There were many things that his puny teenage brain could not make sense of. It could not make sense of the theories his shifu taught him, could not make sense of the sword techniques Senior Wen had taught him, could not make sense of destiny, and could not make sense of how he should proceed from here. A thought suddenly flashed past in his mind--if he could not live on, he should just die.

The thought of seeking death was far too painful; his eyes stung, and he nearly couldn’t hold back his tears. Involuntarily, he thought of his shifu’s unimpressed face, recalled him saying “Leaking horse piss at the slightest thing, are you still a man?”, and forced his tears back.

Deeply immersed in his warring thoughts, Zhang Chengling did not notice that the black-veiled performer playing and singing the tavern was plucking at the strings of their instrument, while slowly closing in on him…

Meanwhile, just as Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing had been about to leave the alley one after the other, the atmosphere between them odd, a woman’s scream came out of the blue from nearby. Zhou Zishu paused in his steps.

Right afterwards, a white shadow flashed in front of their eyes, and with a ‘plop’, the Green Vixen Liu Qianqiao was tossed onto the ground like a burlap sack by the intruder. She rolled to the side, trying to get up, but her acupunctures looked to have been sealed as she collapsed back down.

This person, who had no tender pity for the fairer sex and casually flung people around, was none other than that old glutton Ye Baiyi.

Ye Baiyi pointed at Liu Qianqiao, and asked Zhou Zishu, “What’s with this ugly freak mad like a dog? "

These words struck a nerve of Liu Qianqiao’s, and she glared at Ye Baiyi like she wanted to slice him into a thousand pieces. In that moment, Zhou Zishu realised--the reason why this Ye person was this odd, was most probably because he had been single for all of his life; if a woman was willing to spend the rest of her life with someone like him, never mind climbing a tree, a female pig would ascend to heaven!

Wen Kexing caught up, grabbing Zhou Zishu’s wrist as he stepped forward, and glared at Ye Baiyi--for some unknown reason, this Valley Master Wen radiated strong enmity towards Elder Ye, but of course, this reason could be something similar to the bestial instinct that made wolves and dogs guard their food--only to hear Wen Kexing say, very unhappily, “Why is it you again, hanging around like a spectre haunting us?”