Hu Zi
Hu Zi is the third disciple of Tian Xie Zi and the third senior brother of Su Ming. A burly, forthright cultivator who drinks, snores, boasts, and spies on his fellow disciples, he is also a self-taught master of Runes and the incarnation of the Vessel Spirit of the Great Yin Sealing Rune. His seemingly comic habits conceal both the Dao of Entering Dreams and a fierce conception of family: whenever the Ninth Summit is threatened, Hu Zi becomes its defender, its Rune Spirit, and eventually one of the leaders who carries its name across True Morning Dao World.
The defining tension in Hu Zi's life is between the path naturally suited to him and the battles he insists on fighting for others. Sleeping and dreaming open his most distinctive Dao, while his origin gives him extraordinary affinity with Runes. Yet he repeatedly gives up rest, drink, and even the safe study of Runes when his family needs a shield. That stubborn loyalty costs him years of loneliness, grave wounds, and finally his life, but it also makes the Ninth Summit a home that survives separation, war, and an aeon's destruction.
Biography
A loud, sleeping guide on the Ninth Summit
Hu Zi meets Su Ming as the Ninth Summit's third disciple, loudly calls himself “Grandpa Hu,” and arrives drinking from a wine gourd. He is supposed to welcome the new disciple, but his introduction also establishes the contradictions that define him: he looks simple and speaks without restraint, yet watches the mountain closely and takes pride in knowing its people and hidden routes. He brings Su Ming through the summit's changing frozen passages, even using Eldest Senior Brother's breath to warm his wine, and quickly treats the newcomer as someone entitled to the summit's private life and warmth. (Chapters 219–224)
His drunken sleep is not mere laziness. Su Ming observes that Hu Zi moves from drunkenness into sleep and from sleep into dreams, where he creates a joyous world filled with drinking and fighting companions. That natural passage between waking and dreaming is the basis of his cultivation. Hu Zi can also draw others into dreams: after Zi Che invades the summit and breaks his beloved gourd, Hu Zi captures him and leaves him trapped in an unpleasant dream while Hu Zi sleeps nearby. The episode shows both the reach of his art and the emotional trigger beneath it—insults can be laughed off, but damage to what he associates with home and companionship provokes a ferocious response. (Chapters 224–230)
Hu Zi's other great talent is for Runes. He uses them to watch other summits, studies layouts that do not belong to him, and eventually breaks the Seventh Summit's protective Rune after ten days. He explains that understanding such a Rune is easier than opening a constantly changing formation without being noticed. When Su Ming asks for help, Hu Zi devotes himself to producing dozens of runic diagrams; Su Ming later incorporates them into his Divine General Armor. Hu Zi's insight is instinctive enough that he struggles to explain his reasoning, but his willingness to pour his effort into Su Ming's request turns technical instruction into an early act of brotherhood. (Chapters 246–279)
That bond becomes explicit during the retaliation for Zi Che's injuries. Hu Zi joins Su Ming and Second Senior Brother, fights with a huge rusty axe, and uses layered protection that both absorbs attacks and breaks into invisible counterattacking fragments. His Enter Dream then spreads through a ten-thousand-foot area, filling it with the scent of alcohol and putting almost every living being within range to sleep. The technique also closes Hu Zi's own eyes and leaves his body exposed, so he uses it because he trusts his brothers to protect him. Su Ming recognizes that trust and accepts the reciprocal duty: Hu Zi is no longer simply the eccentric disciple who showed him around, but a brother who will fight and sleep under his protection. (Chapters 284–295)
The Great Disaster and the brother who kept the summit
During Su Ming's journeys among the Shamans and in the World of Nine Yin, Hu Zi's teaching continues to affect events even while the brothers are apart. Su Ming identifies unfamiliar formations using knowledge learned from Hu Zi, then spreads Hu Zi's old Runes across the Fated Kin's island as its first defensive layer. These applications show the portability of Hu Zi's craft: diagrams given to one junior brother become defenses for a people Hu Zi has never met. At the same time, Su Ming's thoughts repeatedly return to whether Hu Zi still waits at the Ninth Summit, making him the living point toward which “home” is oriented. (Chapters 481–526)
The Great Disaster leaves only the summit's peak above the sea and scatters the family. Ordered by Second Senior Brother to remain behind, Hu Zi spends twenty years preserving that last piece so Su Ming and the others can find their way back. With Tian Xie Zi missing and the other senior brothers gone, outsiders from Heaven Gate demand offerings and threaten to reclaim the mountain. Hu Zi endures their humiliation and flogging because open resistance could cost the summit itself. He stops drinking and sleeping, since both bring back memories of his absent family, and grows older while guarding a home reduced to one lonely mountaintop. (Chapters 528–542)
