Zuo Lin'an stood up and walked over to Xu Youyou, looking him up and down. Seeing that he was completely unharmed without a single bruise, he figured his friend hadn't been beaten.
Xu Youyou chuckled, glanced at Zuo Lin'an's already packed luggage, and then began packing his own clothes.
“Actually, I was pretty worried when I first went back, but to become a dungeon boss with you, I still plucked up the courage to bring it up.”
“At the time, my aunt stared at me expressionlessly for a long time, giving me goosebumps. Just as I was starting to panic, she actually agreed outright!”
Seeing this, Zuo Lin'an stood up to help him pack.
“Did you ask her why? That shouldn't be the case. Aunt Mei usually protects you fiercely!”
Xu Youyou was uncharacteristically serious, and even his expression calmed down.
“Of course I did. After all, you're not the only one surprised; I really wanted to know too.”
“And the result was...”
Zuo Lin'an grew interested. “What happened? Did Aunt Mei stop caring about you?”
Xu Youyou shook his head. “No, it's actually because of some things that happened to me when I was a kid, which severely shortened my lifespan.”
Zuo Lin'an's expression flickered.
“What do you mean? Severely shortened lifespan?”
Xu Youyou sighed. “My aunt told me that our Xu family was originally a scholarly family, a prominent clan!”
“My mother was also a young lady of a wealthy family who had been well-educated since childhood. But because my grandparents wanted to fight over my great-grandfather's inheritance, they actually ended up selling my mother into the deep mountains...”
“You know how this world is. The more remote a place is, the stronger the feudal mentality. My mother was hounded to death by them, and my aunt rescued me.”
Zuo Lin'an nodded. He hadn't known about this before.
“Actually, the specter bound to my aunt is my mother.”
Hearing this, Zuo Lin'an was truly shocked!
“What?!”
He had accidentally learned before that Aunt Mei was a Specter Master, but he never expected that her specter was actually Xu Youyou's mother!
This...
Was that really okay?
Didn't Xu Youyou mind?
Seeing Zuo Lin'an's slightly complicated expression, Xu Youyou waved his hand casually. “For an ordinary person to fuse with a specter, it's very difficult, but also very simple.”
“As long as the specter is willing to fuse.”
“So, the specters bound to Specter Masters are always their dearest loved ones.”
Zuo Lin'an finally breathed a sigh of relief.
That made sense.
“Then what happened next? Why was your lifespan severely shortened?”
Xu Youyou sighed. “After my aunt became a Specter Master, she joined a mutual aid organization called the Starry Chat Group.”
“So she was usually very busy with many things, and since she had no experience taking care of a baby, she hired a nanny for me. Everything was fine at first, but who would have thought that something would happen later?”
“Because of that mutual aid organization, my aunt and some other uncles and aunts provoked some ruthless enemies. They found an opportunity to kidnap me and threw me into an abandoned dungeon.”
Zuo Lin'an frowned as he listened.
An abandoned dungeon?
“Did that abandoned dungeon have something bad in it?”
Xu Youyou shook his head. “There wasn't anything bad inside.”
“It's just that there was a problem with the dungeon itself. The specter inside had already dissipated, but some of its rule-based power still lingered within.”
Zuo Lin'an asked, “A power that can drain a living person's lifespan?”
Xu Youyou denied, “No, it's time.”
“The flow of time in that abandoned dungeon was very different from the outside world. Spending one day inside was equivalent to a year outside.”
“And that's not all.”
“Once you stay inside for ten consecutive days, even after you leave the dungeon, you'll be tainted with a trace of that rule-based power, which accelerates your aging speed.”
Rate on N.U.
