And then?
Jue Mingzi laughed — the saddest thing in his entire life was probably that very “and then.”
“She just up and left, went to the East Qin capital, to her favorite music parlor. It wasn’t a brothel, but it was still a place where performers sold their art in the world of pleasure and vice.”
Jue Mingzi laughed bitterly. “She was forcing my hand — forcing me to leave the Qinse Valley, to leave the Isle of Lingering Immortals. Even at that music parlor, she never stopped working on ‘Lament.'”
“She wasn’t forcing you to leave — she was forcing you to face reality, forcing you to shoulder the burden of your family’s mission!” Ziqing said flatly. She understood a woman’s heart, and she understood a mother’s hidden pain even better.
Jue Mingzi nodded repeatedly, then shook his head just as repeatedly. “It’s a pity — I just couldn’t see it back then. I couldn’t see it at all!”
“I only thought she’d genuinely grown apart from me in spirit. I… I went to find her again and again. She never refused to let me visit, but she never came back with me either — until one day, she told me, with total finality, that she wanted me to stay in the East Qin capital.”
At this point, Jue Mingzi paused. Ziqing waited. Beside her, Jun Beiyue and Baili Weisheng — two grown men — both leaned silently against the stone wall, their movements almost perfectly synchronized, large hands rubbing at their jaws, likewise waiting for Jue Mingzi to continue.
But Jue Mingzi didn’t speak for a long while, covering his eyes with his hand, tears streaming silently down his face.
“And then…?” Finally, it was Ziqing who spoke.
“And then?” Jue Mingzi suddenly gave a bitter laugh. “She said that if I wouldn’t stay, wouldn’t marry her, she’d marry someone else — marry into the East Qin prime minister’s household. I thought she was only threatening me. I left that very night. Who could have known… three days later, when I went back, she was already gone, nowhere to be found.”
Jue Mingzi covered his eyes, leaning heavily against the wall, his whole body blending into the lush green of the moss-covered stone. In the dim light his face was hard to make out, but one could faintly see him trembling.
At this point, really, there was no need to ask anything further.
Everything had become clear.
That woman, Mu Ci — she had been carrying his child when she’d come asking him to marry her, asking the man she loved most to stay. And yet she’d been refused all the same!
She’d even feared this man might go on to demand she give up the child, and so she’d chosen another man to protect it instead!
“So — you were devastated, you hated her to your core, you wandered Longyuan, and finally returned to the Isle of Lingering Immortals. You wove a web of lies, shed every trace of responsibility for ‘Lament’ and the two demon zithers, even gave them away to Xuanyuan Lige, and then you nearly got yourself killed, and hid away here alone!” Ziqing finished the story quietly — a truth no one could have guessed.
This… was an irresponsible man!
And also an orphaned survivor of the Isolated Isle who had failed his duty!
Ziqing sniffed, turned, and swept away like the wind.
“Qing’er!”
Jun Beiyue called out, hurrying after her. Baili Weisheng, meanwhile, patted Jue Mingzi on the shoulder, sighed, and turned to leave — but paused, then asked in a low, hesitant voice, “Uncle, there’s one more thing I’d like to ask you.”
Jue Mingzi didn’t answer. Baili Weisheng took his silence as consent, and lowered his voice further. “Uncle, you… you… you… you…”
Baili Weisheng said “you” for a good long while, too embarrassed to actually get the question out.
At last, Jue Mingzi lifted his head and looked over, saying coldly, “What exactly do you want to ask? And who exactly are you?”
“Heh heh, I’m Ziqing’s friend — a really close one, the kind that shares the same pair of pants as her husband!” Baili Weisheng said, breaking into an immediate, ingratiating grin.
“Her name is Ziqing?” Jue Mingzi asked.
“Mm-hm, her name’s Ziqing. So… uh, Uncle, what I wanted to ask was… you… you… you…” Baili Weisheng was still terribly embarrassed.
