Chapter 2: The Destiny Cannot Be Avoid
The hot sun shone downward. The shadow of a 14-year-old boy stretched out, and his knees touched the rough ground. The blood was still flowing. The sparkling eyes concealed seven-tenths of sorrow, and three-tenths of raging were within his chest.
"Go back to where you came from," the young man replied in a plain voice. Without looking back, he could tell who the comer was, because, for the past six days, the young woman was the only one who frequented his mother's grave.
The girl of the same age looked at the wicker basket of the food she had placed there last time. The basket remains in its original condition, unchanged. The girl did not speak. She just picked up the old basket and put the new one in the same spot. "You have to eat something, Xueming. Otherwise, ... " The girl held back her words and prepared to turn around.
"Jin ... lan", a hoarse voice uttered the girl's name so lightly that it sounded like a whisper.
A faint smile appeared on the face of the young girl named ... Jinlan. She paused her feet, ready to turn around, moving her beautiful face toward the young boy of her age. Even though she felt confused and had a guilty conscience about Xueming, she still had a good feeling about her first lover, always.
"Since you have chosen your own path, why are you here being nice to me? ... You just go. I, Xueming, do not need any pity from anyone.” His voice was light and hoarse, but every word was said with firmness and resolution.
Speaking of the relationship between Mu Jinlan and Xueming, it ended a year ago on the day he lost his extraordinary talent. On the day of his twilight, the Mu family clearly showed that they wanted to completely cut off the relationship between him and Mu Jinlan. Not to mention the strange status of Xueming in the Yong family because his mother, the youngest daughter of the current leader of the family, was pregnant without a husband. Plus, she did not even mention half of a word about Xueming's father. This caused her two older brothers to always thwart the approval of Xueming as part of the Yong family.
When Xueming was seven years old, he showed potential geniuses. As a young boy who was more intelligent than those in the same generation in the Yong family, he could complete the first level of the basic Qi cultivation when he was only eight years old. As a result, Xueming's two uncles could no longer argue about Xueming's status in the Yong family and thus had to obey the orders of the clan leader. No matter how much they hated Xueming in their heart, in a world where a man with the most strength possessed everything, if you are the strongest, the others will follow and admire you.
When he reached ten years old Yong Xueming made it through to the second level of the basic Qi cultivation. The fame could no longer be concealed within the Yong clan, and that was the starting point for the various families in Golden Bird City to bring beautiful girls to get to know a fatherless child like Xueming. One of them was Mu Jinlan, a gorgeous girl of the same age as Xueming. Xueming's cousins in the Yong family were all envious of him.
Xueming's mother, Yong Mei Hwa, received the fruit of merit from her son. People of the Yong family who had been estranged now flattered her. In the past, Yong Mei Hwa’s body was always weak. After giving birth to Xueming, she succumbed to a strange illness. She would often suffer coldness, especially at night, the coldness was unspeakably excruciating. However, after returning to the main residence of the family without having to live in a separate tiny house like before, she obviously became healthier, not to mention the many get well gifts and great tonics from various visitors.
But the happiness only lasted for two years. The night during the Yong Clan's youth training in the Beast Forest area, no one knew what happened during training. When returning home from the training site, Xueming’s left eye was completely blind because there was something like a black, shiny stone filling tightly inside the left eye socket. Despite having no other wounds, he steadily lost the Qi he had cultivated. After one year passed, his Qi reduced to the first level. Even though the leader of the Yong family invited doctors to heal him or nourish him with magic medicine, his Qi was never recovered.
When the misfortune came, Yong Lishuo—the would-be leader of the Yong clan, opportunistically expelled him from the home sweet home crowded with flattering people to be stuck in a rat hole once again. When he lost his power, people abandoned him, including his young female lover, Mu Jinlan, whom his family internally approached for engagement but no formal proposal yet. Worse, the Mu family disregarded his feeling by announcing the engagement of Mu Jinlan--who was becoming increasingly beautiful—with the young talented boy from the Li family, an old noble family from a big city with a lot of fortune, money, and prestige, all of which Xueming had nothing to match.
