HDRDTH -Chapter 116 The Anchor in Your Heart Is Too Heavy

That face.

Wrinkled all over, a patch of graying beard hanging from the chin, eyes deep like a black hole.

But the facial structure, the expression between the brows and eyes…

This damn thing looked exactly like him—thirty years older!

Yu Xian even subconsciously touched his own face.

“Sir.” Yu Xian swallowed nervously and forced himself to stay calm. “Who are you? Is this some new cosmetic clinic marketing trick? Reconstructing my face like this… that must be expensive, right?”

The old man ignored Yu Xian’s nonsense.

He grinned slightly, a smile carrying a kind of all-seeing ease.

“What, just because you changed your skin, you don’t recognize yourself anymore?” The old man patted the bluestone beside him. “Sit.”

Yu Xian rolled his eyes, walked over, and sat down heavily. He was the type to go with the flow anyway.

“Cut the mysterious act.” Yu Xian looked at the old man’s bare bamboo rod. “Old sir, you don’t even have a line, let alone a hook. Are you fishing air here?”

The old man chuckled softly and looked back at the calm river surface.

“Fishing… why must there be a line?”

His voice was steady.

“There are fish in the water, and a hook in the heart. The line connects heaven and earth. With a visible line, you only catch dead things in water. With an invisible line, I fish the living currents of this world.”

Yu Xian’s eye twitched twice.

“Old sir, I’ll give you 99 points for that performance—one point less so you don’t get arrogant.” He waved impatiently. “If you’re just idling here, say so. Don’t talk about ‘world currents.’ Look at the water—there isn’t even a bubble. This is textbook empty-cast behavior.”

The old man wasn’t angry.

He turned and looked Yu Xian straight in the eyes, extremely seriously.

“You say I’m empty-casting. But you?”

He pointed at Yu Xian’s chest.

“You dislike mundane troubles and always want to hide in a quiet pond. But your nature… wherever you go, becomes the center of a whirlpool.”

“You use the most expensive rod, the best bait, wanting to be an unbothered salted fish.”

“So tell me—what have you actually caught?”

Yu Xian was hit right in the sore spot and jumped up like a cat whose tail had been stepped on.

“That’s bad luck!”

He exploded in grievance.

“I wanted to catch a crucian carp for soup, and I hooked a nuclear submarine instead! I wanted a quiet nap, and someone spent three billion buying out seats to my concert! I casually dropped a worm, and I pulled up some bronze relic that looks like it belonged to Yu the Great!”

He gestured wildly in the air.

“How is that my fault?! I spent my previous life fighting in business until I was exhausted. Finally retired, I just want a peaceful life. Why the hell does heaven keep dumping all this crap on me?!”

The old man listened quietly.

Only when Yu Xian finished and sat back down, panting, did he speak slowly.

“It’s not heaven dumping it on you.”

He tapped the bamboo rod lightly toward Yu Xian’s chest.

“It’s because the anchor in your heart is too heavy.”

Yu Xian froze.

“You say you want to lie low, but deep in your bones, that drive to dominate and control everything has never been put down.”

The old man sighed deeply, his voice carrying endless years of weariness.

“You cook, and you push it to the extreme. You write music, and it becomes war songs guarding mountains and rivers. Even your casual complaints carry the killing intent to dismantle entire intelligence networks.”

“That’s not the laziness of a salted fish. That’s arrogance—looking down on this world from a higher dimension.”

He turned back toward the vast river.

“Your aura is too strong. Great karmic threads, heavy destinies… they sense you, and they fly toward you like moths to fire.”

Yu Xian fell silent.

He suddenly remembered what Old An, the farmer from Wild Boar Valley, once said:

“When you cast your line with calculation, what comes up is always something big in the world.”

It was exactly the same as what this old man said.

“What exactly is this place?” Yu Xian took a deep breath and asked, suppressing the shock in his heart.

The old man raised the bamboo rod and pointed at the wide river before them.

“This river is called the Wei River.”

Buzz—

A thunderclap seemed to explode in Yu Xian’s mind.

Wei River?

A straight hook?

And a man who looked exactly like him thirty years in the future?

He swallowed hard, his throat dry as if it were about to smoke.

“You just said… that deep in my bones, I’ve never stopped wanting to dominate the world.” Yu Xian stared at him. “And you also mentioned something about… three thousand years ago…”

The old man didn’t look at him. He simply continued speaking to himself.

“I was the same as you back then.”

He sighed, as if recalling something unimaginably distant.

“Before I was seventy, I sold meat, ran a tavern. I just wanted to live as an ordinary man. Sit by the river, hold a bamboo rod with no line, and enjoy peace.”

“But there was a young man surnamed Ji who kept bothering me every day.”

“Couldn’t drive him away no matter what.”

The old man shook his head, his tone carrying both helplessness and a faint, victorious smile.

“He said the world was in chaos, and insisted I come out of retirement.”

Yu Xian was completely stunned.

He stared blankly at the old man in front of him.

That name—one that resounded through the entire history of Huaxia, deified countless times—was now being spoken so casually.

“You… you are…?”