“What exactly do you want to ask?” Jue Mingzi snapped, perhaps having reserved that particular level of patience only for his own daughter. He snapped at Baili Weisheng, then turned to hurry after them — but Baili Weisheng grabbed him at once, blurting out, “Uncle, are you sure you only have one daughter?”
Jue Mingzi froze. “What do you mean by that?”
“Uncle, you… you… Uncle, I’m also an orphaned survivor of the Isolated Isle, someone with the yang-poison-immune constitution…” Baili Weisheng said timidly. The moment the words left his mouth, Jue Mingzi froze for an instant, then violently shook off his hand, saying coldly, “Impossible!”
Baili Weisheng had the yang-type ren-gu constitution — he might carry the Isolated Isle’s direct bloodline, or he might carry some other bloodline entirely. So far, the only elder of the Isolated Isle’s orphaned survivors to appear on the Longyuan continent was Jue Mingzi himself — of course Baili Weisheng needed to be sure.
Hearing Jue Mingzi say “impossible,” Baili Weisheng shrugged, tossing out, “I don’t want it to be true either!” and turned to leave.
“Wait!” Jue Mingzi called him back. “You have the yang-type ren-gu constitution?”
Jue Mingzi studied Baili Weisheng’s face closely, clearly skeptical.
“I was already raised into a ren-gu vessel, but whoever raised me failed to cultivate the mental discipline — I just ended up with the body of a ren-gu, nothing more,” Baili Weisheng explained.
“That… how is that possible?” Jue Mingzi was shocked. “You… have you people really found a way to break the curse?”
“Why wouldn’t it be possible? My willpower is strong…” Baili Weisheng trailed off mid-sentence, startled by his own words. Why hadn’t he thought of this before?
The yang-type ren-gu constitution had been broken in Xiong Xiaobao’s case, because of his Dream Clan bloodline.
Could it be that in his own case, it had actually been broken too, and he simply hadn’t realized it all this time?
Gu Nanny hadn’t actually succeeded in cultivating his mental discipline, and it wasn’t his own strong willpower either — it was that his yang-type ren-gu constitution had been broken from within, all along!
“The Jinjiao bloodline!”
Baili Weisheng blurted it out in shock, and was about to ask more, but when he turned around, he found that Jue Mingzi had already walked far off into the distance.
By the time Baili Weisheng caught up to the cliffs, he found Ziqing carrying Baili Xiaosheng, about to leave, with Jun Beiyue and Xiong Bao trailing along silently beside her. Jue Mingzi followed the whole way, asking questions the entire time, but Ziqing paid him no mind at all.
This woman — still angry, then!
She didn’t even go find the two Qinse elders, heading straight out of the valley back to the Gu family.
Jue Mingzi trailed behind the couple the whole way, and Baili Weisheng trailed behind Jue Mingzi, his brow furrowed the entire time, clearly weighed down by heavy thoughts.
Ziqing didn’t say a single word the whole way, and even Jun Beiyue stayed silent. Jue Mingzi, who had kept asking questions at first, eventually fell silent too, simply following close behind, step for step.
At last they reached the gates of the Gu estate. Ziqing stopped, not turning back, and asked flatly, “So you’ve finally decided to leave the Qinse Valley?”
“As long as there’s a way to break the ren-gu constitution, I will absolutely leave — I will personally go searching for the Isolated Isle. I have a musician’s legacy map in my possession that not even your mother knew about,” Jue Mingzi said earnestly.
At those words, Ziqing spun around abruptly, staring at him in shock. Jue Mingzi’s heart leapt with joy. “Daughter — there really is a way to break the ren-gu constitution, isn’t there! You people have found a way, haven’t you!”
Looking at Jue Mingzi’s tear-streaked face, weathered and moss-marked with age, and the smile spreading across it — so genuine, so pure — Ziqing found herself helplessly, bitterly smiling. Resentment she couldn’t muster, hatred she couldn’t muster either. She could only nod. “Yes.”