Bi Yan stood outside the compound of the dilapidated little cottage with beads of tears streaming down her cheeks like pearls falling off a necklace.

It was the place that appeared so many times in her dreams.

After what felt like a lifetime she never thought she would live to come back here again. Yet here she was, right in front of the little cottage.

“Is this really not a dream?” The little fox girl thought.

For several seconds, she stood there, quiet as a crypt. There was once a dream that was home for her, but now, standing right in front of the little cottage in her dreams, she could not even dare to breathe, never mind whisper. She was afraid that anything more than a squeak would make the fragile dream vanish, just like the many nights for the past twenty years.

Li Mu stood beside her, not uttering a syllable. He knew what she was going through as he observed her.

It was also the same for him when he first returned to Earth. The closer he got, the more anxious he became.

The same dread that only swells as one inches close to home.

Then, the rickety door of the bamboo cottage creaked open, slashing through the silence and ending the trance. A haggard figure, with his back bent as he coughed heavily, dragged himself slowly out the door, limping wearily with a broken leg.

What looked like a gnarled old man was actually a middle-aged person but with pale-white hair and a sallow expression and especially a gaze in those sunken eyes so distant as if all the colors in life had been robbed from him.

He leaned on a bamboo stick, using it to keep him steady. The wrinkles and creases on his scrawny and emaciated face looked like marks brusquely chiseled with unskilled hands. His left leg dragged on the ground like it was dead with his ankle in a grotesque angle.

Li Mu could feel the power of a member of the Fox Clan, although the signature felt addled to him.

Perhaps he was once a Fox Clan Cultivator with remarkable power of his own, but the chaotic magical force roiling inside him not only hindered him to show his real capacity – weak and powerless–it was also gnawing at his physical body, causing him to be in perpetual pain.

Bi Yan burst into tears the moment she saw this man.

Sobbing uncontrollably, she rushed into the compound and fell to her knees before the lanky man with tears pouring out her eyes. “Father! I’m back! Father…”

Bi Yan’s lithe figure trembled, trembling violently in fits.

Li Mu sighed and went in after her.

With all of his weight on his stick, the man cradled a little pot–a clay pot usually used to boil herbal draught. He stared at Bi Yan now at his feet with a bewildered look in his eyes. Hardly anything changed in his gaze.

“Who are you?”

His voice carried a morose and somber undertone.

Bi Yan lifted her head slowly. “Father, it’s me! Bi Yan! I’m your daughter, Bi Yan. I’m back! I’ve returned from the Baiyu Dynasty at the Brilliance Immortal Star Region! Father, are you still sick?!”

The expression of the middle-aged man shifted not one bit.

“Y-you… You must be mistaken,” he doubted, wincing apprehensively away.

“I’m Bi Yan, Father!? Don’t you recognize me?! Twenty-three years ago, I…” She recounted what happened two decades ago and at the end of her tale, she looked up at him with brimming anticipation.

Still, not even the slightest stir could be seen on the man’s gaunt face.

He shook his head. “I’m sure you’re mistaken, girl. I’ve lived here for more than forty years. I had two daughters, but they’re dead–I buried them with these hands of mine–then my wife died ten years ago. I don’t have any daughter who was taken to the Baiyu Dynasty.”

Bi Yan stared at him, stunned.

So was Li Mu beside her.

But the man hardly stirred when he spoke–a telltale sign that he spoke the truth.

Li Mu confirmed this with the hypersensitive perception afforded by the Xiantian Skill.

Was Bi Yan really mistaken?!

Li Mu looked at the little fox girl.

There she knelt on the ground, her baffled face fraught with disbelief and uncertainty, although it was quickly replaced by resolve and defiance. “No. I’m not mistaken. I can never be mistaken. Everything here is the same as how I remembered it. Look at me, Father! Look closely! Look closely! I am Bi Yan, your daughter!”

“And so I have, girl,” the man shook his head, saying, “you really are not my daughter. You’re wrong. I am but a poor cripple with no use to man nor beast. Fates could have treated me better by giving me a daughter as beautiful as you, but alas, you really are not mine.”

Bi Yan could hardly take in a word he said.

“No, Father! Think harder! I am really your daughter! You used to take me into the mountains to hunt for leopards when I was a child! Then there was once, we found a female leopard who was hurt by the side of the Peak of Mystic Spring!”

Bi Yan narrated to him the tales of the past they shared together, hoping that it might invoke some of his memories.

The middle-aged man only shook his head. Placidly, he said, “Go, girl. I really don’t know you.”

Bi Yan stared at him blankly in silence.

She could not believe it. After great difficulty, she had finally found her home and her father, only to find that the latter remembered nothing about her.

“MOTHER! IT’S BI YAN! I’M BACK, MOTHER! PLEASE COME OUT!” Bi Yan wailed amidst tears and sobbed hysterically.

Li Mu projected his Divine Consciousness. There was no one else in the cottage or anywhere in the scanty bamboo shack’s little compound. No one else but the lanky cripple.

