Tu Tianba had been a tough, resilient lad since childhood. He often ran wild and stirred up trouble outside, only to be tucked under his father’s arm the moment he got home and receive a full-arm swing of a spanking, wailing far louder than any ordinary boy. Later, when he left home to cultivate immortality, he lost count of how many life-or-death battles he had fought.

It wasn’t as if he had never been injured.

Not to mention that over all these years, he had honed a singular, peerless skill in slapping face; his seemingly tender, fair-skinned cheeks had long been through the crucible of a thousand fires. Any faint mark left on them now was purely the result of his own heavy hand.

In other words,

Tu Tianba believed the skin on his face was on par with any top-grade defensive spiritual treasure—not falling short in the slightest.

The texture felt quite good, too.

It would be even better if it weren’t an avatar formed of blood mist.

Yet, at this very moment.

The damned immortal lord had merely brushed a forefinger lightly against his cheek—it couldn’t even be called a “touch,” for Tu Tianba felt virtually no force at all, as though a wet wisp of cloud had drifted past his face, barely stirring the fine, downy hairs…

Yet a sudden, tingling numbness surged through him.

In an instant, Tu Tianba’s head dissolved into a ringing roar.

The raving screech of the inner demons was drowned out by the buzzing; meanwhile, that numb sensation spread rapidly from his cheek across half of his body, turning his usually nimble tongue utterly clumsy:

“Uh, it’s… yeah, it’s fine; it doesn’t hurt.”

What was going on?

Had this damned immortal lord cast some foul spell to ambush him?

Tu Tianba brooded in secret, warily scooting a little farther away and fixing a death glare on the man. Little did he know, a completely different set of calculations was turning in the other’s mind.

Unable to muster his strength, the man let his arm drop back down. Fortunately, his eyelids weren’t too heavy, so he quietly gazed up at the youth who was vigorously rubbing his own face. As their eyes met, an unexplainable sense of shame welled up from the depths of his heart.

This sensation was not guided by memory, but an emotion born of raw instinct.

Though I don’t know what happened before, it seems… I did something quite awful to him?

The faint suspicion flitted through the man’s mind.

The next instant.

He sensed an unusual weight in his other hand. Unable to resist, he shifted his gaze away first, and before he could even exhale a silent breath of relief, he saw the broken sword gripped tightly in his palm.

“…?”

The broken blade was as translucent as ice frozen over a deep, frigid pool. Even beneath the warm sunlight, it still gleamed with a faint, ghostly blue chill. The snapped edge was jagged and uneven, with several fractures spider-webbing up from the break across the remaining blade like a ruined cobweb.

An instinctive pang of heartache and pity rose within the man.

Right on its heels came yet another ominous speculation.

Having just rubbed the strange numbness off his face, Tu Tianba followed the gaze of the man beneath him and spotted the broken sword as well. Instantly forgetting the bizarre sensation that had defied description, he didn’t even wait for the man to ask before launching into a blistering indictment.

“If I weren’t so damn durable, the thing snapped in half wouldn’t be this sword—it’d be me!”

Saying so still felt insufficient to vent his fury. He immediately pried the man’s limp fingers open, snatched the broken sword into his own grasp, and slipped it into his sleeve with well-practiced ease.

When his hand came back out, the broken sword had vanished without a trace.

“Confiscated!”

The man was left dumbfounded by his tirade, his face gradually flushing with helpless bewilderment. His eyelashes, clumped wetly together, fluttered for a long while before finally settling still.

After an extended pause.

The man spoke with visible difficulty: “You called me ‘wife’… does that mean our relationship is…” He lifted his eyes, swiftly scanning the youth’s overly tender face, and suppressed the dizzying turmoil in his heart before pressing on: “Then… why would I strike you with a sword?”

Tu Tianba’s eyes darted left and right. He scratched his cheek and scratched behind his ear, frantically wracking his brain for an excuse. Yet, aggravated by the chatter of his inner demons, he simply lobbed the question right back in an utterly nasty tone: “What, you think I’m lying to you?”

“That is not what I meant…”

Tu Tianba climbed straight up the trellis: “Then what do you mean?!”

“Forgive me. I simply feel I ought not have raised a hand against you.” the man paused for a beat, suddenly pivoting the topic, “I still do not know what you are called…”

Tu Tianba fired back instantly: “My name is Healer Tu. I am a healer.”

The man: “…”

The silence became eerie.

He asked again: “And what of me?”

“Uh… um…” Tu Tianba’s eyeballs began rolling again, his fingers scratching a trail from his jaw down to his collarbone, “You’re called, you’re called… err… Dog—ah, no, Hui…”

Inside the system space.

The white orb of light stared in dead silence at its host, who was lagging like a frozen bot, and couldn’t resist dropping a hint: “Host, whatever you do, don’t say the protagonist’s real name! There’s a scene for this in the original novel! The scumbag ex-husband fabricated a fake name on the spot for the amnesiac protagonist, calling him—”

Before it could finish, it heard the host clap his hands together, declaring with absolute certainty:

“—Your name is A-Hui.”

The white orb of light: The heart that was hanging by a thread has finally dropped dead.

The amnesiac man went quiet for a moment, then asked: “And my surname?”

Now, this was something Tu Tianba actually knew.

He answered as if it were the natural order of heaven and earth:

“You took your husband’s surname.”

“…”

The man felt the surname sounded terribly foreign, yet he did not rashly dispute it. Instead, he probed further: “How did we meet? What are our identities? How did you tuck that sword away just now, and what about me—”

Tu Tianba was bombarded by a barrage of questions until his brain buzzed.