At first, Xueming was furious and tried to meet with Mu Jinlan, believing that she was manipulated by her family. But as days went by, the truth began to emerge. His love for her could not be compared to the future glory of the young girl. One day he secretly saw Mu Jinlan smiling all the time while walking lovey-dovey with the young man from the Li family in the Golden Bird City market. The fury that he used to have faded away. At that time Xueming was only thirteen years old, but he understood the world of cultivators as deeply as the middle-aged adults. The young man saw human nature through and through. Despite how hurtful it was, he could only accept what had happened. In this world, only the strong have the right to set their own path. But when he was powerless, the only thing he could do was just accept fate and move on. From that moment, Xueming was determined to let everything go according to destiny.
Although he let go of things, it seemed that the misfortune wasn’t over yet. A year later, Yong Ping, Xueming’s grandfather, passed away. The last refuge of Xueming and his mother was gone. Yong Lishuo became the next clan leader. This uncle never liked Xueming from the beginning. Plus, his younger brother, Yong Li Jun—Xueming’s other uncle—was not happy with the fact that his own father was fond of Xueming. At first, he refused to drive the boy out of the clan, and when he was aware of his talent, he brought the boy into the main house. Moreover, he also gave away the Yong clan's enormous resources to nurture Xueming. Some of those resources should have been provided to his two sons. Instead, he himself had to use his own wealth to train his sons who had ordinary talent until they made it to the second level of the basic Qi cultivation, in order to be eligible for the entrance examination of a good training academy. This cost him a lot of fortune. Therefore, resentment was always there in his chest.
When there was no other power to oppose the two uncles, Xueming was therefore expelled from the family. Although they didn’t banish Yong Mei Hwa, they raked up the story of the past, claiming that she had brought disgrace to the family to drive her out of the family’s main residential area and send her to a distant place. Although the family still gave her allowances to support her daily life, it wasn’t enough for a prideful one like her to accept. Expelling Xueming was no different from throwing her out as well. She would rather drink her own blood rather than beg for food scraps from her two brothers. Therefore, on that day the mother and son had to wander out of the Yong family.
Their new dwelling outside the Yong clan was dilapidated, unable to protect them from the harsh cold wind. The money they used to have was running low, unable to buy good medicine to nourish Yong Mei Hwa's body. Even though Xueming wandered for a job, he was bullied by the Yong family in many ways.
Also, the despicable Yong Sue, one of Yong Lishuo's eldest sons who once secretly had a crush on Mu Jinlan, told the story of Xueming to Mu Jinlan's fiancée of the Li Family, thus causing him to be jealous, run amok, and use the power of the big family to persecute Xueming even more. This made it extremely difficult for Xueming to make a living, even just for a single dime.
Eventually, Yong Mei Hwa's weak body could not endure the sickness and died a few months later after her father’s passing. Because she chose to walk proudly out of her family, even after death, she refused to let her corpse be buried with those of the Yong family. Before death, she merely told Xueming to go and find his father. She believed that he had never abandoned them both.
In Xueming's heart, he had held a grudge on his father since childhood because his father deserted him and his mother, but his mother’s parting instructions must be fulfilled. Therefore, he now adopted his father’s family name, which was “Long”, and took the last memento from his mother, waiting for the day he would meet his father so he could show it to him and confirm their relationship status.
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On the seventh morning after Yong Mei Hwa's death, Xueming already came to terms with everything that had happened. Although his cultivation journey ended because of the past meteorite crash, it was partly due to the persecution from Yong Sue and Yong Fu that caused him to get lost in the deep forest. Although he had grudges in the chest, his incompetence didn’t favor the path of retaliation. Therefore, he could only keep the resentment inside and chose to move on with life.
Xueming didn't have many belongings. Unable to make a living in the Golden Bird City, he had to travel a long distance across the forest, heading for a big city either to find a job or an academy with various academic textbooks not related to the Qi cultivation. With his ingenuity, soon Xueming must be more or less successful.
With that realization, Xueming bowed his head three times in front of his mother's grave before saying goodbye to her, planning that when he had enough money, he would return and renovate his mother's grave to be more attractive.
Now Xueming's face had a bitter smile. When he looked back at the Golden Bird City, the memories of the last 10 years slowly flowed into the youth's brain. When he made up his mind, the boy flicked his head to look forward with no more hesitation and walked his way through the Demon Forest in the west, heading for to the Purple Jade City.
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone