Fang Yuan weighs what the Spring Autumn Cicada cost him: hundreds of thousands killed to cultivate and refine it, and it did not survive the trip back with him. He decides the loss changes nothing, since he refined it once before and can refine it again, and what he kept instead is five hundred years of memory of treasures, figures, and events still to come. He is still a mortal with no aperture and no path opened, so cultivation, not treasure-hunting, is the immediate problem. Reaching a third-level Gu Master would let him leave Qing Mao Mountain safely, and the Awakening Ceremony that starts that climb is the next morning. ch. 2
His twin brother Fang Zheng comes in to shut his window and finds him standing in the rain, worrying that their aunt and uncle will disapprove of him staying up so late. Fang Yuan’s memory fills in the family history behind the visit: their parents died on a clan mission when he was three, their aunt and uncle absorbed the inheritance while treating the boys harshly, and Fang Yuan’s own reputation as a talented, cold child was built on reciting Earth’s popular ancient poems. In his previous life the Awakening Ceremony revealed Fang Zheng as the A grade talent and himself as only C grade, a reversal that hardened his aunt and uncle’s coldness toward him and let old resentment in his brother surface as rivalry. He recalls hating all of it back then; now, holding five hundred years of perspective, he feels calm rather than bitter toward his brother, his aunt and uncle, or the enemies who cornered him in his previous life, naming the demonic path’s core stance instead: no compromise, and no need for revenge either. He sends Fang Zheng off with a glance sharp enough to unsettle him. ch. 2
