Times Have Changed [MDZS]

Chapter 1: Jin

Ah, do heaven really hate him for taking the easy way out so it sent him back to the past? Yes, he had realized that he was thrown in the past. Because that deep red light that shone right before the miasma of resentful energy consumed him could be nothing but a light from an activated array, and his situation right now was something that he would never forget happening in his previous life.

Damn it! He just wanted to die!

"Should I just let myself rot?" he absentmindedly asked regardless of the fact that he was alone. He lived in this graveyard before alone, so there's no reason for another being to join him now and answer his question. Unfortunately, there is.

"You better not," said the eerie voice beside his ear.

The Yiling Patriarch loves the company of inhuman beings more than anyone else, but he felt strangely disturbed right now. Slowly turning his head, Wei Wuxian finally noticed the creature that accompanied him right from when his spirit landed to his past self's body.

Two pair of eyes met. The red ones squinted into obvious mischief. The grey ones dilated in shock and fear.

It was as if Wei Wuxian's heart jump out of his chest the moment he had a clear picture of the black creature beside him.

"Ahhhhhhhh!!!!!" he shouted as his body regained a strength that he would never have thought he still have at this moment. It was as if he was injected with super high dosage of anesthesia, allowing him to move and distance himself from the menace...maybe minus the drowsiness caused by normal anesthesia.

"Dog!" Wei Wuxian yelled in a high-pitched voice, without thinking about his status as one of the most feared evil incarnate. It had always been hard for him to bring it up, but although the Yiling Patriarch was known for being ever-so invincible, he'd become a coward whenever he faced a dog, deeply rooted from his childhood trauma during his stay in Yiling as a street rat.

"Lan Zhan!" he hadn't notice what he had said until the demonic being, well he was truthfully a demonic beast given his ability to talk, laughed at him.

"Lan Zhan here, Lan Zhan there. When you wake up, you called his name. When you became afraid, you call for him," the demonic beast ridiculed.

"St-st-st-st-st-stay away from me!" Wei Wuxian embraced himself as if it would give him protection.

The demonic beast just snickered with this unreasonableness. He was clearly not moving from his place. "Ah, even when you were in a three-month-self-persecution, you still call his name in your dreams, or was it nightmare?"

Wei Wuxian was surprised, "H-h-how did you know that? But first distance yourself from me!"

"You invaded my cave, and disturbed me from my slumber? It's not like I was given a choice to unhear your rumblings. If I was fully awake back then, I would surely gag your mouth."

Wei Wuxian, "Okay? W-why are you not distancing yourself?"

"Shouldn't you be surprised that there's an owner to the place that you had invaded? Why are you focusing on things like distancing?" the demonic beast said in exasperation.

"I-I am afraid of dogs," Wei Wuxian admitted.

"Oh?" the other thought it was funny how the feared founder of diabolism is afraid of dog, not to mention, even in a relatively small dog as him. "Sorry then, my injured body cannot move."

That's when Wei Wuxian noticed that the thick black fur of the talking dog was drenched, probably by blood. Added with injury, the small size and full of meng look of the beast would normally induce pity from humans, but Wei Wuxian's trauma was an anomaly.

Hearing no answer from his deliberate pitiful act, the beast sighed, "Are you not going to dress my wound? Even just to repay my kindness of bringing you to the past?"

"You're the one that brought me here?" Wei Wuxian angrily asked. Sometimes anger could be a cure to stuttering.

"Normally, you should be happy," the beast stated.

"Instead of helping you, I might just kill you," Wei Wuxian declared as a matter of fact, failing to remember that he couldn't even stand this relatively far distance between them.

Demonic Beast, "That's if you could go near me."

Wei Wuxian, "You're right, then I'll just let you die on your own!"

"Let's calm down, can we not?" the talking dog pacified. "I didn't send you here."

"So now your washing your hands of the deed?" Wei Wuxian laughed bitterly. He didn't want to be here and now the perpetrator that threw him in this mess was treating him dumb.

"I was indeed the reason, but you were just caught," the demonic beast explained.

"Of all the times your array could be triggered, why then?" He was really becoming braver and braver the longer the dog and him converses.

"First, it is my dead friend's gift to me before he succumbed to the cycle of reincarnation, not mine. Second, I couldn't control when it would be activated. You know what a sacrificial ritual is, right? The number of lives needed was reached, with your blood as the catalyst, the ritual was completed. Maybe it was all coincidence, or maybe yours and the Burial Mounds' fate are really connected."

"Why travel through time?" Let's say that what the dog said was reasonable, Wei Wuxian would first believe in him.

"Oh that? It's...it's also a by-product," he guiltily admitted.

"What?"

"Hahaha. You see, you see, the power used to trap me was anything but weak, so the power needed to lift it should be also tremendous. Well, the clashing of two powers might have ripped a passage in the space and time. Since your blood was what mainly powered the array, we were sent back to when you first stepped on the Burial Mounds."

"This..." Wei Wuxian couldn't believe that he was really someone that would always bring trouble upon himself.

"Now, now, shouldn't you be happy? You freed me, and in exchange, you get the chance to save those that could still be saved," the dog talked sense and that woke him.

Jin Zixuan was still alive. His shijie was still alive. The Wen remnants were still safe.

He indeed should be thankful.

Unwillingly dragging his injured body towards his most hated creature, Wei Wuxian faced his fear to help the dog with his injuries.

And that's the start of Wei Wuxian's cynophobia rehabilitation and his journey of changing the future with a dog friend.

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