Old Jiang looked at the scene before him, yet what appeared before his eyes was the village of Luoxia many years ago.
That day, he had rushed over in haste.
That day, the birthing room had been thick with the scent of blood.
That day, he had learned for the first time that some bonds of kinship could not truly be cast aside simply because one said they wanted nothing to do with them.
Many years ago, Jiang Huaichao had not yet been the stooped, foul-mouthed old fisherman he was now.
Back then, he had been the Deputy Envoy of the Sea Hall in the Cangming Divine Palace.
He had spent years traveling along the borders of Cangzhou, responsible for monitoring tides, water veins, and unusual movements among sea beasts.
Which water vein in the Eastern Sea was about to run wild, which shallow waters were harboring sea beasts, which towns needed to evacuate before a tidal surge—he had to inspect every one of them personally.
Everyone in the divine palace knew that Deputy Envoy Jiang of the Sea Hall was cold, aloof, and indifferent to human feelings.
He himself had believed the same.
The divine palace had given him status, authority, cultivation, and a place in the world.
In return, he ought to devote his entire life to the divine palace.
As for mortal family ties, they had always seemed insignificant to him.
That was, until the urgent letter reached his hands.
The letter had come from Luoxia Village.
The paper was damp with sea mist, and the handwriting was somewhat disordered.
There were only a few lines:
Jiang Ruoshui is having a difficult childbirth. Her condition is critical.
Please return at once, Deputy Envoy Jiang.
Jiang Ruoshui was his daughter.
She had been born from an unexpected affair between him and a fisherwoman when he was young.
It was not a past he was proud of.
At the time, Jiang Huaichao had been utterly devoted to remaining in the divine palace. He had never imagined that he would become entangled with a mortal woman.
Later, the fisherwoman gave birth to Jiang Ruoshui. She fell ill and died a few years afterward, leaving the child in Luoxia Village.
Jiang Ruoshui had no talent for cultivation.
Nor did she have any qualifications to enter the divine palace.
Over the years, Jiang Huaichao could not say that he had felt any profound fatherly affection for his daughter.
Whenever he happened to pass through Luoxia Village, he would merely leave her some silver, pills, and necessities.
He had once considered finding her a young, promising man from a wealthy family, someone who could ensure that she would have enough food and clothing and live a peaceful life.
But Jiang Ruoshui had refused.
She had chosen Tantai Jinghuan, a fisherman from the same village.
He was a handsome and gentle young man, but he had nothing to his name.
Jiang Huaichao had been so furious that he had flung his sleeve and walked away.
He had thought Jiang Ruoshui foolish beyond belief.
She clearly had a better path before her, yet she insisted on following a poor fisherman and sharing his hardships.
He still remembered how strong the wind had been outside Luoxia Village that day.
Jiang Ruoshui had stood before the courtyard gate. Her face was somewhat pale, but she had still said softly,
“Father, he treats me well.”
Jiang Huaichao had sneered.
“What good is that?”
“What can he give you?”
Jiang Ruoshui had pressed her lips together. After a long silence, she finally said,
“He can give me a home.”
At the time, Jiang Huaichao had found the idea laughable.
A home?
A few drafty wooden huts, several fishing nets worn thin from drying in the sun, and a small boat that could be overturned by the waves at any moment—how could those things possibly be called a home?
After that, he had visited Luoxia Village less and less.
He thought he had already let go.
He thought that since Jiang Ruoshui had stubbornly chosen a mortal life, she should bear the consequences herself.
Until the urgent letter reached his hands.
Jiang Huaichao had not hesitated for even a moment. He left the Sea Hall that very night.
Riding the water, he hurried toward Luoxia Village.
The sea wind tore past his ears, and the darkness of night was left far behind him.
But he was still too late.
By the time he arrived at Luoxia Village, the sky had already darkened.
Several village women had gathered outside the birthing room, all of them wearing mournful expressions.
With a single glance, Jiang Huaichao knew that he had come too late.
The scent of blood had not yet dispersed inside the room.
The midwife was holding two newborn babies. Her face was exhausted.
Jiang Ruoshui lay quietly upon the bed.
Her face was pale, her lips utterly bloodless.
Moonlight fell across her features through the window, making her look as though she were merely asleep.
Jiang Huaichao stood at the doorway, unmoving for a long time.
He had originally thought that he did not feel much affection for this daughter of his.
She had been disobedient.
She had no talent.
And for the sake of a fisherman, she had defied his good intentions as her father.
He had imagined countless times that he could simply pretend he had never had this daughter.
But when she truly lay before him, never to open her eyes again, his vision suddenly blurred.
Step by step, he walked to the bedside.
