“Don’t want to tell me?”
Nan Shan’s tone turned mocking.
“Or are you thinking about how to make up another lie?”
Ji Yue let out a faint sigh.
“I’m just thinking how to explain it. Don’t always be so angry.”
“You lied to me for so long, and I can’t even be angry?”
Nan Shan snapped, but meeting his clear, calm gaze, she forcibly suppressed her temper again.
“He…” Ji Yue seemed to search through long-forgotten memories before finally saying, “He was a divine servant.”
Nan Shan was about to say I already know that—when she heard him continue:
“He raised me for seven years… he was my father.”
Hearing his words, Nan Shan abruptly fell silent.
Some things were so long buried that Ji Yue had nearly forgotten them.
But the moment he spoke, with just that one word, all the old memories came flooding back.
“Before the age of seven, before I received the Golden Robes, I was just an ordinary child, living in the temple’s back courtyard surrounded by incense. The one who took care of me was Uncle Zhong.”
It was nothing but a mundane story: a child, pure and blank as a sheet of paper, knew nothing of the world.
Whoever fed him and raised him became, naturally, his parent.
Uncle Zhong had cared for his daily needs, taught him to read and write, shared in the confinement of that small temple courtyard—and had been his only family, the person he trusted most in the world.
“…Then he betrayed you?”
Remembering everything she had experienced in the hallucination, Nan Shan’s voice tightened.
Ji Yue paused, then smiled after meeting her serious gaze:
“It wasn’t exactly a betrayal. He was a divine servant, not a father. It was only because I was young and ignorant that I confused the two.”
“If he really saw himself only as a servant, he should have told you the distinction earlier, instead of waiting until you turned seven to suddenly pin you down and have them pour boiling golden water over you,” Nan Shan said coldly.
A smile flickered in Ji Yue’s eyes.
“You figured it out?”
“Not hard to guess.”
Nan Shan held his gaze.
What she had experienced in the hallucination didn’t fully overlap with Ji Yue’s life, but a lot was easy enough to infer.
Hearing this, Ji Yue silently lifted the corners of his lips.
“Since it wasn’t hard to guess, why ask again?”
“I want you to say it yourself.”
Nan Shan stared at him stubbornly, still looking angry.
Ji Yue sighed lightly, helpless. “Do you remember me telling you I was a mortal who became a god?”
“Mm, I remember.”
“A mortal becoming a god, without cultivation, without enduring heavenly tribulations… Even though offerings of incense could sustain my divine power, I wasn’t a true god. Sooner or later, I would wither and perish.
After the previous Ji Yue Celestial Lord died, the people refined his divine bones into golden water to mold my golden body.
That’s how I inherited his powers of divination and blessing, and became the new Ji Yue Celestial Lord.
After that, I fulfilled my duties, bringing blessings to the people of Dongyi.”
He glossed over it all lightly.
Nan Shan wanted to ask if it hurt when the golden water was poured onto him, but when the words reached her lips, she realized — what was the point of asking now?
So much time had passed.
What good would it do to ask?
“What else do you want to know?”
Ji Yue asked when she stayed silent, looking completely willing to be at her mercy today.
Nan Shan’s eyelid twitched slightly.
“You said that a false god will inevitably wither and die. Before Dongyi was shrouded by resentment, did you experience that decline?”
Ji Yue paused, then nodded.
“At that time, my divine power had indeed waned. I hadn’t been able to bless the people for a long time.”
“So they found a new successor?”
Nan Shan immediately asked.
Ji Yue chuckled. “I know what you’re thinking, but no.
“Successors are usually chosen only after the previous Celestial Lord fully dies.”
“Oh, so Shou Xin isn’t a successor,” Nan Shan nodded.
“He’s you. More accurately, he’s you before the golden water — before you were seven.”
Ji Yue was slightly stunned, genuinely showing a bit of surprise this time.
Seeing his expression, Nan Shan couldn’t help but mock:
“What are you staring at? I’m not an idiot.”
“When did you figure it out?”
Ji Yue asked.
Nan Shan: “A long time ago.”
The handwriting was similar, the food tasted similar, even their facial features were somewhat alike.
That wasn’t all — in Ji Yue’s old bedroom, there were grasshoppers made in a style only Shou Xin knew.
When Shou Xin got angry, his eyes turned red, just like Ji Yue’s blood-red pupils that appeared occasionally, mirroring the bloody sun in the sky.
They even used identical bells.
And Uncle Zhong — Shou Xin hated him, while Uncle Zhong kept trying to please him.
Yet Uncle Zhong, despite his easy-going nature, never dared appear before Ji Yue.
Faced with so many signs, it was impossible for her to pretend not to understand.
Ji Yue looked at her for a long time and then laughed:
“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
Because she had been too busy chasing after someone’s footsteps, too busy savoring the tiny moments of joy and excitement.
Even when she noticed something wrong, she had only wanted to pretend she didn’t see it.