Su Ming's return releases everything Hu Zi has suppressed. Hu Zi first tests whether his junior brother is real, then rages at him for taking twenty years to come home, recounts how every member of the family waited, and finally embraces him in tears. Once responsibility is no longer his alone, exhaustion overtakes him and he falls asleep in Su Ming's arms. Su Ming discovers the scars on his back and answers the abuse Hu Zi suffered, while Hu Zi's first peaceful sleep in years restores the summit's ordinary warmth. Their reunion establishes a lasting pattern: Hu Zi protects the place of return, and Su Ming protects the person who kept it. (Chapters 540–548)
That pattern is tested when Hu Zi stands between an incapacitated Su Ming and Beiling. Already grievously hurt, Hu Zi burns his own life to meet an incoming strike and says farewell rather than step aside. Su Ming wakes in time, reverses the attack, and uses his own life force at great cost to restore Hu Zi's ruined body. Before leaving again, Su Ming places a drop of blood on a stone monument and gives Hu Zi control over it, ensuring that a disaster at the Ninth Summit can be sensed and answered. Hu Zi's defense thus changes the relationship from one-sided guardianship into a system of mutual rescue across distance. (Chapters 569–579)
Reuniting the family before separation from the Berserkers
After the Immortal conflict overturns Su Ming's sense of what is real, Hu Zi remains one of the memories that gives the Ninth Summit its meaning. Su Ming calls the summit his spirit, recalls its warmth even when he fears it was only a dream, and later shapes a distant volcano into a likeness of the mountain, including Hu Zi's house. Hu Zi is important in this period not only as an absent person but as proof of a lived relationship: the honest concern he showed Su Ming is one of the experiences against which false worlds are measured. (Chapters 639–686, 761–762)
Hu Zi continues waiting until Second Senior Brother finally returns. He rushes into the air, embraces him with red eyes, and apologizes because the plants once covering the mountain are gone. The emotional reunion quickly returns to old comedy when Hu Zi admits that he ate plants and seeds, impersonated his brother with a Rune, and uncovered things hidden around the summit. This mixture matters to the restoration of the family: grief does not vanish, but their teasing, quarrels, and embarrassing habits make the Ninth Summit feel inhabited again rather than merely memorialized. (Chapters 722–724)
The brothers then attempt to awaken Eldest Senior Brother from his petrified state. Although Hu Zi's cultivation is the lowest of the three involved, Second Senior Brother judges Enter Dream uniquely suited to reaching and protecting the consciousness inside the statue. Hu Zi accepts the danger without hesitation and sleeps while embracing the statue, holding Eldest Senior Brother's consciousness in a dream as Second Senior Brother casts the Great Heavenly Phantom Art. If the ritual is interrupted, Hu Zi risks becoming a soulless body trapped in permanent sleep; he proceeds because saving his elder brother matters more to him than that cost. (Chapters 727–734)
Su Ming protects the ritual through an attack on the Ninth Summit, and the effort succeeds: before Su Ming leaves the land of the Berserkers, he sees Hu Zi following the restored Eldest Senior Brother and Second Senior Brother out of the cave. The success proves that Enter Dream is not only a battlefield suppression technique but an art capable of sheltering another person's fading self. It also repeats the brothers' covenant of protection—Hu Zi entrusts his helpless body to Su Ming, while Su Ming's departure entrusts the continuing search for Tian Xie Zi to Hu Zi and the others. (Chapters 733–747)
Leaving Yin Death and building the Ninth Sect
Hu Zi is eventually revealed to be more than a talented human runemaster. He was formed from the Vessel Spirit of the Rune sealing Yin Death Region, taught himself about Runes, and, under Tian Xie Zi's guidance, gained insight into dreams. After Su Ming is forced into the Barren Lands of Divine Essence, Hu Zi leaves the land of the Berserkers with his senior brothers to search for him. The ancient wills of Yin Death make them conquer other continents and accept the Brand of Dark Dawn's Ghost before they can depart; Hu Zi later forgets those experiences, leaving a gap in his own memory of the price of freedom. (Chapters 1049, 1167)
Eldest Senior Brother sends Hu Zi into the Immortals' Union to rise from the bottom and temper the laws of his original runic form in war. The decision is deliberately harsh because Hu Zi's honesty can be both virtue and weakness, and the battlefield gives him the pressure to create his own Dao. When the brothers at last find Su Ming, Hu Zi is still emotionally transparent with them: he rushes from the ship laughing and crying, recognizes Su Ming despite his altered face, and apologizes for not having been strong enough to prevent his exile. His training has taught him to conceal killing intent from outsiders, but it has not changed how completely he reveals himself to family. (Chapters 1167–1170)
Hu Zi follows Su Ming to the Heavenly Incense Rune, where his nature as a Rune Spirit is both an advantage and a danger. Runic symbols appear in his eyes as he studies it, but its call affects him more strongly than ordinary cultivators and threatens the stability of his soul, forcing him to remain at the boundary and observe rather than advance. He nevertheless insists on accompanying Su Ming afterward, declaring that a senior brother cannot let his junior brother go alone. These events give practical limits to his affinity: he can perceive formations exceptionally well, but another vast Rune can act directly on the spirit from which that perception comes. (Chapters 1171–1176)
