Xiao Se continued, letting the subject develop naturally.
"Some people are born with exceptional fortune — through the influence of external factors or the sheer weight of their karma, they find the memories of a previous life surfacing from deep within their soul. A gradual awakening, rather than a designed one." He lifted his tea cup. "Then there is the other kind. Souls who don't enter the reincarnation cycle at all. Instead, they use a secret technique — a method of possession. They target a newborn infant, seize the body before the child's own consciousness has properly taken root, consume the infant's nascent soul, and use the vacancy to begin a second life. These are what you might call possession hunters." A brief pause. "They tend to be dangerous. The thoughts and habits of a full lifetime are deeply embedded in how they perceive everything. The constraints that childhood normally builds — the gradual formation of moral limits, empathy, basic decency — simply aren't there. They arrive as finished people in unfinished bodies, and the results are often exactly as unpleasant as that sounds."
The table was quiet for a moment.
"Then — does that mean everyone has a past life?" Ning Rongrong leaned forward, her eyes alive with the particular excitement of someone who has just discovered a subject she finds entirely compelling. "Every single person?"
"If you believe, it exists," Xiao Se said, with the equanimity of a man who has decided that this is an adequate answer. "If you don't, it doesn't."
"That's not a real answer," Ning Rongrong protested, which was fair.
"I'm really very curious what I was like before." She had already moved on from the protest, her expression taking on the soft, wondering quality of someone imagining a series of interesting possibilities.
"You might not want to know," Xiao Se said, in the considered tone of someone offering a warning. "What if you were a man in your past life?"
Ning Rongrong shuddered. It was a full-body, involuntary, entirely visceral shudder, the kind that starts at the scalp and ends at the ankles.
"Xiao Se was teasing you," Qian Renxue said, with the mild exasperation of someone who has watched this happen before and is still required to clean it up. Though internally she was thinking that her father's gift for lightly unsettling people was, if anything, more refined than it had been. Progress of a kind.
Ning Fengzhi, who had been listening with the attentiveness of a man taking careful notes, set down his cup. "Brother Xiao Se — this concept of reincarnation, while it sounds quite elevated and abstract, I find it difficult to dismiss entirely. But possession—" He paused, and the slight crease between his brows was genuine. "Possession is another matter. The thought of it is—" He searched for the word. "Disturbing doesn't quite cover it. A child, before they've had a single real memory, already gone — displaced by something older and entirely foreign."
"I shared your skepticism once," Xiao Se said. "Then I met Tang San, and the skepticism resolved itself." He turned his gaze to Ning Rongrong. "You've spent more than two years at Shrek Academy alongside him. You've had time to observe. Have you noticed anything that doesn't fit a fourteen-year-old?"
Ning Rongrong didn't have to think about it. "The things he knows," she said, with the directness of someone who has been sitting with the answer for a while and just hadn't had the right context to say it in. "The techniques he uses. The way he thinks about certain problems. None of it is something a teenager would arrive at on their own, and none of it is something Yu Xiaogang would have taught him." She paused. "And there's a — quality to how he moves through the world. A patience that doesn't match his face."
She fell quiet for a moment. Then something shifted in her expression, and she looked at Xiao Se with a new kind of attention. "Speaking of knowing things that don't fit..." She hesitated. "Xiao Se — you know a lot too. Sometimes the way you explain things is—" She stopped. Started again. "Are you also—?"
Xiao Se's hand came up and landed firmly on the top of her head.
"If I were a genuine old monster," he said pleasantly, "I would not be sitting here having a casual dinner with you."
"Ow." Ning Rongrong rubbed her head. She looked at him with the expression of someone who has been deflected and knows it and is not entirely satisfied with this outcome. "So is it the reincarnation kind? With restored memories?"
"Telling you wouldn't be a catastrophe," Xiao Se said, leaning back slightly.
"Then tell me!" She was already leaning forward again, the ache in her head apparently forgotten.
"Brother Xiao Se — I confess I'm curious as well," Ning Fengzhi said, with the careful honesty of a man who has decided that straightforwardness is more efficient than pretending otherwise. He had, like Ning Rongrong, run the numbers on Xiao Se and arrived at a similar question. Unlike Ning Rongrong, he had talked himself back from it — no one would volunteer that kind of information willingly. And yet here they were.
"Inheritance," Xiao Se said.
A beat of silence.
"Inheritance?" Ning Rongrong and Ning Fengzhi said it at almost the same moment, wearing almost the same expression.
"Just as your Seven Treasure Glazed Tile School has passed certain techniques and knowledge through your lineage from one generation to the next — the distraction control methods, the accumulated understanding of support-type martial souls — mine is an inheritance as well." He picked up his chopsticks. "Mine is simply a somewhat unusual variety."
"What kind of unusual—" Ning Rongrong was already pressing forward.
"Rongrong." Ning Fengzhi's voice was gentle but complete. He set his own chopsticks down and touched her arm lightly. "That's someone's private matter. We don't ask."
"Oh." She settled back, visibly wrestling with her curiosity and losing to her manners. "Right." She reached for her own chopsticks, mouth still slightly set. Any inheritance was a secret in any institution worth belonging to — she knew this, had been raised with this understanding. She'd crossed the line without noticing, which was its own kind of embarrassing.
"Brother Xiao Se." Ning Fengzhi returned to the question he had actually come here to resolve. His voice had the careful weight of a man settling a long-standing internal debate. "Tang San's current situation — where does he stand? I had considered, at one point, that he might be a reasonable match for Rongrong. Twin martial souls, the bloodline of the Clear Sky School. Strong foundations." He paused. "After learning what he is, I abandoned that consideration entirely."
