Chapter 22: Qin Fang Abandoned, New Love Emerges

Qin Anyu arrived at the former Qin residence to find the main gate half-open. Stepping inside, he scanned the courtyard and saw no one except Qin Fang, who was sitting at a stone table drinking alone, without a single dish of food in sight.

He walked over to the table, frowned, and asked, "Uncle, where is everyone else?"

Neither the Wuwo Immortal Emperor nor the original owner of this body had held any affection for him.

Qin Fang looked up. His hair was disheveled, his eyes bloodshot, and his face a mess—a stark contrast to his formerly clean and tidy appearance. Seeing that it was Qin Anyu, he grinned, a smile so strained it seemed he was about to burst into tears. "Anyu, you’ve come."

He gestured vaguely with his wine bowl. "They’re gone. All gone. I’m the only one left in this entire Qin residence."

Qin Anyu frowned. "Didn't I tell you all to move out? Why haven't you left yet?" He disliked him, and he disliked his family; he only wanted them out of this estate.

Qin Fang laughed wildly. "They all left, but I didn't. I was waiting for you."

"I'm here," Qin Anyu said. "You can leave now."

Qin Fang suddenly broke into loud sobs. "They’ve vanished. Qili, Datong, and all the servants—I went out for a moment, and when I returned, they were all gone."

*Oh?* So there was more to it. This "gone" carried a different meaning than the previous one. After a swift turn of thought, Qin Anyu asked, "Is Zhang Fuyuan gone too?"

"Gone," Qin Fang wailed. "Not only them, but everything in the house that could be carried away is gone too."

Qin Anyu scanned the surroundings and only then noticed that the doors and windows of the rooms were wide open, leaving them completely hollow. It seemed Zhang Qili and the others had truly left. If Qin Fang wasn't lying, he had been abandoned.

There is always something detestable about a pathetic person, and he was a true testament to that. The two brothers had grown up without parents, relying on Qin Zhu’s desperate, bone-breaking efforts to improve their lives. Later, when Qin Zhu gave him cultivation techniques and medicinal herbs, urging him to train hard, he traded most of the herbs for wine, remaining stuck at the third stage of the Qi-Nurturing realm by the age of fourteen.

Later, he met the Zhang Qili family, who were struggling to survive together. He became infatuated with her. Even though Qin Zhu warned him that she was unreliable, he continued to act as he pleased, even stealing money and herbs from their home to support them. When Qin Zhu discovered this and confronted him, he threw a tantrum, declaring that if he weren't allowed to marry her, he would no longer acknowledge Qin Zhu as his brother.

Qin Zhu, unable to bear cutting ties with the younger brother he had raised, gave in for the sake of appearances, but on one condition: he must focus on his cultivation from then on. He agreed. Thus, they were married, while Qin Zhu remained a bachelor.

After the marriage, the three members of the Zhang family lived in the house Qin Zhu bought and consumed the resources he earned. It must be said that their talent for cultivation was not bad. He and Zhang Qili, who had only begun systematic training after seventeen, reached the eighth stage of Qi-Nurturing by their mid-thirties, and Zhang Fuyuan reached the sixth.

When the three siblings reached the age where they could cultivate, he often complained to Qin Zhu that their resources were insufficient, suggesting that since they were still young, there was no need to invest so much. It was only due to Dai Linglong’s insistence that the siblings' resources were guaranteed.

It was obvious that Zhang Qili had leaked Qin Zhu’s itinerary to that Zhang Yuan, leading to the ambush that caused Qin Zhu and Dai Linglong to go missing. After they disappeared, he had been impatient to become the head of the household, eager to erase every trace of Qin Zhu’s family.

He was truly foolish to be so impatient. Now that he couldn't become the head of the household and Zhang Qili and the others had vanished, he was left alone to drink and stare at his nephew with a "face full of misery."

Qin Anyu naturally ignored him, turned, and headed toward the gate. "Uncle, since they have already left, you should go too. I’m going to buy a lock and secure the main gate."

After taking a few steps, he turned back and said, "Uncle, isn't Qin Huitong at the Lihuo Sect? You should go find him."

When he returned with a lock, he was the only one left in the courtyard; Qin Fang had departed. Good—at least there was less to be annoyed by.

After locking the gate, he walked a few yards down the alley, hesitated, then looked back once more before turning away to head toward the main street. His next stop was the Intelligence Gate.

Captain Guo Qi was not there, but the garrison soldier Song Yi gave him the latest scrolls. After reading one of them, Qin Anyu asked, "Have all the people from the Intelligence Gate gone out?"

Song Yi nodded. "Except for me and a few on rotation, everyone else has left."

"By whose order?"

"The provincial government's."

"Have they found the trail of those people from the Dali Kingdom?"

Song Yi shook his head and did not respond. Whether he didn't know or wasn't allowed to say, Qin Anyu didn't press; he had only asked in passing, and they weren't close enough for more.

After leaving the garrison headquarters, he exited the provincial capital and headed west. After traveling for several dozen miles, he heard the sound of hurried footsteps around the corner ahead and quickly ducked into the bushes behind some boulders.

Soon, a group of garrison soldiers appeared in a chaotic mess, many of them injured. Reaching the boulders, someone shouted, "I can't go any further, let's rest."

Immediately, someone echoed, "Exactly. If we aren't killed, we'll be run to death."

A man who appeared to be a captain finally ordered them to rest there. About sixty soldiers collapsed on the ground, completely lacking decorum.

Suddenly, a voice spoke up, "This operation must have been leaked."

"I think so too. Otherwise, before we even arrived, we wouldn't have been ambushed by Qi-Refining and late-stage Qi-Nurturing experts. They clearly wanted to wipe out all three hundred of us."

"Exactly..."

Qin Anyu listened to their conversation and agreed that their encounter was suspicious, re-evaluating the situation in Tanzhou Prefecture. He had previously known that the prefecture was peaceful, and after reading the Intelligence Gate's scrolls, he had learned of many undercurrents, but hearing their words, he realized the situation was far from simple.

They hadn't been resting for long when another group of nearly a hundred soldiers arrived, almost every one of them wounded, with the lightly injured carrying the severely hurt. Relatively speaking, this group appeared more disciplined and soldier-like than the first.

Among the wounded, he saw Wang Fuli, who was now missing his left arm. Despite the loss, he still gripped his heavy blade tightly.

After the severely wounded were laid down, he saw Guo Qi, whose face was slashed and whose armor was shattered at the chest, stained with blood. This group did not intend to stop and rest; they continued forward. As they passed the others, a verbal conflict erupted.

The newcomers vented their anger, calling the first group cowards who had fled without regard for their teammates' lives, and accusing them of having traitors in their ranks who ran before even seeing the enemy. The first group retorted that the others were playing the victim, staging a bitter scheme to cover their own failures; otherwise, they argued, they would have been wiped out by the enemy's Qi-Refining and late-stage Qi-Nurturing experts long ago.

Each side had their own justifications, and the air grew thick with indignation and discord.

Qin Anyu felt there was no point in listening further, so he prepared to leave and move forward to track down the ambushers. Just as he was about to act, he spotted figures running along the ridge behind them—some at the Qi-Refining stage, others at the Qi-Nurturing stage.

*Another ambush?*

He immediately changed his plan, grabbed two stones and threw them toward the garrison soldiers, then sprinted toward the hillside himself.