Atop the mountain peak, Zhang Mingyuan watched the void close and shook his head helplessly.
“Sigh, what on earth is this? What kind of wife throws her own husband to another woman?”
He muttered in a low voice, a helpless expression appearing on his face.
Yet, as the residual glow of the setting sun shone on the side of his face, the upward curve of his lips was impossible to suppress.
How could he not understand Su Jinxue's thoughts?
It wasn't that she didn't care, much less that she wasn't jealous.
On the contrary, because she cared so much, she was willing to leave him this space to personally and completely sever this karma that had entangled them for years.
With such a generous and understanding wife, what more could a husband ask for...
Withdrawing his gaze, he looked at Shen Ningyan to his side and gently raised his hand.
A wisp of gentle immortal energy swept out from his fingertip, sinking into her body.
As the immortal light flowed, the wounds on Shen Ningyan's body began to heal.
Shen Ningyan's eyes lit up instantly.
The physical pain from earlier was nothing to her at all.
Only when Zhang Mingyuan pointed his sword at her and spoke those heartless words did she feel a pain that pierced her heart.
Seeing Zhang Mingyuan step in to heal her, she suddenly sat up, trying to throw her arms around his legs.
She wanted to cry out to him, “Brother Mingyuan, Yan'er knew it! You still care about Yan'er in your heart.”
However, Zhang Mingyuan slightly sidestepped, causing her to grasp empty air.
Her palms pressed against the ground as she looked up at Zhang Mingyuan through tear-filled eyes, utterly lost.
Zhang Mingyuan remained silent for a moment before sitting down on a slightly cleaner patch of ground a short distance away from her.
Atop the peak of Mount Mu, the mountain scenery stretched before them, and the sunset glow was as brilliant as a vast field.
“Brother Mingyuan...”
Shen Ningyan's voice trembled. “Those words you said just now... they must have been a lie to trick Yan'er, right?”
“You must have been placed under some mind-controlling imprint by Su Jinxue, right?”
“There's no way you don't like Yan'er, right?”
Looking at the tear-stained face of the girl staring at him with pleading eyes, a complex mixture of emotions welled up in Zhang Mingyuan's heart.
Truth be told, if he hadn't saved her back then, perhaps none of this mess would have happened.
For the past three thousand years, this girl had been clinging to him, refusing to leave no matter how much he tried to drive her away. Sometimes, he had truly found it incredibly annoying.
Yet, when he first saw Shen Ningyan in the Void Land all those years ago, she had looked like a helpless, cornered girl...
Surrounded by several ferocious nightmare beasts, she had been covered in blood, her purple dress tattered, and the magic treasure in her hand already dimmed and shattered.
Slumped in the mud and blood, her eyes had held a deep sense of despair and helplessness.
At that moment, looking at her, Zhang Mingyuan seemed to see himself during his first three hundred years after transmigrating to the Xuanling Realm.
Back then, he was also just a rogue cultivator—without a master, a sect, or anyone to rely on.
To fight for a single low-grade spiritual herb, he had crawled through piles of corpses.
To escape the pursuit of his enemies, he had hidden in pitch-black swamps for months.
He understood all too well that feeling of utter hopelessness, of barely surviving in the cracks of the world.
Facing Shen Ningyan in that state, could he really have stood by and watched her die?
He cultivated to control his own destiny, not to be dominated by others, but that did not mean he wanted to become a heartless, unfeeling stone.
Zhang Mingyuan finally spoke, his tone calm but leaving no room for doubt:
“Shen Ningyan, everything I said just now is true.”
Shen Ningyan's eyes instantly dimmed once more.
Zhang Mingyuan continued speaking, and then, as if recalling something, a gentle curve involuntarily rose at the corner of his lips:
“However, I indeed have an imprint placed on me by Little Xuexue.”
Shen Ningyan's eyes suddenly flared with light.
“Brother Mingyuan! I knew it! Don't worry, Yan'er will definitely—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold on, let me finish first!”
Zhang Mingyuan quickly pressed down on Shen Ningyan's shoulders. Seeing her posture, he feared she might immediately rush off to fight his wife to the death.
Pressed down by Zhang Mingyuan, Shen Ningyan instantly quieted down.
She sat there obediently, like a young beast terrified of displeasing its master.
“Brother Mingyuan... please speak...”
“Well...”
Zhang Mingyuan looked up at the horizon, his gaze drifting as if he were lost in memory.
“The imprint she placed on me isn't the kind that controls the mind, but rather the ‘Soul-Tracking Imprint’.”
“You must know of this imprint. It's only used to lock onto someone's location and has no other negative effects.”
“When it was first placed on me, I was very resistant.”
“Because we hadn't confessed our feelings to each other yet, and I just thought, what right does this woman have to do this?”
“What right does she have to know my location at all times? This is surveillance! This is an exploitation of my human rights!”
“Hahaha!”
Zhang Mingyuan couldn't help but laugh out loud. “But only later did I realize that because I hadn't ascended to immortality back then, she was worried that a troublemaker like me would get bullied outside without her knowing... She wanted to protect me, to back me up!”
