Chapter 1624 — Bing Tang's Origins, Part Two
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
But when she truly beheld that letter, Bing Tang discovered that, in the depths of her heart, she still could not let it go! She wanted to know -- wanted to know who her parents were, wanted to know why they had abandoned her! To bear her and then not raise her -- why had they done such a thing?
And the letter had been written by the Hidden Tang family, which only deepened Bing Tang's confusion and fury. The Hidden Tang family, though its influence did not rival the Ice Palace's, was still a colossus in the mundane world, mightier by far than any ordinary great clan!
Such a clan, and yet they could cast away a child? Had they done it deliberately, or without meaning to? And now that they knew she was the Ice Palace's palace master, they thought to claim her back? Where had they been before?
Yet for all her anger, Bing Tang still found herself pleading her parents' case. Perhaps back then they truly had lost her by mishap; or perhaps they had not failed to search for her -- they had been searching, but she dwelt within the Ice Palace; how could they ever have found her? They could never have found her at all!
"Aunt Qing, you and ** raised me, taught me my martial arts; you are the ones dearest to me! But my birth parents, for whatever reason they abandoned me, are my parents after all, and it is impossible to say I do not care. Still, I only wish to understand what happened back then, to understand my origins... Aunt Qing, you have never once spoken of how you and **, that venerable one, found me. Now... will you tell me?"
"Ah!" Xiao Qing sighed. "It was not that I would not speak, but that I feared speaking would disturb your heart and delay your **. You were small then, your nature still unsteady. But now you are a fine hand at the peak of the late Heaven tier, and there is no need to fret over such things any longer. Yet since you never asked again, I never brought up those sorrowful old matters of my own accord. Now that this has come to pass, I may as well tell you how it was!"
"Very well, Aunt Qing, speak." Bing Tang gestured for her to go on. Her feelings had already settled back into calm; her face was perfectly placid, betraying neither joy nor sorrow.
"In those days I was not yet a Heaven tier expert -- but I was only a hair's breadth from breaking through from the peak of the late Earth tier into the Heaven tier. Seeing this, the old palace master took me out to travel, that I might break through to the Heaven tier in one stroke..." Xiao Qing said. "You know as well as I do that in most cases, everything before the Earth tier depends on effort, and everything after it depends on fortune. The Heaven tier is no easy threshold to cross. Back then the Ice Palace's strength was not yet as overbearing as it is today; one more Heaven tier expert was naturally a good thing! So the old palace master took me to roam the mundane world... and the place we roamed to was none other than where the Hidden Tang family makes its home..."
"What! It really was where the Hidden Tang family is!" Bing Tang's expression shifted a little. She had harbored doubts about the letter's credibility, but hearing Xiao Qing's words, her heart clenched at once. Could it be that everything written in that letter was true?
"It was indeed where the Hidden Tang family makes its home... It was a night of driving snow. The old palace master and I were going out to seek insight, to see whether there might be some opening for breakthrough," Xiao Qing said.
Bing Tang nodded. In their Ice Palace lineage, the ** methods all took ice and cold as their foundation; the colder the land and the weather, the more favorable it was to **!
"And when I and the old palace master came to a stretch of open wilderness to prepare for **, we suddenly heard an infant's cries, rising again and again," Xiao Qing said. "Curious, I and your ** followed the sound, and there on the snow we found a swaddling bundle..."