I raised stunning young ladies, but they all wanted to possess me.

Pei Yuran tapped her fingers lightly on the scabbard.

She knew her mother better than anyone else.

Pei Youyi has always been cautious in his actions and never leaves the Middle East war zone easily, much less fly thousands of miles to Japan for a simple transfer order.

There must be some very important reason why she would do this.

Just then, the alloy door of the command center was pushed open from the outside.

A young man walked in.

She wore a plain white robe, a long sword at her waist, and her long hair was tied back with a blue ribbon.

His attire was exactly the same as in the battlefield footage on TV, except that he now had a bleeding abrasion on his shoulder.

With a slight flick of her wrist, Pei Yuran drew the sword half an inch from its sheath, instantly lowering the temperature of the entire command center.

The elder involuntarily shivered and took a step back.

"Don't come near me."

Her voice was as cold as an undercurrent beneath the ice, devoid of any extra emotion.

Xu Huan stopped at the doorway, far away from her table.

Through the cold lights of the entire command post, his expression was somewhat pained, but his clear, cold eyes held more guilt and a kind of almost stubborn expectation.

"Junior sister, I've wanted to apologize to you in person for years."

"What happened back then was my fault."

"I was trapped by greed and tormented by inner demons, and I committed an unforgivable crime."

"I've been cultivating alone in the Antarctic wilderness all these years, hoping to make up for it with the rest of my life."

"Get out."

Xu Huan's voice trembled slightly under the cold light.

"Gu Yan is dead."

"Junior sister, your senior brother has protected you since you were a child, and I don't want to see you continue to torment yourself for someone who is already dead."

Before he could finish speaking, an icy blue sword aura exploded from the blade, shooting toward his chest at a speed imperceptible to the naked eye.

The sword light was blocked by something just before it pierced his chest.

It was a defense automatically activated by the protective sword energy within his body.

However, the force of Pei Yuran's sword strike was far beyond what he could withstand. When the protective sword energy shattered, it made a crisp sound. His body swayed a few times, and a trace of blood spilled from the corner of his mouth.

He didn't wipe it, but simply lowered his head and bowed slightly in Pei Yuran's direction.

"I'm leaving now."

The clan elder watched his figure disappear behind the alloy door, remained silent for a long while, and then cautiously spoke.

"Miss, that matter of Xu Huan happened so many years ago."

"He is quite capable now, and the Middle East theater is in dire need of top-notch combatants. Should we consider keeping him on the team?"

"Back then, our ancestors only expelled him from the sect, but did not cripple his cultivation. It seems they were considering the bond between fellow disciples."

Pei Yuran placed the sword back on the table.

Those icy pupils reflected the deep blue ice crystals sealed on the sword tassel.

Her voice was still cold, but it contained an emotion that the elders had never seen on her face before.

It wasn't anger, nor sadness, but a very faint sense of certainty, like someone who had seen through something.

"Elder, the swordsman uses his heart as his sheath."

"Inner demons are not scary; what's scary is deceiving yourself."

"The inner demon is, in essence, greed."

"Craving power, craving shortcuts, craving what does not belong to you."

"He can lie to himself and say it's his inner demons, but he can't fool me."

"The mistake he made back then wasn't because he was possessed by something; he chose that path himself."

"A person like this, no matter how fast their sword, has a bent heart."

"The Pei family's swords do not need those with crooked hearts."

She lowered her head, her gaze falling on the deep blue tassel on the sword, encased in ice crystals, and her eyelashes drooped slightly.

The voice was so low that only she could hear it.

"Besides, I can't fool myself."

Xu walked out of the command post and walked a long way along the underground corridor of the Middle East theater.

The sound of the alloy door closing behind him still echoed in the corridor, dull and cold.

He walked to a deserted corner and stopped.

He slammed his right fist against the wall, the alloy plate making a dull thud, and a trickle of bright red blood seeped from where his knuckles collided with the metal.

He didn't understand.

He has already apologized, stood before her in the most humble manner, and blamed all the guilt on his inner demons, so why won't she forgive him?

Under normal circumstances, shouldn't the junior sister have reconciled with him?

In those stories, the senior students who went astray eventually realized their mistakes, suffered many hardships, and were ultimately forgiven, accepted, and stood by the protagonist's side again.

He exhaled a breath of stale air and removed the still-bleeding fist from the wall.

Two cleaning maids were passing by at the end of the corridor carrying buckets of water. When they saw him there, they were so frightened that they quickly lowered their heads and hurried into the storage room next door.

The door to the storage room was ajar, and the whispered conversation of two people drifted into his ears without him missing a single word.

"Was that Mr. Xu just now?"

"His hands were bleeding, and his face looked terrifying."

"I heard from people at command that the young lady wasn't very nice to him during the meeting today..."

"Of course, he's not Gu Yan."

"What do you mean?"

"You haven't met Gu Yan before. I used to work for the Pei family in Da Xia."

"When that young master Gu came to the Pei family, Miss never made him stand so far away at the door."

"She would let him sit next to her and even have someone pour him tea."

"The young lady spoke to him in a completely different tone."

"It will still be cold, but that cold is the kind of cold where something is flowing beneath the ice."

"Look at the way Miss looked at Mr. Xu today, she didn't even want him to come in."

These words were like an extremely fine needle, piercing into the deepest, festering wound in Xu Huan's heart.

He always thought that he lost to Gu Yan because he made a mistake and went astray. He believed that as long as he corrected his mistakes, he would be able to win back everything he had lost one day.

But now he finally understands.

It's not a question of right or wrong, it's the difference between the original spouse and the substitute.

When he wielded his sword alone in the Antarctic wilderness, the person who had been dead for three years still firmly held the most important place in his junior sister's heart.

He clenched his fist again, but this time he didn't slam it against the wall. Instead, it hung at his side, blood trickling slowly down his fingertips.

The cold light at the end of the corridor stretched his shadow very long, and a deep, deep resentment flashed in his originally cool and handsome eyes as the light flickered.

The alarms for Kyoto's fourth line of defense went off in the early hours of the morning.

Instead of the gradually escalating warnings of the past, a series of sharp beeps rang out simultaneously from all the rune towers.

The northern outskirts, the southeastern coast, and the entire defense line are in a state of emergency.

When Gu Yan arrived at the pass from the command post, the dark red rift had already stretched from the horizon to mid-air, and the types of calamities surging out were more diverse than ever before.

The vanguard are the corrosive insects.

Fist-sized, numbering in the hundreds of millions, they rolled and surged along the ground, leaving countless holes in the surface of the alloy city wall wherever they passed.

Next came the Cyclops spewing acid, towering over ten meters tall, each acid projectile burning a melting hole in the city wall.