Chapter 476: She’s Crying?

The cast-iron spatula in her hand suddenly felt like it weighed ten thousand pounds.

It was Jiu Zui.

The Sovereign of the Drunken Peak. Her master.

He looked exactly as he always did on their isolated mountain. He was wearing tattered gray robes that looked like they hadn’t been washed since the previous century. His thick, coarse hair was tied in a messy, haphazard topknot held together by a splintered wooden chopstick.

His beard was wild, matted, and currently speckled with what looked suspiciously like breadcrumbs.

He carried a chipped clay gourd of wine slung over his shoulder, and he walked with the slightly unsteady, swaying gait of a man who considered sobriety to be a medical emergency.

He smelled of cheap fermentation, roasted meat, and unapologetic vagrancy.

Ji’an stared at him.

Her silver-flecked eyes were wide, unblinking, taking in every single detail of his feral appearance.

Her brain, still bleeding from the horrific revelations of the Corridor of the Eclipse, experienced a reality-breaking collision of cognitive dissonance.

Five minutes ago, she had watched the Ninth Timeline.

She had seen the truth of the Karmic Siphon array. She had seen the young, pristine version of Jiu Zui, the breathtakingly beautiful, ethereal, flawless K-pop deity with flowing silk robes, delicate jade flasks, and eyes full of liquid, celestial sorrow.

She had seen the man who had sacrificed his own majestic, fairy-like dignity, chaining himself to a lifetime of drunken obscurity just to help Yan Zhaoge break the rules and anchor her fractured soul.

She looked at the memory of the flawless, ethereal beauty.

And then she looked at the current reality of the burping, scratching, grease-stained hobo standing in front of her.

’What happened to your skincare routine?!’ Ji’an’s transmigrator soul wailed in devastation. ’You used to glow! You used to look like a shampoo commercial! The cultivation world ruined you! You sacrificed your moisturizer for me!’

Jiu Zui stopped a few feet away from her.

He scratched his unkempt beard, pointedly avoiding her wide, tear-filled, staring eyes. He looked everywhere but at her, at the spinning astrolabe, at the glass floor, at a speck of cosmic dust floating in the air.

He cleared his throat, a rough, awkward, grating sound.

"Don’t look at me like that, brat," Jiu Zui muttered, his voice gruff, defensive, and laced with a tsundere awkwardness. He uncorked his clay gourd and took a long swig of cheap liquor. "I’m not here for you. Don’t go getting a big head. I was just in the neighborhood."

Ji’an just stared at him, her lower lip trembling.

"The neighborhood?" Yan Zhaoge scoffed loudly, crossing his arms, looking at the old drunk with sheer disbelief.

"You are in the restricted, extra-dimensional core of the Stargazing Tower, located at the highest elevation of the central continent. There is no ’neighborhood,’ Jiu Zui. You actively breached nine layers of imperial wards just to stalk her."

"I was foraging for rare herbs!" Jiu Zui barked back, his face flushing red beneath the dirt and grime. "And I got lost! And then I sensed this idiot’s Qi flaring like a supernova, so I just popped in to make sure she didn’t accidentally blow up a load-bearing pillar and drop the sky on my mountain! I am performing structural oversight! I am completely indifferent to her personal well-being!"

He looked at Ji’an, offering a scowl that was meant to be intimidating, but just looked incredibly fond.

"You look terrible, girl," Jiu Zui grumbled, shifting his weight uncomfortably under her intense stare. "You’ve got soot on your nose, you’re crying like a whipped dog, and your posture is atrocious. If you’re going to threaten the Heavens, at least stand up straight. I didn’t teach you to slouch while holding a spatula."

He was trying so hard to maintain the facade.

The grumpy, uncaring, abusive master routine.

But Ji’an knew the truth now. She knew exactly how much this feral badger of a man had given up for her. He wasn’t just a lazy drunk who liked her cooking.

He was a co-conspirator in the grandest, most tragic act of rebellion in the history of the Azure Empire.

