Li Fei nodded, “Yes, indeed.”
Riyan glared fiercely at Lei Xiuyuan, snarling, “Then you get out! I still have things to say to him!”
Li Fei chuckled, “I already know everything I should and shouldn’t know. Why bother making me leave? You two can talk right here, and I won’t say a word.”
Riyan’s tail swayed angrily, “As they say, a grown daughter sides with outsiders! You foolish girl, protecting him like this!”
Li Fei shook her head, “Riyan I have many things I want to say to you too. I plan to go overseas with Xiuyuan during this Hai Yun. I hope you can come with us. Will you?”
He remained silent for a long time, then said softly, “So you’ve finally decided to return overseas? Very well. Before we leave, let’s kill all those bastards from the Wuyue Court. I’d be delighted!”
“No,” Li Fei looked at him calmly, “I just want to see the places you and Master visited before. We won’t kill anyone. That’s not what Master would have wanted.”
Riyan sneered coldly, “People are so fickle! Your vow to be an ordinary person has barely cooled, and today you want to go overseas. Who knows if, in a couple of days, you’ll want to kill all the immortals in the Central Plains! I don’t care about the immortals. If you want to kill, I’ll kill with you. Killing them all would be cleanest!”
“I still want to be an ordinary person, but not one who avoids everything,” Li Fei said slowly. “I’ve seen and experienced too little. Even now, I still have the urge to kill those responsible for Master’s death. But even if I killed everyone in the Central Plains, Master wouldn’t come back, nor would he be happy about it. There must have been something more important than me or himself that he was willing to sacrifice himself to protect. I want to understand Master’s state of mind. I don’t want to be a coward pretending my uniqueness doesn’t exist like before.”
Riyan snorted and laughed coldly, “You’re so glib! I was planning to rip off your oath-breaking head!”
He turned back to look at the corpse of the Qingcheng Immortal and sighed, “What’s been haunting me isn’t just Qingcheng’s death. He didn’t know what the Jianmu fruit he brought was, but I did. That day, I didn’t just follow the north wind to Jianmu; I deliberately wanted to go. I had selfish motives. I had heard about the connection between the Jianmu fruit and the Yaksha, and I wanted to see this natural species, experience the so-called ultimate in my lifetime. Qingcheng was gravely injured and could no longer achieve the great Dao, but the Jianmu fruit was so extraordinary that if cultivated properly, it could fulfill my years-long wish. I kept it from him, but he just wouldn’t teach you cultivation methods, nor would he let me get close to you. I was angry and confused, and we had a big argument. He pointed out my hidden motives; such a clever person, he had already guessed some of the reasons. In my shame and fury, I angrily left Qingqiu. This incident affected me greatly, and in my troubled years, it invited heart demons, causing my demonic energy to be sealed. Even today, I still have an obsession with this wish, but you are you. Qingcheng was right; you’re a person, and the power to make choices is your own. He sent you to the Wuyue Court to give you the ability to choose, I suppose. You won’t disappoint him in the end. You’re truly a child raised by Qingcheng.”
Li Fei listened in a daze, not expecting him to praise her like this in the end. She was so shocked her jaw nearly dropped, “You… you’re praising me?”
Riyan glanced at her disdainfully, “Just saying. If talking alone could accomplish things, this world would be full of smooth talkers! Judging by how you can’t leave this boy’s side, you’re still a fool!”
He suddenly spat out a ball of red fire, precisely covering the corpse of the Qingcheng Immortal on the stone platform. Li Fei cried out in surprise, but before she could run over, his withered body had already turned to ashes, sealed in a semi-transparent ball of light.
“What are you yelling for,” Riyan swallowed the light ball, saying indifferently, “Let him go peacefully. How could we let someone like him rot away as a corpse? I’ll find an opportunity to send his ashes back to Hushefeng. He’s been thinking about that place all these years.”
What’s so good about that club-like Hushefeng that he couldn’t forget it, even naming the Jianmu fruit “club”? It’s truly infuriating.
Li Fei stared at him blankly, “Then… then are you willing to come with us…”
Riyan ignored her, only gazing intently at the jade-like arm bone on the stone platform. After a while, he said, “Keep this bone. When you have time, forge it together with that horn of yours. The quality of this bone is incomparable to that broken horn of yours. One day, it will surely be a great weapon for your protection.”
The arm bone used to refine the Jianmu fruit? Li Fei suddenly remembered the pain of being forcibly refined by Zhen Yunzi that day, and her face turned pale. How was refining this bone any different from refining herself?
Riyan impatiently turned and walked towards the cave entrance, “It’s just a dead object. People always obsess over these meaningless things! I’m leaving!”
Leaving? Li Fei hurried after him, taking two steps at a time, chasing him out of the Ganhua Realm. She saw him floating in mid-air, gazing far into the lush green expanse of Qingqiu.
“…It’s been a long time since I felt this wind, this sunlight.” Riyan looked up at the sky and the earth, his pale green eyes full of nostalgia. “The vast sky, the blazing sun, the sea of trees—I haven’t seen this landscape for many years.”
