead.”

He asked Pu Cao, “Can you understand that?”

Pu Cao nodded. “Yes.”

The refined man continued, “In that situation, do you think the nation that is thousands of years more advanced would invade the other nations?”

Pu Cao thought carefully, then shook his head. “No. There would be absolutely no need.”

“Exactly — absolutely no need.”

The refined man said, “In circumstances like those, the people of the advanced nation would come to see themselves as gods, gazing down on everyone else in a posture of superiority — as gods look down upon insects.”

Pu Cao asked, “Where is this nation? What is it? Is it the Black-Armored Kingdom?”

The moment he said it, he regretted the question. If it were the Black-Armored Kingdom, could the Central Plains even withstand it?

The refined man answered, “It lies thousands of years in the future.”

Pu Cao froze.

The refined man continued, “They dwell as though on a canopy above the heavens, watching our world through a special means. You may not be able to picture it — but in the schoolrooms where their children attend class, there is a great screen. On that screen, this world plays out. Using technological methods, it broadcasts history live, as a form of education.”

Pu Cao did not understand these words, and his brow knitted deeply.

The refined man paid no attention to whether the boy understood or not. In his view, Pu Cao was simply a listener.

And this listener, truth be told, was not strictly necessary. He was fond of this clever disciple — but whether the boy was present or not would not greatly affect him.

“You may not even be able to imagine it — that children of that time would take history lessons as genuinely *visible* history. They called it ‘observe but do not interfere.’ And yet — does observation not constitute interference in itself?”

The refined man slowly exhaled. “And yet in the midst of such supreme advancement, there will always be those who grow nostalgic for the past — who yearn for what they call the primitive beauty of earlier times. That is a kind of sickness…”

He said this with a self-mocking smile. Pu Cao did not catch it, but there was a concealed thread of remorse woven into his master’s voice.

“They believed that slipping secretly back into an earlier, more primitive era would make them gods — commanding the wind and rain, like emperors of the dark night. Once that notion took hold, it grew like wild grass in the heart, until at last they resolved to act.”

“The reason they hesitated so long was that once done, it could not be undone. Coming here meant there was no going back. And they knew that once they truly did it, they would face pursuit…”

At this point, the regret in the refined man’s eyes became unmistakable.

Pu Cao saw it.

The refined man exhaled once more. “Let’s go.”

Pu Cao could not stop himself from asking, “And that man — is he the one who came to pursue Master?”

He had not understood everything his master had said, but he was sharp enough that he had grasped another part of it.

The refined man made a sound of affirmation. “Most likely. But something went wrong — I don’t know what. He doesn’t know who he is, what he’s supposed to do. Perhaps the greatest mistake was that I made a move against him in the Western Regions. If I hadn’t, he would have kept hiding — because he believed he himself was the one who was meant to be cleared away.”

Pu Cao thought carefully over his master’s words, then shook his head. “But since he was a potential threat regardless of whether he’d awakened or not — shouldn’t it have been better to eliminate him as early as possible? If Master had struck at the very beginning, none of this trouble would exist now.”

The refined man’s brow creased slightly, as though he found this child’s way of thinking somewhat distasteful — and yet he said nothing.

The two of them walked out of Gubang County one behind the other. A carriage was already waiting at the gate.

After boarding, the refined man closed his eyes to rest. But how could he possibly sleep.

He was thinking… *perhaps being erased is the right outcome after all*. From the perspective of what they called the advanced civilization — yes, it was right.

But then, who truly wishes to die?

He genuinely wished he could sit down face-to-face with that Mr. Li and have a proper conversation. Tell him what they had done over all these years.

And then also tell him: *We… regret it.*

In that era of seemingly limitless advancement, they had lived under constraint after constraint — and so they had felt unfree.

After devoting all their ingenuity to reaching this era, they had not dared disrupt the course of things, wanting only to become people wealthy enough to live entirely as they pleased.

But in time they came to understand: by the point where they were wealthy enough to do exactly as they wished, they had already begun to alter the course of this era.

At this very moment, within Gubang County, Mr. Li was dressed in the clothing of the Yan clan people, disguised as a frail old man, sitting by the roadside and smoking a long pipe.

Those men in black were loading up their packed goods to be transported away. This location had been discovered; they would move the wealth elsewhere.

Wealth and what they called freedom — that was what they had come for.

Mr. Li suddenly saw that clearly.

*What era an age is, is what story it ought to tell — not my story, and not theirs.*

That single thought occupied his mind entirely.

He had not truly awakened to anything even now — he had simply come to a kind of clarity.

*If this era has already been given my story, then I will tell my story to its end as quickly as I can, with my own hands, and let this world return to what it should be.*

*Future people will remember a Mr. Li who could do anything and everything — the great idle wanderer. That is enough.*

Half an hour later, Mr. Li was inside the convoy.

In a moment when no one was watching, he had climbed aboard a cart, pushed two crates as far apart as he could manage, wedged himself into the gap, and pulled a tarpaulin over himself.

To the north of the city, there truly was a vast, sweeping peach grove.

And within the grove, there truly were seven peculiar stone statues — seven men.

The statues were carved with remarkable artistry. But the most extraordinary thing — the most outrageous thing — was that those seven statues had been carved to resemble the seven people themselves. The likeness was nearly perfect.

And atop the heads of each of the seven towering statues stood a living person, dressed in the same long robes as the figures below.

“We used to think this was very impressive. Why does it feel so childish now?”

One of them spoke.

Another smiled, and the smile carried a faint, quiet bitterness.

“Exactly… now it just feels ridiculous and childish.”

He looked at the others, and his gaze eventually settled on the refined man who had just returned.

“Yan Ji — what do you think?”

The refined man also smiled, and his smile also held that same trace of faint bitterness.

He said, “What can I think? I think… what we need to do now is make it look convincing.”

“That’s right…”

One of them said with some helplessness, “This is genuinely harder than anything we’ve ever done.”

Yan Ji said, “Hard or not, we do it.”

The others nodded.

Yan Ji glanced toward Pu Cao, who stood waiting under a tree in the distance, and then said with a somewhat complex tone, “If they don’t feel the weight of it, they’ll think none of it is real.”

Another person sighed, “I’m only afraid that in the end, they won’t be able to understand.”

Yan Ji said, “That doesn’t matter.”

The seven of them looked at one another. At a wave of Yan Ji’s hand, all seven swept upward in unison and vanished in an instant.