He reached out and closed Jiang Ruoshui’s eyes for her.
The instant his fingertips touched her icy lashes, he finally broke down.
He knelt beside the bed and wept like an old man in his twilight years.
Even though, at that time, he was not yet nearly as old as he was now.
The midwife held the two babies and let out a quiet sigh beside him.
She told Jiang Huaichao that Jiang Ruoshui’s health had always been weak.
Tantai Jinghuan had met with disaster while at sea, and his remains had never been found.
Overcome with grief, Jiang Ruoshui had also happened to be in the early stages of pregnancy.
She had forced herself to hold on until she gave birth to the children, but in the end, she had not survived.
As Jiang Huaichao listened, he felt as though a knife were slowly carving open his chest.
Tantai Jinghuan was dead.
Jiang Ruoshui was dead as well.
The marriage he had once looked down upon had ultimately left behind only two newborn children.
The midwife said softly,
“Deputy Envoy Jiang.”
“Ruoshui said at the end…”
“She asked you to take good care of her children.”
“Their names are Jingyue and Shui Hua.”
Jiang Huaichao raised his face, wet with tears.
He looked at the two infant girls in the midwife’s arms.
The elder sister was very quiet.
She neither cried nor fussed. She merely opened a pair of dark eyes and gazed at the moonlight outside the window.
The younger sister, however, cried fiercely.
Her tiny hands flailed about wildly, as though searching for something.
The midwife held the two children out to him.
Trembling, Jiang Huaichao reached out and took them into his arms.
When he held the elder sister, she only looked at him in silence.
But the younger sister cried even harder, waving her little hands as she tried to grab her sister’s swaddling cloth.
Awkwardly, Jiang Huaichao brought the two bundles close together.
At last, the younger sister’s tiny hand caught hold of the corner of her sister’s clothes.
Her cries gradually softened.
At that moment, Jiang Huaichao’s throat tightened painfully. He could only nod again and again.
“All right…”
“All right.”
“I’ll take care of you.”
“I’ll take care of both of you.”
He personally arranged Jiang Ruoshui’s burial.
He also went to the waters where Tantai Jinghuan had met with disaster and retrieved the wreckage of the fishing boat along with several of his belongings.
Since he could not find an intact body, he built a cenotaph for Tantai Jinghuan.
From then on, two graves stood side by side in the bamboo grove behind Luoxia Village.
One bore the name Jiang Ruoshui.
The other bore the name Tantai Jinghuan.
Jiang Huaichao sat before the graves for a long time.
The sea wind swept through the bamboo grove, and the leaves rustled like someone whispering softly.
After that night, he suddenly lost all desire to return to the divine palace and fulfill the so-called duties of the Sea Hall.
Tide reports or sea beasts—none of them mattered anymore.
Before his daughter’s cold corpse, they all seemed distant and empty.
He returned to the divine palace once.
Then he submitted a petition resigning from his position as Deputy Envoy of the Sea Hall.
The divine palace did not understand.
Some tried to persuade him.
Some urged him to stay.
Others mocked him in secret, saying that Jiang Huaichao, of all people, had actually abandoned his future in the divine palace for the sake of mortal family ties.
He did not look back.
From then on, Jiang Huaichao remained in Luoxia Village.
He became the grandfather of the two children.
The early days were extremely difficult.
Jiang Huaichao knew how to interpret tide reports, read the movements of water veins, and suppress sea beasts.
But he did not know how to soothe babies.
Jingyue was too quiet—so quiet that it broke one’s heart.
She rarely cried. Whenever she awoke, she would simply open her eyes and gaze at the moon, as though looking at a place no one else could see.
Shui Hua, on the other hand, was constantly fussy.
She cried when she was hungry.
She cried even when she was not hungry.
She cried when she was sleepy.
She cried even when she was not sleepy.
And she cried whenever she could not see her sister.
So long as the two children were placed together, Shui Hua would reach out to grab Jingyue.
And although Jingyue was only a tiny baby, she would always quietly let her little sister hold on.
Jiang Huaichao went from being clumsy and helpless at first to learning how to change swaddling cloths, cook rice porridge, and mend the children’s little clothes.
At night, when the two children refused to sleep, he would carry one in each arm and walk circles around the courtyard.
He would walk until dawn.
Until the tide receded.
He began fishing.
He began repairing boats.
He began drying nets, selling fish, and patching the eaves alongside everyone else in the village.
At first, whenever the villagers saw a cultivator who had once served in the divine palace standing before the stove with two children in his arms, boiling a pot of rice porridge into paste, they could not help laughing.
Jiang Huaichao would glare coldly.
“What are you laughing at?”
The village women would only laugh harder.
