Putting aside the details of the Purity Plan for the moment, Li Dai looked toward the mountain gate of the Buddha Sect and saw a ragged, bedraggled little boy kneeling before it—or rather, kneeling upon the huge stone Buddha statue standing beside the gate. Behind him stood a little girl, clutching tightly to his clothes and whimpering timidly, "Brother, Nandeng, I want to go home, I'm hungry!" The little girl looked to be only five or six years old, just as emaciated as the boy, yet her large, dark-grape eyes were exceptionally bright, evoking an instant surge of pity in anyone who saw her.
Of course, Li Dai had not stopped abruptly out of an excess of sympathy or a desire to gawk; she halted her drifting because of the little girl's words: "Brother, Nandeng." How familiar those two syllables were! If one did not count the seventy thousand years she had spent traversing time, she had only just heard that name from the senior Tianyou in the quiet chamber of the Buddha Sect ruins.
Indeed, Li Dai could not be mistaken. Senior Tianyou had said that when he had completely lost his memory after suffering a deviation in his cultivation, it was a monk his own age named Nandeng who had saved him and even taken him on as a disciple. Even if that master-disciple relationship might have existed only in name, that very status had provided the Qi-deviated senior Tianyou with vital protection, allowing him to remain within the Buddha Sect. Moreover, his eventual complete recovery and res…
Chapter 629