Southern Archives: The Salt Went Mad After Losing Its Shrimp Guide

[Yan-Xia CP | Sentinel/Guide AU | Powerful leads find redemption together | Mystery-solving main plot | Rewriting the Nan’an’s ending | Happy ending]

A raging fire aboard the Nan’an wiped out the strongest Sentinel-Guide pair in the south.

Everyone said that Zhang Haixia, an S-rank Guide, had drowned, and that his Sentinel, Zhang Haiyan, had gone completely mad.

His mental landscape was shattered, his senses overloaded. He snapped at everyone and became the mad Sentinel no one at the archives dared go near.

People urged him to find a new Guide. He spun an old badge between his fingers, smiling with careless menace. “My Guide is alive until I see him, and dead until I see his body.”

Six months later, a series of murders involving dried corpses broke out in Xucheng. Every victim’s mental core had been burned to ash by duskgrass.

Zhang Haiyan investigated alone, but froze abruptly outside the morgue.

A familiar tidal scent drifted on the breeze, and silvery-gray mental tendrils silently curled around the back of his burning neck.

A young man stood beneath the corridor, leaning on an ebony cane. A silver-furred otter peeked over his shoulder, and his voice was as clear as the sea after the tide went out. “Zhang Haiyan, don’t make a scene.”

The man he had searched for over six months was alive. But with his mental core shattered and poison eating away at his legs, he was a crippled Guide who could no longer sustain a complete barrier.

From then on, the mad Sentinel reined in his temper and stayed right by his side.

When someone sneered that Zhang Haixia was a useless Guide, Zhang Haiyan flipped the table. He pressed a dagger to the man’s throat and smiled coldly. “My man. Who gave you the right to call him useless?”

No one knew that every night, when his senses collapsed, it was those cool hands pressed against his brow that brought him back.

Even with a shattered mental core, he would give everything he had to piece Zhang Haiyan’s crumbling world back together, bit by bit.

Zhang Haixia: “I can’t maintain a complete barrier anymore.”

Zhang Haiyan lowered his head and kissed the back of his hand, his voice hoarse and burning with intensity. “You don’t have to. I’m here.”