They still came over afterward to teach him how to feed the children rice paste, how to bathe them, and how to heat water at night without startling them awake.
The cold and aloof Deputy Envoy of the Sea Hall from long ago gradually became Old Jiang of Sunset Village.
The two children grew up bit by bit as well.
Jingyue had always been quiet.
She did not like making a fuss, nor did she like crying.
When the village children chased seabirds along the shore, she would sit at the entrance to the courtyard and watch the tides rise and fall.
She rarely said what she wanted and almost never caused anyone trouble.
Shui Hua, however, was the complete opposite.
She was like a little fish fresh from the water, never able to sit still for even a moment.
If she was not chasing chickens, she was herding dogs.
If she was not splashing the water jar in the courtyard until water covered the ground, she was sneaking off with Jiang Huaichao’s fish basket to catch crabs by the sea.
Once, in order to prove that she was braver than the village boys, she climbed the mast of an old boat resting on the shore while Jiang Huaichao was not looking. Half the village was frightened into shouting from below.
Jiang Huaichao’s face turned livid with anger.
After carrying her down, he grabbed a boat pole and was about to give her a beating.
Then Jingyue, standing nearby, gently tugged at the hem of his clothes.
“Grandpa.”
“My sister’s frightened.”
Jiang Huaichao lowered his head and took a look.
Shui Hua’s face was indeed pale, but she still held her chin high and stubbornly denied it.
“I’m not!”
“I’m not scared at all!”
Jiang Huaichao scolded her for being reckless.
He scolded her for acting like some little demon that had crawled out of the sea.
But every time he finished scolding her, he would wipe her hair dry.
Jingyue, meanwhile, would quietly sit to the side and use a cloth to wipe her sister’s face.
Whenever Shui Hua was unhappy, she would throw herself into Jingyue’s arms and complain.
“Sister, that old man scolded me again.”
Jingyue was clearly only a little girl herself, yet she always acted like an older sister, gently patting Shui Hua’s back.
“Don’t climb so high next time.”
Shui Hua grumbled.
“Then he shouldn’t have scolded me so harshly.”
Jingyue glanced at Jiang Huaichao and nodded with great seriousness.
“Mm. Grandpa was wrong too.”
Jiang Huaichao was so angry that his beard bristled and his eyes bulged.
But after they returned home, he would still fry an extra little fish for each of the two children.
Sometimes, when Jiang Huaichao looked at them, his heart would ache.
So this was what family felt like.
The bickering.
The trouble.
The exhaustion.
They kept you from sleeping at night and had you worrying yourself sick throughout the day.
And yet they were also impossible to let go.
After the two children grew a little older, Jiang Huaichao began teaching them the most basic breathing exercises.
He had not held out much hope to begin with.
After all, Jiang Ruoshui had possessed no talent for cultivation.
Tantai Jinghuan had merely been an ordinary fisherman.
He had only thought that if the two children could draw qi into their bodies, they would at least have some means of protecting themselves in the future.
What shocked him, however, was that the very first time Jingyue and Shui Hua practiced breathing, they simultaneously stirred the moisture in the courtyard.
The moon was bright that night.
The two little girls sat cross-legged in the courtyard, following the method Jiang Huaichao had taught them, breathing in and out.
After only a short while, ripples suddenly spread across the water jar.
Damp vapor surged in from every direction, as though it had heard some silent summons.
Jiang Huaichao stood in the courtyard and remained speechless for a long time.
At first, he was overwhelmed with joy.
His two granddaughters were not mortals.
They possessed talent.
Extraordinary talent.
Talent so immense that it surpassed even his understanding.
But then that joy turned into fear.
Such talent should never have appeared in the children of two ordinary fishermen.
It should never have appeared in both of them at once.
Jiang Huaichao did not sleep that entire night.
He sat in the courtyard, watching the room where the two children slept, as his heart slowly sank.
He had once been the Deputy Envoy of the Sea Hall.
He had witnessed too many anomalies in the water veins and knew too many secrets of the divine palace that ordinary people would never have any chance to encounter.
The affinity Jingyue and Shui Hua possessed with the tides could not possibly be explained by an ordinary Water Spirit Root.
Their bond with the sea was as though they had been born to be acknowledged by it.
From then on, Jiang Huaichao became even more cautious.
He forbade the two children from cultivating in front of others.
He also forbade them from revealing anything unusual outside the village.
Whenever Shui Hua refused to accept this and complained that she was clearly very talented, so why could she not show everyone else, Jiang Huaichao would pull a stern face and scold her.
He thought that as long as he did this, their days could continue on like this, one day after another.
There was nothing wrong with that.
At least they were together.
Until that day...
