In Fifth Mao’s eyes, Fifth Lingyu’s silence was a form of defiance, even mockery.

He lifted his hand, ready to strike Fifth Lingyu again, but weakly let it fall.

He had no strength left.

Fifth Mao said, “Leave. From now on, you are no longer my son.”

Fifth Lingyu, still kneeling, stared coldly at Fifth Mao.

Unable to bear it, Fifth Mao said, “What now? You’re looking at me with those eyes again. Do you want to kill me too? After just killing a family member, and before I’ve even had time to clean up your mess, now you want to kill your own father?”

Fifth Lingyu, expressionless, asked, “If I kill you, will you stop calling me a monster? Will you stop telling me to change who I am?”

“Heh.” Seeing his son admit it, Fifth Mao didn’t know what to say.

He stood up and looked down at Fifth Lingyu.

“What right do you have to kill a celestial clan leader? What do you have? That baseless, innate bloodlust of yours? You’re just a monster driven by lowly desires, unable to practice the Dao of Source. You’ll always be ruled by your base instincts, despised by the world—forever dark, forever wretched, forever without hope.”

It wasn’t even mockery.

Fifth Mao’s face was calm as he coldly stated the objective truth to his own son.

Qin Ruqing couldn’t bear to look at Fifth Lingyu’s expression anymore.

She forced a light-hearted tone and said, “Well, now you really do want to kill your father.”

“How is it that parents in this world can truly love and hate their children with such intensity? The love is so real, but the hate is just as real.”

With a sigh, Qin Ruqing turned her head to look at Fifth Lingyu.
“It’s a pity you can’t feel it. You only saw pure hatred.”

Fifth Lingyu had been exiled.

He was banished to a desolate island in the Central Sea for killing a fellow clan member.

There was no escape, as the Fifth family’s identification bell was both a mark and a shackle.

“Your father still showed you mercy,” Qin Ruqing said to Fifth Lingyu on the island.
“In noble families, harming your own kin is a grave crime, something no family would tolerate. While every family has its dirty secrets, you admitted it yourself, which makes it hard to cover up.”

“This punishment is light. Back then, even Xiao Tang was expelled from the family.”

Fifth Lingyu’s exile had no set end date.

Fifth Mao’s intention was probably to keep him imprisoned until the clan had forgotten about the incident.

Then, he could find a way to erase the “stain” from his son’s history.

But unfortunately, Fifth Mao never got the chance to carry out his plan.

When the upper-class noble families organized their first exploration of the Abyss, Fifth Mao volunteered to lead the team.

The higher-ups had no idea what would happen in the Abyss later, and the purpose of this first expedition was merely to scout it out and seek a complete inheritance.

However, deep down, Fifth Mao had another goal.

He vaguely sensed that Fifth Lingyu’s inherent bloodlust held some hidden secret.

He intended to find an opportunity in the Abyss to cleanse his son of this violent nature, ridding him of his “monster” identity.

Fifth Mao didn’t tell anyone about this plan; only his subordinate, Fifth Jia, had an inkling of the truth.

When she saw this, Qin Ruqing shook her head.

“You firmly believed Fifth Lingyu was a ‘monster,’ so you went to great lengths to save and ‘correct’ him. With this mindset, Fifth Lingyu’s label as a monster would never be washed away.”

Fifth Lingyu was brought back from the island because his father was on his deathbed and wanted to see his son one last time.

Qin Ruqing could sense Fifth Lingyu’s shock when he heard the news, even though his face showed no emotion.

Fifth Jia sighed and hesitated before saying, “Your father forcibly broke through the Immortal Tomb’s barrier, apparently trying to secure an opportunity for you. In the end, he did get it, but the barrier’s power backfired on him… He’s only holding on by a thread now. We need to hurry.”

When Qin Ruqing heard this, she immediately understood.

“The Immortal Tomb’s barrier backfired”—this barrier was the residual power of an ancient sacrificial formation created by over a thousand immortal souls.

It could preserve those ancient immortal souls for millennia without fading, guard the Abyss, and imprison the soul of the ancient Beast Emperor.

Even today, after the barrier had dissipated, a final remnant of its power remained, sealed within the astrolabe in her hand.

Such immense power—no matter how powerful the clan leader was—could not be resisted.

Fifth Mao wasn’t going to survive.

