The entire sect is obsessed with love, but I'm the only one who's truly insane.

Another light drizzle fell. Lin Du, wearing a bamboo hat, followed Granny Ma along the mountain path with his head down.

"Why did you have to come along? Isn't your face scary enough?"

Lin Du pulled out a veil he used to cover his face in winter, haphazardly wrapped it around the lower half of his face, covered it with a bamboo hat on top and the veil on the bottom, and asked in a muffled voice, "Is it okay now?"

Granny Ma was silent for a while, then said, "There's no one in the world as troublesome as you. Yesterday I asked you to watch the stove, but you insisted on researching some kind of timed array. I almost wasted my time brewing that pot of medicine."

"That girl cried for most of the night, her eyes are almost blind from crying, and I didn't even give her any hope for the future." Lin Du reached out and pinched his ear. "Besides, I've already released my divine sense, so I might as well just watch and practice my array carving."

"Then my pot lid almost exploded from carving," Granny Ma said calmly.

Lin Du was dressed in a black robe today. Even though the material was of excellent quality, with gold thread woven in and the ruby ​​on the crane's head was lifelike, in Granny Ma's eyes he still looked like a mountain bandit.

"That was an accident." Lin Du coughed lightly. "My right hand was fractured, and I couldn't help but carve it slightly off."

Inscribing formations on objects with the slightest error can lead to disastrous consequences. This requires not only a strong spiritual sense but also a steady hand.

Granny Ma turned back to look at her again, "You still haven't answered my first question."

Lin Du knew there was no way to avoid the issue, so he coughed lightly. "I just want to see if people who are kept in captivity know how to be self-reliant."

Granny Ma glanced at her bandit follower and said, "You seem to have a lot on your mind."

Lin Du didn't speak, but suddenly Granny Ma grabbed his right wrist. "Hey, no, Granny, Granny, it hurts, it hurts..."

A strange force burrowed into his flesh, and Lin Du suddenly fell silent, no longer pretending, and let her probe into his wrist bone.

A chilling power coiled around her wrist like a snake. "Mo Lin didn't utter a sound when he broke your wrist, and now you're crying out in pain?"

Lin Du could still laugh; even through the gauze scarf, you could hear the indifference in her voice. "She can recover."

The yin energy suddenly vanished. "No wonder you've been wearing hard wristbands these past few days."

A black plaster was tossed into Lin Du's arms. "Keep it on. It will be completely healed within five days."

For ordinary young people, a fractured bone takes more than a month to heal on its own, while for cultivators, which have spiritual energy to nourish them, it heals faster, but it still takes ten days to half a month.

Lin Du lowered her head and sniffed the ointment; the smell was even more murky than the medicine she drank. After hesitating for a long time, she asked, "There...could there be any bugs in this?"

"No," Granny Ma said calmly, "but there's something you'd rather not know."

Lin Du suppressed his curiosity. "Then I'd better not ask."

She was very obedient. She applied the plaster herself and then re-secured the wristband. Just then, she arrived at the front of Qinglu Village.

The village was still shrouded in misty rain.

When Lin Du entered the village, he found that most of the people were still there, except for four or five young people who were not yet adults and had gone into the city. They maintained their original way of life, working hard to survive over the years, and still had plenty of food given by the Moon Goddess.

The well, whose bricks and stones had been stolen, was rebuilt with ordinary bluestone. An offering table was placed in front of it, with various kinds of prayer snacks on it. Now it had long been soaked and rotten by the rainwater, and it seemed to have grown moldy. It must have been left unattended for many days.

Lin Du accompanied Granny Ma as she delivered medicine to each household, using the excuse that the spring cold snap meant the children, being young, were at risk of contracting an epidemic without the protection of the moon goddess.

Some people expressed their gratitude profusely, while others remained hesitant.

Neither Granny Ma nor Lin Du offered any advice. Lin Du acted even more like a corpse puppet than the corpse puppet itself, remaining silent and only responsible for distributing the medicine.

