The three of them sat quietly in the blood-red night. The streaks of red light in the sky, resembling the aurora, flowed like a canopy.
“Don’t you remember your name?” Jiang Wen’s voice broke the silence.
“No.”
“Then choose one. Regardless of what you were called before, you can give yourself a new name now.”
“…I don’t know what to choose. I can’t think of a name for myself.”
“Seeing as there’s not an ounce of flesh on your face, why not call you Ah Gu?” Hongluan said with a hint of ease, her hands behind her head, legs crossed as she lay on a flat rock. Looking at the skeleton man supporting his chin with his hands, she found the scene rather amusing.
“Ah Gu?” The skeleton man hesitated, feeling a strange familiarity with the name. However, with no memories to draw upon, he accepted the name.
“Then it’s Ah Gu.”
Ah Gu was temporarily accepted by the two. While chatting by the campfire, Jiang Wen found Ah Gu to be a rather humorous and optimistic person.
“I crawled out of a stone coffin. I was startled when I saw human bones all around me. Then I escaped the underground chamber and saw my reflection while washing my face by the river. To be honest, I was a little frightened by my appearance.”
Ah Gu babbled on about himself, the bones of his skull opening and closing, making for a rather comical sight.
His skull was well-groomed, with a bony luster, white and flawless. Even as a skeletal being, he could be considered handsome. Although he was a bit frightening at first glance, he became endearing after spending time with him.
Hongluan especially liked to tease him, handing Ah Gu fruits and food. She would laugh gleefully as he crunched on them, the food falling to the ground from his jaw.
Ah Gu was gentle and didn’t mind the teasing. He even joked about his own skull to liven up the silence of the scarlet land at night.
Jiang Wen watched the two chatting with interest, sensing the aura emanating from Ah Gu. It was an ancient, unfamiliar, yet familiar aura.
If he wasn’t mistaken, the aura should belong to an elite warrior of the tribe. It was an aura originating from the totem, from the power of ancestral blood.
This aura had accompanied him through countless battles and was deeply etched in his mind. Even if he had temporarily forgotten, he could quickly sense it upon contact.
Tribal warrior—it was an ancient title. For Jiang Wen, the title was both distant and very close.
However, the tribal warriors had long disappeared with the Tai Cang into the river of time. Even when he was in Tianyuan City, the number of tribal warriors was dwindling.
After all, compared to the warriors painstakingly trained by the tribe, the Tai Cang soldiers who focused on cultivation were clearly more effective in combat. Therefore, in the decades after the establishment of Tianyuan City, the number of tribal warriors had been decreasing. As for the final fate of the tribal warriors, Jiang Wen couldn’t know.
He only knew that even the last of the tribal warriors were from at least a hundred thousand years ago.
Having lived through such a long period, why had he come back to life? And what was he so stubbornly wandering this scarlet land for?
Jiang Wen glanced at Ah Gu, his gaze turning to the distant Light Tree. He felt that it might hold all the answers he sought.
However, his intuition told Jiang Wen that his situation was somewhat delicate. If he couldn’t cure his memory loss, facing the giant Light Tree directly might lead to unexpected consequences.
Jiang Wen had seen the appearance of the Tianqian Great Wall on the map of mountains and rivers, and even on the microscopic map, he could still feel its grandeur. Its ten-thousand-mile-long body was like a long dragon, encompassing the entire border of Tai Province.
The Tianqian City, located in its center, was an imposing fortress dominating the world. It was home to a million people and the most important town in Great Qian.
There was even a poem that said: As long as the Tianqian stands, the Great Wall will endure.
When Jiang Wen first obtained the map of mountains and rivers, he was puzzled as to how such a magnificent Great Wall was built. He also wondered how a Great Wall could defend against those boundless supernatural beings in a world of cultivators where power belonged to individuals.
Now, looking at the Great Wall again, all his doubts vanished.
The Tianqian Great Wall stands only because of Tianqian City.
And Tianqian City was the Tianyuan City that he and Jiang Wenji had built together. It was a royal city that spanned Tai Cang and overlooked the entire Old Earth. If he wasn’t mistaken, this ten-thousand-mile-long Tianqian Great Wall should have been built primarily from the body of the Azure Dragon, gradually expanded upon afterward.
To be called the Tianqian Great Wall, the Azure Dragon was, after all, a ferocious beast from the ancient wilderness. Even after he led the people of the Immortal Sect to kill it, the remaining divine power in its body was still not to be underestimated.
Tianqian was Tianyuan, the place where he had stayed for nearly a hundred years in a dreamlike state. Perhaps the amnesia he suffered from was also related to Tianqian City.
Regardless of the final outcome, he had to go to Tianqian City to see.
The silence of the night engulfed the earth, and the three of them didn’t cultivate quietly. When the light of dawn rose and the Light Tree radiated its power in all directions, Jiang Wen slowly woke up from his meditation.
He looked around in a daze, finding a strange person with a skull head sleeping next to the remnants of the campfire. A slight sense of vigilance arose in his heart as he looked at Hongluan, who was lying on the rock.
Looking at the scarlet earth, Jiang Wen rubbed his forehead. He vaguely felt like he had forgotten something.
“Fellow Daoist Hongluan,” Jiang Wen called out.
Hongluan and Ah Gu both woke up and looked at Jiang Wen.
“Who is this?” Jiang Wen asked, pointing at Ah Gu.
“He is called Ah Gu. He came here yesterday. He came back to life from the tomb and doesn’t know where to go. You were here yesterday and accepted him. Why don’t you look at the pouch on your waist?” Looking at Jiang Wen’s expression, Hongluan knew that he must have forgotten what happened yesterday, so she explained to Ah Gu.
Jiang Wen subconsciously touched his waist, opened the pouch, and took out the talisman paper. After a moment, he looked at Ah Gu with a complicated expression, but said calmly, “Since you don’t know where to go, why don’t you come with us first? You can leave when you remember where you want to go.”
“Okay,” Ah Gu responded.