The fact that he was holding on for one last breath to see Fifth Lingyu was already a testament to his formidable cultivation.

When Fifth Lingyu finally saw his father, Fifth Mao was already on the verge of death.

He was barely breathing, but he tightly clutched something in his hand.

When he saw Fifth Lingyu, the breath he had been holding nearly slipped away.
But Fifth Mao held on.

He couldn’t speak, but his eyes were filled with emotion as he looked at Fifth Lingyu, his hand twitching slightly.

Fifth Lingyu stood silent, as if he understood something, and took a step forward, extending his hand.

Fifth Mao released what was in his grip.
It was a simple, ancient-looking jade slip of a greenish hue.

He looked at Fifth Lingyu, his lips parted, and with great difficulty, he uttered a final sentence: “Be… a normal person.”

Fifth Mao died.

He left Fifth Lingyu with a jade slip and a final plea to be a normal person.

Qin Ruqing guessed that the jade slip was likely the relic of Immortal Zhiming’s estate.

It was probably because of this jade slip that Fifth Lingyu later walked a different path.

As for the request to be a normal person, Qin Ruqing held a pessimistic view.

Fifth Lingyu listening to that?

Not likely.

His father’s death might have been a huge turning point for Fifth Lingyu, but it definitely wouldn’t lead him in the direction Fifth Mao had hoped for.

And sure enough—

“You fancied yourself a wise clan leader, yet you were so foolish.” Fifth Lingyu stood before his father’s tombstone, his mother’s grave beside it, his lips curling in faint mockery.

“A normal person? Who exactly is abnormal?”

“Did I need you to risk your life to seek some salvation for me?” Fifth Lingyu’s voice was filled with confusion and sarcasm.

Qin Ruqing could hear the resentment.
How could there not be resentment?

His father had forced a label onto him, and in the end, his father died because of that label.

How could Fifth Lingyu ever reconcile with it?

He chose not to.

“What does being normal even mean? Because my last name is Fifth, I must cultivate the ancestral Dao and have a heart for the world—that’s what normal is?
To respect those above and be kind to those below—that’s normal?”

“Well, I refuse.”

“I’ll prove to you in my own way that you were wrong.”

“The way you died was so utterly foolish.”

“You’re the real waste—just a Celestial with a title and cultivation, nothing more,” Fifth Lingyu retorted in front of the grave, echoing the insult Fifth Mao once hurled at him.

After Fifth Mao’s fall, his younger brother, Fifth Sheng, succeeded him as the Celestial Clan Leader.

From that moment, Fifth Lingyu’s personality underwent a dramatic change, as he began to indulge in a carefree, worldly life.

Following his brother’s final wishes, Fifth Sheng covered up the incident of Fifth Lingyu’s “murdering a clan member,” but Fifth Lingyu expressed no gratitude.

A year later, he voluntarily requested to go to the Western Ridge of the Southern Domain.

Fifth Sheng agreed.

At this point, Qin Ruqing thought the illusion would end, but the scene started to shift once again.

Standing up, she heard the familiar crack of a whip, followed by Fifth Mao’s voice: “You wretch—!”

They had returned to the beginning.

Everything seemed to be rewinding, replaying the same events.

Fifth Lingyu appeared trapped in an endless nightmare, reliving the most vivid moments of his past.

Unfortunately, all these moments were painted in sorrow and pain.

When the scene began to repeat for the third time, Qin Ruqing decided it was time to leave.

She looked at Fifth Lingyu and said:

“I’m leaving now. Before I go, let me share a little secret with you—though you can’t hear me.”

“Do you think that when you play the fool, you’re merely pretending?”

“Do you believe that when you laugh, it’s filled with pain?”

“And that the cruel, violent side of you is the real you?”

“Well, let me, a true fool, tell you—it’s not so clear-cut.”

Qin Ruqing gazed into the void. “At first, I wasn’t like this either. At a certain point in time, I made a decision to change, and that’s how I became the person I am now.”

“The past was real, and so is the present.”

“The dark side is you, and the light side is you too.”

Turning back to look at Fifth Lingyu, she added:

“Your father, in the end, was narrow-minded. He didn’t understand how complex human beings can be.”

“I’m off.”

As Qin Ruqing left, she didn’t see the moment when Fifth Lingyu, who had been laughing maniacally in the illusion, suddenly stopped.

He looked in the direction she had gone, as if he had sensed something.