The calculation was clean enough. The Seven Treasure Glazed Tile School's future running through the veins of someone whose actual age, accumulated experience, and ingrained thought patterns were those of a grown man occupying a teenager's life — the idea of his daughter in that situation made something cold and clear settle in Ning Fengzhi's chest.
"An old man in a young body is still an old man," Xiao Se said simply. "And not a particularly self-aware one. Your instincts are correct."
"Then how would you describe him, more precisely?"
Xiao Se considered this for exactly one second.
"A giant baby," he said.
Ning Fengzhi looked at him. Looked away. Something worked in the corner of his mouth.
The rest of the dinner passed with considerably more ease — conversation ranging across various subjects, the table gradually clearing as the evening developed. Ning Fengzhi, during the comfortable middle portion of the meal, introduced the subject of Xiao Se and Ning Rongrong spending more time together with the practiced subtlety of a man who thinks he is being more subtle than he is.
Ning Rongrong noticed immediately. "Father—" Her voice carried the specific pitch of a daughter who is both flattered and mortified simultaneously, and who is choosing mortified as her public position.
Xiao Se heard the implications perfectly clearly, filed them under things he was not going to acknowledge, and steered the conversation elsewhere with the smooth efficiency of a man who has navigated this particular terrain before. He already had enough women to account for. Adding another would require explanations he didn't have the infrastructure to provide.
After dinner, they parted ways. Qian Renxue and Xiao Se returned to the Crown Prince's residence. Ning Rongrong made her way back to Shrek Academy with the reluctant energy of someone who would very much have preferred the evening to continue. Ning Fengzhi, occupied by his obligations as a member of the Soul Master Competition organizing committee, remained at the Seven Treasures Hotel for the night.
Inside Shrek Academy, the mood was not celebratory.
Flander had settled into the chair across from Yu Xiaogang with the expression of a man who has run out of things to say that would help but feels the need to say something anyway.
"Still thinking about today?" he asked.
"It's nothing." Yu Xiaogang produced the smile he kept for occasions like this — a practiced, brittle thing that resembled genuine ease the way a painted window resembles an actual view. "I've endured this kind of thing for twenty years. A few more rumors don't signify." He turned his cup in his hands. "How are Mubai and Hongjun?"
"We got there in time. They're fine." Flander's expression was its own entire sentence. "Ready for the next match, at least."
"Good. We need them." Yu Xiaogang nodded, the efficient practicality of a teacher overriding whatever else was happening in his face.
A pause settled between them.
"Where's Erlong?" Flander asked. "She didn't come back with the others."
"Apparently she ran into Xiao Se and the Heaven Dou Crown Prince at the arena." Yu Xiaogang's voice was carefully neutral, the way voices are when they are being carefully neutral about something specific. "She left when she heard he was there."
"Ran toward him or away from him?"
"Away." A beat. "The students said she looked—" He paused, chose the word. "Conflicted."
Flander frowned. "She went looking for him specifically, didn't she? When was that — after the Zhu Zhuqing match?"
"She became convinced, around that time, that Xiao Se was connected to someone she'd been looking for." Yu Xiaogang set his cup down with a small, precise motion. "The person who saved her mother. The resemblance — the surname, certain things about how he carries himself — she built a case from it. You know how she is when she's decided something."
"And when she got close enough to confirm it, she left," Flander said slowly.
"She left," Yu Xiaogang agreed.
The two men were quiet for a moment.
Xiao Huohuo. Xiao Se. The same character in the surname. Yu Xiaogang turned it over in his mind the way he had turned it over many times before. It could mean something. It could mean nothing. Coincidences existed.
What he could not as easily dismiss was Liu Erlong herself — the way she had carried this question for so many years, the way it had become a kind of fixed point that she returned to, the way she had consistently and quietly declined every other door that had opened. She had never met this person who saved her mother. She had never seen his face. And yet she had decided, in the way that Liu Erlong decided things — completely, without revision — that she was waiting.
Something moved in Yu Xiaogang's expression that he would not have named if asked. It was not simple. It had lived alongside his feelings for Liu Erlong for a long time, knowing its own shape without resolution.
He picked up his tea and did not say anything further.
At the Crown Prince's residence, a maidservant met them at the entrance with the careful composure of someone delivering news they were uncertain about.
"Your Highness." She bowed to Qian Renxue. "Liu Erlong, former Dean of Blue Tyrant Academy, arrived a short while ago. She is waiting in the reception hall. Do you wish to receive her?"
Qian Renxue kept her expression neutral. "Thank you. You may go — I'll be there shortly."
The maidservant withdrew.
Qian Renxue turned to Xiao Se. The look on her face was somewhere between amusement and a kind of gentle, complicated feeling that she took a moment to settle before speaking.
"Father," she said, quietly. "The woman you accidentally charmed while wearing Mother's appearance has come. She's almost certainly here for you." A beat. "Do you want to see her?"
Xiao Se's lips pulled sideways in the specific expression of a man confronting a situation he genuinely does not know how to resolve cleanly. "Tell her I've already left."
Qian Renxue considered this. "That works for tonight." She paused, and something in her tone shifted — less amused now, more earnest. "But Father — leaving her in this state indefinitely isn't right either. I have no particular fondness for Shrek Academy or most of the people in it. But Liu Erlong isn't a Shrek Academy problem. She's a woman who is genuinely, deeply attached to something she hasn't even properly confirmed exists. She's been waiting on it for years." She looked at him evenly. "That's not something you can just let sit indefinitely. It's not—"
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. The end of it was present in the look she gave him — the look of someone who knows what prolonged, unresolved waiting costs a person, because she has watched it happen to people she loves.
(End of Chapter)
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