My name is Xiang Xianjue, eldest disciple of Cangwu Mountain. I was born with extraordinary strength and a naturally gifted Daoist constitution.
To protect my junior brother, Chu Wudao, I personally severed my seven desires.
The emotions I cast off did not disappear. They coalesced into someone who looked exactly like me, called himself Shixuan, and from then on regarded me as his enemy.
Later, I severed my own spiritual roots and became a cripple. Shixuan found me, brought me back to Cangwu Mountain, took me as his disciple, and gave me the Daoist name Zhuoxiang.
He had stolen my identity.
He made me scrub the floor on my knees, recite cultivation manuals on my knees, and kneel in the snow night after night until dawn.
He took my junior brother as his second disciple. Every day, Chu Wudao watched him treat me like a servant, yet dared not acknowledge me.
Later, Shixuan tricked Chu Wudao into entering Soulbreak Ridge.
Man-eating beastfolk lived there. Chu Wudao almost died inside.
When he emerged alive, half his body was no longer human.
He thought I had not come to save him. He hated me.
He did not know that I had walked eight hundred li on ruined knees to reach him.
There was much else he did not know.
For example, Shixuan was not my enemy. He was a debt I had owed for twenty years.
For example, I never resented him for tormenting me. I only regretted that, when I lit those seven lamps in the stone cave all those years ago, I had not told him I had never abandoned him.
For example, I could have ended all of this at any time.
All it would have taken were two words.
“Zhuoxiang, come back.”