These foolish thoughts — Nan Shan didn’t want to admit them, so she countered with a question:
“After your divine power weakened, what did they do to you? Why did Shou Xin appear?”
Ji Yue was silent for a long time.
After a long pause, he looked into the distance and said quietly, “That was a very difficult time for me.”
He didn’t elaborate, but Nan Shan could already imagine it.
His divine power faded, yet his responsibilities remained.
With his nature, he must have scraped out every last drop of his spiritual power to continue meeting the people’s endless demands — until he was on the brink of collapse and thus split off Shou Xin, a self who had never endured the suffering.
The atmosphere grew heavy.
Nan Shan no longer wanted to pry into what exactly had happened back then.
Instead, she asked a different question:
“Do you hate them?”
The “them” could refer to Uncle Zhong — or maybe to no one specific at all.
Yet Ji Yue understood. He shook his head slightly:
“All living beings are burdened by suffering. There’s nothing to hate.”
“…Don’t give me that. If you truly didn’t hate them, where did all that raging resentment over Dongyi Island come from?”
Nan Shan rolled her eyes at him.
Ji Yue just smiled, unbothered at being exposed.
The mood finally eased a little.
Nan Shan rubbed her nose and continued asking the questions she was curious about:
“You said you ‘saw me’ after Dongyi fell. But if I’m right, you had already lost your divination and blessing powers before Dongyi’s fall. How did you see me afterward?”
“I indeed lost my powers of divination. But after I fell, by some coincidence… I glimpsed a piece of the future.”
Ji Yue looked up and gazed at her tenderly.
“I saw you. For many years after that, I kept watching you.”
Nan Shan’s eyes quivered slightly.
After a long time, she asked, “In what you saw, did you see me liking you?”
Ji Yue was briefly stunned — then he fell silent.
Nan Shan sneered:
“You did see it. That’s why you knew long ago that one day I would fall for you.”
“I tried hard to avoid it…” Ji Yue murmured.
“Yeah, you tried so hard — avoiding me, dodging me, even after realizing things weren’t going as you expected, you deliberately called me over at night to try and scare me off with the truth.”
Nan Shan scrambled up from the ground, exaggeratedly blowing out a breath.
“You worked so hard, truly! Good job, Celestial Lord Ji Yue!”
“Nan Shan—”
“Don’t call me!”
Nan Shan pointed at him angrily.
“Watching me fall for you just as you foresaw — you must feel pretty smug, huh?
“And you talk about avoiding it… If you really wanted to avoid it, you shouldn’t have done my laundry, shouldn’t have stayed outside my door when I was sick, shouldn’t have smiled at me, shouldn’t have been so nice to me!”
She stormed off, face dark, walking a long way before suddenly running back.
“And you should have just made it clear from the start, instead of letting me rack my brains like an idiot!”
She scolded Ji Yue fiercely.
Even after returning to the back courtyard, she was still fuming.
Just as she was about to find something to vent her anger on, she spotted Shou Xin hiding in the shadows.
“Hey, you! Come here!”
She finally found a target.
Shou Xin’s warning bells immediately went off.
“What for?!”
“Just come here! Why so much nonsense?”
Nan Shan frowned.
Shou Xin hesitated for a long time, then reluctantly walked toward her.
“Why do I feel like your temper’s getting worse…”
Standing before her, he straightened his back.
“What do you want?”
Nan Shan stared into his clear, carefree eyes for a long time, then suddenly reached out and pinched his face.
“Ow ow ow!”
Shou Xin stared at her in shock.
“What are you doing?!”
“Nothing,” Nan Shan released him, and Shou Xin immediately ran off.
The large courtyard was left with only Nan Shan sitting on the veranda steps, cradling her face and blankly staring toward the front hall.
Right — she hadn’t asked him about the jade slips yet.
Those exquisite cultivation techniques, suited perfectly for mortals, had clearly been painstakingly collected over a long time, almost as if they had been prepared just for her.
But he had said he only “saw her” after the protective barrier appeared, and over the years had only broken through it twice — once at her birth, once twenty years later to retrieve her — both times without lingering long.
Could he really have gathered so many jade slips in just two outings?
The more she thought about the possibility that he was still hiding something from her, the more Nan Shan’s just-cooled anger flared back up.
So she charged off again in a rage.
“Where are you going now?”
Shou Xin, hiding inside the house, couldn’t help but ask.
Nan Shan: “To find Ji Yue!”
“…Don’t fight, okay?”
Shou Xin weakly tried to dissuade her, but quickly realized she wouldn’t listen anyway and gave up.
Nan Shan, face dark, reappeared on the beach in an instant.
She was ready to demand answers.
But then she saw —
A lonely figure sitting quietly on the sand, wearing plain clothes.
The cruel, terrifying fallen god who had slaughtered all his people and dragged the whole island into ruin overnight — was now just sitting there, alone and silent.