He was the man who had watched her die over and over again, choosing to drink himself into a stupor just to numb the agony of his own helplessness, while steadfastly refusing to ever abandon her.

The heavy cast-iron spatula, the weapon she had used to carve her way through seventeen lifetimes of trauma, suddenly slipped from her fingers.

It hit the cosmic glass floor with a loud, ringing CLANG.

Jiu Zui flinched, looking down at the dropped cookware. "Hey! Don’t drop your tools! A chef’s weapon is their soul! Pick that up before you scratch the—"

He didn’t get to finish the sentence.

Lin Ji’an didn’t walk or march.

She launched herself forward like a guided missile.

She crossed the distance between them in a fraction of a second, throwing her arms wide.

"OOF!"

Jiu Zui let out a completely undignified, wheezing grunt of pure shock as the Vanguard Leader, the terrifying Iron Wok Demon, the Apex Anomaly, slammed into him at full speed.

Ji’an wrapped her arms tightly around his waist, burying her tear-streaked face directly into the greasy, stained fabric of his gray robes. She didn’t care that he smelled like cheap alcohol and a wet dog.

She didn’t care that Yan Zhaoge was watching.

She clung to him with the desperate, crushing, frantic grip of a drowning sailor grabbing onto a life raft.

"Master," Ji’an sobbed, her voice muffled against his chest, the dam finally, completely breaking.

All the rage, all the spite, all the adrenaline that had carried her through the Corridor of the Eclipse completely evaporated, leaving only a small, exhausted, deeply traumatized girl hugging the only father figure she had left in the universe.

Jiu Zui froze.

He didn’t just freeze; his entire biological and spiritual operating system experienced a Blue Screen of Death failure.

His arms, which had been raised to take another drink from his gourd, hovered awkwardly in mid-air.

His eyes bulged out of his skull. The clay gourd slipped from his fingers, bouncing harmlessly on the glass floor, spilling the wine across the cosmos.

’She is hugging me,’ Jiu Zui’s brain stuttered, misfiring wildly. ’She is initiating physical contact. She is crying into my robes. She is hugging me. This is not a drill. The anomaly is hugging me.’

For the time she spent on the Drunken Peak, Lin Ji’an had communicated her affection exclusively through acts of culinary service, aggressive yelling, and property damage.

She was a feral, prickly cactus of a disciple. If he complimented her, she sneered. If he got too close, she threatened him with boiling oil.

The most affectionate thing she had ever done was throw a perfectly roasted duck at his head when he was too hungover to walk to the dining table.

She did not hug. She was biologically allergic to vulnerability.

Jiu Zui’s hands hovered in the air like two confused birds trying to find a place to land. He looked terrified.

He slowly, awkwardly, lowered one trembling, calloused hand, lightly patting the top of her silver head in a rigid, staccato rhythm.

Pat. Pat. Pat.

"Uh. There, there, brat," Jiu Zui choked out, his voice cracking, unsure of how to operate a crying disciple. "Are... are you having a stroke? Did you eat a bad mushroom on the way up here? Do I need to induce vomiting?"

Ji’an just shook her head, burying her face deeper into his chest, her shoulders shaking with silent, racking sobs.

Jiu Zui’s panic spiked to critical mass.

If his feral, invincible, emotionally constipated disciple was crying this hard... something horrific must have happened.

She must have been subjected to an agony beyond mortal comprehension.

Jiu Zui’s wide, panicked eyes slowly lifted from the top of Ji’an’s head, locking onto the only other person in the room.

He stared at Yan Zhaoge.

The awkward, fumbling, tsundere master instantly vanished.

He was replaced by the terrifying, fiercely protective Sovereign of the Drunken Peak. The air pressure in the astrolabe chamber dropped so fast that frost began to form on the brass rings of the cosmic machine.

A suffocating, dense aura of pure killing intent erupted from Jiu Zui’s core.

"Zhaoge," Jiu Zui whispered. It wasn’t a growl; it was a deadly, quiet promise of mass extinction.