Suddenly, he soared high into the sky, his white figure like a streak of light, disappearing in an instant. Only his hearty laughter echoed through the mountains and valleys, gradually fading until it was barely audible.
Li Fei stood dazed for a long time, the midday sun stinging her eyes. She could no longer see a trace of the fox. He had left just like that, without any hesitation. His nagging, warnings, and gruff cursing that masked a soft heart had all vanished in an instant.
The ears that were just moments ago filled with noise now only heard the empty sound of the wind. After so many years of companionship, was this truly goodbye?
Li Fei stood alone until her legs went numb. Finally, she slowly turned and walked back to the Ganhua Realm. Lei Xiuyuan was sitting by the stone platform, his eyes never leaving that arm bone. His pupils flashed with golden light, and even the two slender horns on the sides of his head seemed to glimmer with brilliant gold.
The jade-like arm bone emitted a faint, peculiar fragrance that echoed in the spacious cave. It seemed to be silently narrating its tragic fate.
As if responding to this strange scent, the dense spiritual energy in the Ganhua Realm gradually started to ripple like waves. The spiritual energy here was all brought by Li Fei. The original spiritual energy of the Jianmu fruit could purify the demonic energy and miasma that demonic creatures and fierce beasts relied on for survival and cultivation. She used to think that origin spiritual energy was something different from the world’s spiritual energy, but now she understood that origin spiritual energy was the world’s spiritual energy concentrated to the extreme, far denser than the spiritual energy in any immortal cave dwelling in the Central Plains.
Among the myriad strange races overseas, the existence of the Jianmu fruit was the most peculiar. From birth, there was only one. When the old one died, a new one would be born. Lei Xiuyuan had said before that if Master hadn’t forcibly cut that fruit from the tree back then, she would have grown inside the fruit until she was truly mature before breaking out of the shell.
This naturally intelligent species born in the world, seemingly human yet not human, always manifested as beautiful young women in the fruit, each with devastating beauty. But no one would care about this. They often faced the coveting of countless Yakshas as soon as they broke out of their shells. The owner of this arm bone was torn apart by a group of Yakshas with red eyes as soon as she emerged from her shell.
Whether she was willing to admit it or not, for the Yaksha tribe, the Jianmu fruit was more of a tool than a person.
“Xiuyuan,” Li Fei walked over and sat beside him, asking softly, “If Master hadn’t taken me to the Central Plains, would you have been the first person I saw when I broke out of my shell?”
Lei Xiuyuan forced his gaze away from the arm bone and said, “Yes.”
“Then what would you have done?”
Lei Xiuyuan answered without hesitation, “Kept you under house arrest.”
…That’s quite a merciless decision. Li Fei frowned, “What if I had resisted?”
“Killed you.”
Hey! That answer is too blunt! Li Fei’s frown deepened. Lei Xiuyuan chuckled and looked down at her, “There are no ‘what ifs.’ What has happened is reality.”
Even the transcendent Shengluo Dafa could only turn back time on the body. The life that had passed and the emotions that had existed couldn’t be reversed by any immortal technique. For him, all ‘what ifs’ were meaningless; he only focused on the facts before his eyes.
Li Fei glared at him somewhat resentfully, “Have you never said anything nice?”
He thought for a long time before saying, “I have.”
“Why?”
“To see you happy.”
Her eyes widened again, and after a while, she said, “…So you can say nice things after all.”
Lei Xiuyuan pinched her chin and gently swayed it back and forth, “This is the truth, not just nice words. Is this what you want to hear? Now that we have some free time, I can slowly tell you more. First, let’s clean your ears…”
Li Fei quickly pressed down his mischievous fingers trying to dig into her ears, “Stop it! I don’t want to hear! You might as well tell me about the past!”
Lei Xiuyuan finally looked a bit surprised. He gazed at her thoughtfully, “The past? You mean before I became Lei Xiuyuan?”
Li Fei nodded, pretending to be casual, and coughed twice, “Like what you used to enjoy doing, what you liked to eat, that sort of thing.”
Lei Xiuyuan let out a long “Oh,” his fingers lightly pinching her face a couple of times, smiling slightly, “There wasn’t anything I particularly liked or disliked. Cursed Yakshas don’t think about such things. I waited for a long time under the Jianmu tree, always waiting for your birth.”
For Yakshas, the most terrifying thing wasn’t the death of a Jianmu fruit, but that the Jianmu tree would never bear fruit again. The entire Yaksha tribe only had him and Hu Jiaping, two newborn Yakshas, waiting bitterly for a new Jianmu fruit to appear. They could only take advantage of the coming Hai Yun, following the migration of heavenly thunder and sea of fire to the Central Plains, searching for the shattered arm bone of the previous incarnation.
The cursed Yakshas were like a group of monsters fighting desperately for desire, which is why Hu Jiaping was so determined to stay in the Central Plains and live a new life. For every Yaksha, this was a dream come true.
“No matter what, we should thank Heaven for letting you be born,” Lei Xiuyuan smiled and patted her head. Whether as a Yaksha or as Lei Xiuyuan, her being born into this world and appearing before him was the greatest blessing he could have received.