“Could Bi Yan really be mistaken?!

“Can’t be.”

All their way here, Bi Yan had been able to call out the landmarks that pointed them this way, including a number of sights and scenes in the village, narrow little alleyways, and the arrangement of the building structures in the little hamlet. Every detail was right.

All these proved that she was right that this was her home and she could not have been lying.

Moreover, she picked out the cripple as her father the moment she saw him.

“But why? Why did this man fail to recognize his own daughter?”

“Father, it’s me! I’m Bi Yan, your daughter!”

The commotion had caused a crowd to congregate outside the compound with curious villagers pointing and whispering amongst themselves at Bi Yan and Li Mu.

Finally, the crippled man turned livid. He pried Bi Yan’s arms away from his legs and shoved her aside. “What a lunatic! Begone! I told you, I don’t know you! So stop spouting nonsense here! I need to start boiling my medicine! GO!”

Bi Yan fell on her bottom with an aghast look at the man.

Sorrowful and anguished, she threw herself forward to hug him again.

The cripple brandished his bamboo stick, ready to lash it hard on Bi Yan’s back. “Go away, you mad woman! I’ve been telling you so many times! Are you deaf or out of your mind! Or is this one bloody joke?!”

Li Mu rushed forward and caught the stick before it could come down.

The gaunt man glared furiously at Li Mu.

But Li Mu could say nothing to the man. He took the grieving Bi Yan with him and they left.

“Why?! Why does Father not remember me?!”

Bi Yan sat by the bank of a little brook outside the hamlet. She peered into the water and saw her own reflection, feeling mournfully sad and confused by the baffling episode.

The only glimmer of hope which had kept her going for so many years was gone.

“There could be reasons that we still don’t understand. Maybe, you were wrong?”

“Was I?” She stared blankly at Li Mu. “No. Impossible. Everything’s the same as how I remembered it to be. Everything’s the same as before. Even if I failed to recognize him, I could recognize the way there.”

“All right. We’ll go back then. We’ll speak to the other villagers to find it out. Your father, for some reason, might fail to recognize you, but if you grew up here, there must be people–old people especially–who might remember you.”

Bi Yan’s eyes shone with renewed faith.

They went back to the village and spoke to several people there.

An hour later.

They regrouped by the river.

Bi Yan looked like a ghost, her face chalk-white and her eyes terror-stricken.

Li Mu looked as puzzled as a newborn child too.

They had been asking around and what they learned from the rest of the villagers was astounding.

The accounts of the villagers were same as that of the lanky cripple in every single way–none of them knew about Bi Yan and they confirmed the cripple’s pitiful story about how he had lost both his daughters, how the village had helped to pay for their last rites, and how his wife had died ten years ago.

“What on earth is going on here?!

“Could Bi Yan really be mistaken?!”

Even Bi Yan was beginning to doubt herself as she wondered if she was going mad.

“Let’s go back for now,” Li Mu said softly to her.

What should have been a simple search for her lost family had taken a crooked twist into a supernatural state of affairs.

They ambled away from the village and retraced their path back to where the guards whom Dongfang Piaoliang had assigned as guides were waiting. They took the flying boat they came with back to their lodgings.

“Take a good rest.”

Li Mu sent Bi Yan to bed.

The ordeal in the day had taken quite a toll on Bi Yan so that she quickly fell to sleep.

Li Mu retreated back to his room to recuperate and train.

Night came.

Li Mu stepped out of his private chamber.

Bi Yan was still asleep.

Li Mu stepped outside the inn. He made sure no one was following before he vanished into a bolt of light that raced for the horizons.

Minutes later, the plump Dongfang Piaoliang walked out of the shadows of the threshold of the inn’s entrance. He stared quietly at where Li Mu had disappeared with a grin on his meaty face.

…

Li Mu came back to the village of stone tenements.

Even in the dark of night, this quiet and peaceful little settlement looked every bit the hidden gem concealed from the usual hurry and pother of this great city.

With skillful agility, Li Mu dashed like a wraith in the darkness and arrived finally at the compound of the rickety little bamboo cottage.

The windows flared with the illumination of the lamps still lit inside.

He could hear coughing.

The middle-aged man was still awake.

The smell of herbs wafted from inside the little shack.

Li Mu remained in hiding, watching quietly. Nothing seemed wrong. Were they really mistaken? Was there nothing wrong at all with this man?

He prowled in the dark for almost two hours and still nothing happened.

Just when Li Mu was about to leave, something happened.

Four figures each cloaked in dark appeared out of nowhere, sprinting at great speed. With the hushed rustling of falling leaves, they arrived at the compound of the cottage, surrounding the cottage in all directions.

“Are you still boiling your herbs, Divine-winged Fox? Why, may I ask? You don’t have long to live anyway,” cried one of the hooded men, sneering, “I heard your daughter’s back. Why did you not recognize her? Are you afraid of involving her too?”