"Scheming nonsense."

Xu Wanyun watched the little girl walk off into the distance, helpless, and stepped after her.

Aqing's notion was an utterly impossible thing.

With her supreme talent, she'd already, at a tender age, mastered upward of eighty percent of the Xu family's formations.

How could someone like that ever be handed off to another power?

What need would the Xu family then have to exist at all?

From the moment she'd opened that thick book, Aqing was destined to become the Xu family's clan head.

Unless she were some hardened, cunning schemer who could make Shen Yi marry into the Xu family... but by the look of things, before Shen Yi she was like a little white flower there for the plucking, so that was all the more impossible.

She herself, on the other hand—

A light flickered in Xu Wanyun's eyes. She could roughly guess that Shen Yi wanted the Xu family's killing-force spiritual root.

To agree to some trifling, inconsequential little matter for its sake was really no problem at all.

After all, the man had only to take the spiritual root, walk out of the Xu family, and then, with his strength, turn his face and disavow the whole thing, pull his trousers up and go... who could possibly hold him to anything?

And by then, wouldn't she be left to keep her lonely bower alone, washing her face with tears all day long...

Xu Wanyun spun out an entire grand melodrama of love and hate and grievance in her head, and walked toward the wooden cabin with an unsettled heart.

Compared to the previous night —

this time, in broad daylight, with all the clan elders gathered together, it had clearly stirred up an even greater commotion in the village.

The crowd clustered around in curiosity.

Watching the clan head stand solemnly at the door and usher that blue-robed figure inside.

"Didn't he want to borrow the Four-Symbols Demon-Subduing Grand Formation to heal his wounds? So he's healed up, and he's leaving?"

"Once he's out there, he won't go and sell us all out,…