“Honestly, that silly woman. When she placed the ‘Soul-Tracking Imprint’ on me, hahaha... do you know what she did?”
“Her face was cold as ice, and she sat regally on the main throne of the grand hall like a high-and-mighty empress.”
“She commanded me like I was some insignificant subject. I was incredibly annoyed at the time!”
“But I was afraid of her! Because she was a Red Dust Immortal and I was merely in the Mahayana Stage, like an ant before her, so I could only walk over obediently.”
“Her very first words were telling me not to resist, and then without another word, she slapped a ‘Soul-Tracking Imprint’ on me.”
“I was completely dumbfounded at the time, absolutely stunned. I really wanted to beat her up! Hahaha!”
Zhang Mingyuan slapped his knee and laughed heartily, his eyes filled with nostalgia for the past.
“But later, because of a joke, we triggered the laws of the Heavenly Marriage.”
“Actually, I didn't even know how that Heavenly Marriage came about. My big brother, the Heavenly Dao, said that even He was guided by some supreme will to bestow the Heavenly Marriage. At the time, I thought it was some kind of ‘words carry the weight of law’ ability of a Red Dust Immortal.”
“And later, during the trials brought by the Heavenly Marriage, we opened up our hearts to each other.”
“Only then did I realize that we hadn't just been fighting for five thousand years; we had also been keeping each other company for five thousand years.”
“If Su Jinxue hadn't been there during those five thousand years, I really would have found this cultivation world incredibly boring!”
“Later, we passed the trials of the Heavenly Marriage and became husband and wife, witnessed by heaven and earth, and recognized by the Great Dao.”
“After getting married, I said it wasn't fair that only I had a Soul-Tracking Imprint, so I placed one on her too! Hehe... Now we're even!”
“That dummy, she usually looks so cold and detached, like she doesn't belong to the mortal world.”
“But when I placed the Soul-Tracking Imprint on her, her eyelashes fluttered like butterfly wings, and she blushed out of nervousness. She was simply too cute!”
Having finished his piece, Zhang Mingyuan lay flat on his back on the ground.
The moment he lay down, the residual blood on the ground was frozen by an invisible force of frost and snow, not staining his clothes in the slightest.
Gazing up at the horizon filled with sunset glow, he watched a fiery cloud and slowly raised his hand, as if caressing someone's face in the empty air.
That face belonged to the person he loved most in this life.
“Brother Mingyuan...”
Shen Ningyan stared blankly at the man lying on the ground.
The corners of his mouth were curved upward, as if filled with the warmest spring sunshine.
Her Brother Mingyuan was laughing so happily, so she should be happy too.
But... why was it that she couldn't feel happy at all?
It felt as if a needle, a thousand thorns, had stabbed viciously into her heart, leaving it riddled with holes and dripping with blood!
Tears blurred her vision once more.
She gazed infatuatedly at Zhang Mingyuan.
Just as she had done every single time she looked at him over the past three thousand years, her eyes were filled with nothing but adoration and devotion...
“Don't cry. Tears will become cheap.”
She quickly bit her lip hard, trying to stop her tears.
But for some reason, the tears stubbornly kept falling.
She wanted to be good. She wanted to forever leave the most obedient impression before her Brother Mingyuan...
“Brother Mingyuan...”
She sobbed uncontrollably. “You... you still haven't... answered my... last question...”
“Is an answer really necessary?”
Shen Ningyan froze in a daze.
Under the setting sun, his face was filled with openness, but it held absolutely no romantic affection for her.
Her fists clenched tighter and tighter, her nails digging deep into her palms as her tears fell continuously.
“Then Yan'er... will ask you one final question.”
“Go ahead.”
“If the one you met first had been me, would the ending have been different?”
Zhang Mingyuan was visibly taken aback by her question.
He fell silent, momentarily at a loss for how to answer.
Would it?
Would it not?
There probably wasn't a single man who could refuse a girl whose heart and eyes were completely filled with him, right?
But right now, he truly did not know the answer...
Because at this moment, his heart was already filled to the brim by the woman named Su Jinxue, leaving no room for any hypotheticals.
He sat up and looked at Shen Ningyan with a calm, earnest gaze.
“You are a very good girl. If you had met anyone other than me, they would have definitely loved you.”
On this day, this was how Zhang Mingyuan answered.
After he finished speaking, his figure dissolved into a gentle breeze, vanishing from the summit of Mount Mu.
The setting sun gradually sank beneath the sea of clouds, and the blood-red sunset glow across the sky was swallowed by the twilight.
The mountain wind swept across the desolate peak, making a wailing sound as it kicked up fallen leaves and ice shards.
In all of heaven and earth, only her solitary shadow seemed to remain, stretched extremely long and dark by the night.
Shen Ningyan sat there in a daze, staring at the spot where Zhang Mingyuan had sat for a long time, unable to snap out of it.
However, from this day forward.
For a very, very long time in the future, Zhang Mingyuan never again saw this girl in purple, beautiful as the misty clouds, whose heart and eyes were filled with nothing but him...
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