At first, he answered every prompt, rolling his eyes as he blabbered: “The first time we met, you came asking me for directions…” But as he kept going, his patience evaporated entirely, and he snapped with boiling irritation: “You are so annoying! Whine one more word, and I’m walking away! You can rot on this rock by yourself!”

Tu Tianba despised naggy chatterboxes the most; his patience had a razor-thin limit.

Yet, just as he turned his face away toward the deserted mountain cave across the river valley, he heard the man let out a soft sigh. “Are you angry? I simply cannot remember anything. In this moment, you are the only one by my side, and hearing you address me as…”

He slurred the two words indistinctly.

The next second.

The man couldn’t help but gingerly seek confirmation: “Are you truly my…?”

Tu Tianba caught the implication loud and clear.

This damned immortal lord was questioning their relationship.

Even though he found calling this damned immortal lord “wife” utterly nauseating, the moment the other party dared to question it, Tu Tianba flew into an immediate rage. He whipped his head back, eyes blazing with fury: “What are you trying to say? You think I’m not good enough for you?!”

A look of awkward embarrassment crossed the man’s face as he replied:

“…No.”

“Then what is it?!”

The man pressed his lips together, his expression turning painfully uneasy, his voice dropping an octave: “I simply feel you are too young. I likely…”

Would never take a child so young as a partner.

Inexplicably, though he could not recall his name or his age, he had instinctively thought of the youth as a “child,” planting another suspicion in his mind.

—He suspected he himself was not young at all.

Tu Tianba, on the other hand, felt deeply insulted. He hopped to his feet with a flick of his toes, balancing on the edge of the boulder, pointing at the damned immortal lord’s nose and unleashing a torrent of curses: “Where am I small?! Don’t you dare get smug just because you’ve got a plump ass and a broad chest! Sooner or later, I’ll grow them out too!”

The man was rendered completely speechless, his face flushing crimson, unable to squeeze out a single syllable for an eternity.

Seeing this, Tu Tianba snorted coldly, secretly patting himself on the back for his razor-sharp tongue.

He hated righteous cultivators the most. If they weren’t pointing at his nose, barking that he was bound to become a scourge upon the cultivation realm, they were posturing on moral high ground—acting upright and martyr-like even when they were half a breath away from being slaughtered by a demonic cultivator like him, an attitude that set his blood boiling just looking at it.

Not that he discriminated against demonic cultivators, but it wasn’t as if he had chosen to become one by choice!

Take his physique, for instance:

Although his frame was tall and slender, still carrying the lean lankiness of an adolescent boy, with only a pinch of flesh on his cheeks, once he regained a true flesh-and-blood body and used secret arts to accelerate his aging, he would naturally keep developing. Eventually, he would grow into a commanding, formidable man!

Tu Tianba surreptitiously looked the limp, paralyzed man up and down twice. Like oil poured onto an open flame, the blaze inside him shot sky-high, leaving a bitter, sour taste in his heart.

Damn it!

The guy really seemed quite a bit taller than him.

This damned immortal lord truly deserved to die!

One stood while the other lay flat. In particular, when the youth planted a hand on his hip and leaned slightly forward in an aggressively domineering stance, the man clearly still had questions, yet felt too mortified to voice them. He even turned his face toward the other side, unwilling to meet the youth’s eyes.

Those two crude words were simply…

His face burned like a furnace, and his ears were on fire.

A brief silence followed.

Suppressing the embarrassment in his heart, the man inquired once more: “What has happened to me? Why am I drained of all strength, unable even to push myself up to sit?”

Tu Tianba’s own eyes happened to be aching from glaring so hard. Hearing this, he straightened up, rubbed his eyes, and thought to himself: Naturally, it’s because I just poured a whole bottle of ‘Spirit-Gathering Pills’ down your throat.

These pills did not dissolve upon entering the body; their sole function was to vacuum up the spiritual qi of heaven and earth and condense it within the pill’s core.

Originally, Tu Tianba had only wanted to concoct an elixir capable of draining the demonic qi from his body to reduce its toxic effect on the growth of his Flesh-Ganoderma. If it had succeeded, he had intended to swallow three doses a day.

Unfortunately, the pill’s effect had gone completely awry, turning into an elixir that drained spiritual qi instead. Fortunately, it had found a great use right here today, so all that painstaking effort hadn’t gone to waste.

Of course, Tu Tianba would never tell him the truth.

His eyes spun in circles again, mumbling a few ambiguous grunts before swiftly cobbling together a fabricated yarn based on the booklet’s outline: he was a brilliant, strikingly handsome young healer, while the other was his patient—an obscure, penniless little swordsman who, unable to repay his life-saving grace, decided to offer his body as payment to clear the debt.

As he spoke, Tu Tianba drove the point home with heartfelt gravity:

“Mind you, I wasn’t even willing at first!”

The man listened, his expression freezing: “…”

Right at this moment, a gust laced with damp chill slithered across the river’s surface, creeping like a clammy snake past his collar and wrapping his entire body in sodden fabric. The man couldn’t help coughing twice, triggering a sharp jolt of pain in his chest, while a coppery taste of rust surged up into his throat.

Not just rust.

There was also a faint, almost imperceptible trace of sweetness.

A shiver ran through him, yet his abdomen felt curiously warm.

Looking at the youth, in contrast:

The black robes were dry and smooth, with only the sleeves dampened.

…Perhaps it was indeed as he had claimed: the two had had a bitter quarrel that escalated into violence, but the other had put aside their feud, searched for him, and pulled him out of the river valley.

Reflecting on this, the man curled his fingers and called out with slight hesitation:

“I am a little cold.”

The word “Husband” was simply impossible to utter…

And so, the man switched to an alternative:

“—Xiao Xiu.”