After delivering the last item to the last family, someone cautiously asked Granny Ma, "Do you still accept servants? My son is sure to be even stronger and more capable than the one behind you."

Lin Du was mistaken for a servant. Granny Ma thought to herself that Lin Du should be a bandit, not a servant.

Grandma Ma shook her head. Seeing the gloom and worry in the family's eyes, she finally spoke and pointed the way. "You couldn't go up the mountain to pick mountain products before, but you can now. The fields may be abandoned, but they can be cultivated again. How can you not have a way to make a living?"

The man looked blankly at the old woman in front of him, "But...we won't..."

Lin Du lowered her eyes. The plaster on her wrist, with its spicy and chilling sensation, penetrated her bones. The feeling of being both cold and spicy was not pleasant.

She mechanically followed Granny Ma out of the last house, then suddenly spoke, "In just a few hundred years, a dozen generations, it's enough to completely ruin a person."

Granny Ma didn't speak. Lin Du was young, but he was always very empathetic to worldly affairs. Such a person was a talent in the cultivation of Taoism. Being sensitive enough was not a bad thing.

"I once pondered a question: what if they weren't drained of their life force, had enough to eat and wear, and didn't need to work, and simply lived happily for forty or sixty years, only to have their lives taken away at that time?"

"Now, the people in Qinglu Village are secretly cursing the Moon Goddess for abandoning them. They have no food and do not know how to survive."

"I think there are probably many people who would be willing to do this, and I have even thought about it myself. With everything arranged for me, I can play and daydream all day long. Even if I become food for people later, it would be enough."

Granny Ma stopped in her tracks and looked at the skinny boy who still had his face covered. "You want to be kept as a pet?"

Lin Du paused for a moment, then said, "But looking at things today, I still think that people should always have choices."

"It is wrong to be raised from birth without any choice. Our predecessors may have agreed to sacrifice and domestication, but some of our descendants do not want to be domesticated. Those runaway teenagers are the answer."

"As the pregnant woman said, everyone should have the right to freedom of choice."

The vast sky and sea, the lone smoke rising from the desert, the setting sun over the long river, the misty rain of Jiangnan, and the frozen expanse of ten thousand miles—these are experiences that those who have been raised and deprived of their freedom can never truly understand.

When a person loses their labor power, creativity, and even their thoughts, are they still truly a person?

After hearing what she said, Granny Ma silently withdrew the curse seal from her hands.

Lin Du was completely unaware that he had almost been turned into a corpse puppet and kept in captivity. After leaving the village, he removed the veil from his face, revealing a pair of dark eyes that showed a thoughtful glint. "I just looked over and saw that many of the houses, which were originally very clean, were now covered in dust."

"It's the home of those runaway teenagers."

"At least I didn't do anything bad, at least I gave them a choice."

Grandma Ma hummed in agreement, "It's not a good thing for you to worry too much."

Lin Du smiled but didn't say anything.

She didn't want to become one of those superhero stories where someone picks up a car bought with a loan and smashes it at the villain, or even accidentally damages someone's mortgaged house during a fight, or accidentally kills someone's family with a brick she throws.

Lin Du thought that the butterfly effect, the wind it stirs up, should ideally be the wind of hope.

"Mo Lin will be free of the remaining poison in five days. You should hurry up and leave then, take him back to your sect to raise him. He's been making a mess of my courtyard every day." Granny Ma said with a disdainful tone, then added, as if thinking of something, "Your senior brothers have been really busy these days."

Lin Du's eyes suddenly sharpened, but his smile deepened. "That's right. After all, if you want to completely uproot a vine, you have to cut off the roots that are spreading out and drawing life from it."

"Would you like to hear it?"

Granny Ma replied resolutely, "I don't want to."

Lin Du shrugged regretfully; Feng Yi and Ju Yuan must have gathered quite a few treasures this time.

There's still no news about that weapon-refining shop.