This gray-robed woman — if Jiang Feng were present, he would likely be so emotional that he couldn't even speak. She was none other than the wife he had been yearning for night and day, separated from him for twenty or thirty years.
She was also Xu Meng, the previous generation's Saintess of the Green Moon lineage of the Moon God Sect.
Twenty or thirty years had widened the distance between Xu Meng and Jiang Feng, yet they had never managed to pull Xu Meng's thoughts back from the Eastern Kingdom.
Nearly every hour, every moment, she was thinking of her husband far away — thinking of that child, Jiang Chen, who had been without a mother since infancy.
Xu Meng managed a sorrowful smile, murmuring to herself as if speaking in a trance: "Xuan'er, your mother really is biased. I've only ever been able to stay by your side. Your two older brothers — one lost his mother before he could even crawl. The other was driven out of the Moon God Sect at the age of twelve, cast out to fend for himself in the outside world, and now who knows where he's wandering. Tell me, isn't your mother biased?"
This young girl was the new generation's Saintess of the Green Moon lineage, named Xu Qingxuan, addressed by others as Saintess Qingxuan — the most outstanding and talented Saintess of the Moon God Sect in the current era.
Qingxuan's heart felt as though it were being sliced open. She knew that over the years, her mother's longing for her family had transformed into a kind of inner demon, one that no one would ever be able to drag her out of.
Unless... unless one day, her mother could reunite with her father.
As for that father she had never met, Xu Qingxuan did occasionally feel a twinge of curiosity. However, everyone in the entire Green Moon lineage — from the elders who had passed down their techniques to her etiquette instructors and even the servants — had worked to brainwash her.
They told her that her father was of a lowly, worldly bloodline, and that it was the Moon God Sect that had rescued her and her mother from that filthy secular world, severing ties with that wretched father so they would not sink into the mire of the mortal realm.
Such brainwashing had, to one degree or another, been effective on Xu Qingxuan.
She would sometimes wonder — was her father really that terrible?
But if he truly was that terrible, then why had her mother spent all these years unable to let him go?
So in Xu Qingxuan's heart, her father was a contradiction — smeared by the words of others, yet also shaped by the image her mother had painted of him.
Sometimes, Xu Qingxuan thought that if only she could meet her father, all the questions swirling inside her would finally be answered.
As for her brother...
Her brother back in the Eastern Kingdom — Xu Qingxuan had never had any real concept of him. She only had the vague impression that it was a place so humble it could almost be disregarded entirely.
And as for the other brother, her twin — even though he was only fifteen minutes older than her, even though they had both been born within the Moon God Sect, the number of times she had actually seen him was pitifully few.
Ever since her bloodline test, she had been protected — guarded like a princess.
Her twin brother, on the other hand, had been discarded like a pile of garbage after his bloodline test.
From that point on, the fates of these twin siblings diverged completely. Over time, Xu Qingxuan's memories of this twin brother grew faint and hazy.
After all, they had been separated when she was very young. They had never met again since, so her impressions of him had become nearly a blur.
Yet she knew that in her mother's heart, he was her son — her own flesh and blood. To watch her own child torn away and cast out of the Moon God Sect, driven from Frost Moon City, left to wander the outside world — for any mother, that was undoubtedly the cruelest thing in the world.
Xu Meng had tried, more than once, to flee the Moon God Sect and search for her son, to search for her husband.
But the Moon God Sect simply would not permit her to take a single step beyond its borders. In her earliest attempts, she had at least managed to make it past the sect's gates.
Later on, she couldn't even leave the territory of the Green Moon lineage itself. After her repeated escape attempts, she had been placed on the sect's watchlist as a priority surveillance target.
She had gone from being the Saintess of her generation to becoming the disgrace of the Green Moon lineage.
A Moon God Sect Saintess who couldn't let go of some lowly-blooded mortal — she was an absolutely fallen Saintess, an absolute shame upon the sect.
If not for Xu Qingxuan's sake, Xu Meng might very well have been executed on the spot.
For the Green Moon lineage, with Xu Qingxuan now in the picture, Xu Meng had essentially become worthless. The so-called Saintess succession no longer required a redundant figure like her.
Her only remaining identity was that of Saintess Qingxuan's birth mother. Without that single connection, she would have had no foothold whatsoever in the Green Moon lineage.
No matter how the outside world despised Xu Meng, belittled her, or looked down on her — Xu Qingxuan had never once looked down on her mother or kept her at a distance.
Xu Qingxuan had undergone countless rounds of brainwashing growing up. Quite a few people had even told her that her mother was an unclean woman, a disgrace to the Moon God Sect.