When the brothers found the Ninth Sect in True Morning Dao World, Hu Zi declines formal control and instead leads campaigns that gather displaced cultivators and expand its territory. After a northern battle halts that expansion, he turns to Su Ming's request to reopen Morning Dao Sect's sealed Relocation Rune. Even with his extreme talent, he estimates that the ancient formation will require years, because it was designed as a durable defense and shut from within. His shift from conqueror to patient analyst shows both sides of his service to the Ninth Summit: he can win people and territory in the open, but the work only he can do often demands prolonged concentration away from battle. (Chapters 1180–1204)
Rune Spirit and Sect Elder in the dying aeon
Within the enlarged Ninth Sect, Hu Zi becomes its most popular Sect Elder. His straightforward manner and habit of leading disciples into battle attract crowds wherever he goes, making him a personal bridge between the original family and the vast institution built in its name. That popularity is not merely ceremonial. When New Dao Sect attacks and South Union approaches, Hu Zi abandons the nearly completed relocation work because the year still required is time his people do not have, and he redirects his entire talent toward fortifying their present home. (Chapter 1204)
Hu Zi fuses himself into the defenses as their Rune Spirit and holds hundreds of thousands of attackers and dozens of powerful cultivators outside for a month and two weeks. When the formations finally break, the backlash wounds his soul, but he takes Eldest Senior Brother's battleaxe and stands before his wounded brother and Su Ming's Ecang clone. He believes the clone may be the beacon by which Su Ming finds home, so preserving it is another version of the vigil he once kept on the drowned summit. Su Ming's return heals both his physical wounds and injured soul, but Hu Zi's limit is clear: when he binds himself to a formation, its destruction can injure him directly. (Chapters 1204–1206)
Hu Zi returns to strengthening the Ninth Summit's Runes for the approaching disaster. His preparations close most of more than a hundred Relocation Runes and delay invasion, but the final layer is eventually weakened and broken by nine Antecedental Spirits. He immediately moves to the front, combining tremendous physical force with weapons and battle experience. Under Su Ming's suppression of the invaders' power, Hu Zi is nearly unstoppable, yet the episode again shows that his defenses are not absolute: enough superior beings can pin down and collapse even years of work. (Chapters 1224–1285)
In the years that follow, Hu Zi ranges through the True Worlds, ends battles by invoking the Ninth Summit's protection, and recruits anyone willing to claim membership. His exuberant expansion turns Su Ming's reputation into practical shelter for endangered cultivators, while his presence in branch sects embodies the Ninth Summit's authority. Tian Xie Zi later sends a corrective message: Hu Zi should drink, sleep, and even indulge his troublesome curiosity because Entering Dreams is his Dao, whereas his addiction to fighting has left him bloodied and diverted from it. Hu Zi obeys, resumes his old habits, and even restores his mirror-assisted spying, bringing the summit's intimate atmosphere back alongside its political power. (Chapters 1303–1353)
When Su Ming can save only part of the sect from the coming end, Hu Zi is entrusted with selecting the successor disciples. He chooses those who will carry the Ninth Summit onward and leads them to the other side of the River of Forgetfulness, still unwilling to separate his own fate from the disciples who followed him. Yet even this refuge cannot withstand Xuan Zang: Hu Zi roars as the descending finger erases him, his brothers, and the world around them. His death completes the cost of his lifelong choice—he follows the people of the Ninth Summit to the end rather than preserve himself apart from them. (Chapters 1355–1373)
Traces across Morus Alba and the final return home
In Ancient Zang, Hu Zi survives first as one of the dead whom Su Ming cannot forget. Images of Hu Zi and the other members of the Ninth Summit tempt Su Ming to abandon his path, and their likenesses are dangerous precisely because his attachment is genuine. Su Ming continues forward without accepting those projections as substitutes, preserving the distinction between memory and the people he means to recover. (Chapters 1434–1472)
After transcending, Su Ming searches other Harmonious Morus Alba butterflies for traces of the lives born in his own destroyed world. He finds feeble marks corresponding to Hu Zi and the others, but refuses to treat those partial souls as sufficient. Across repeated cycles he gathers the versions needed to open his Abyss Gate; Hu Zi appears in one cycle as the endless wind surrounding Second Senior Brother, suggesting that even in altered forms the two remain together. Su Ming's search therefore answers Hu Zi's old fear that separation and a lost home would keep the family from ever gathering again. (Chapters 1478–1481)
When the Abyss Gate returns them to the Ninth Summit, Hu Zi is the first to awaken. His first instinct is to reach for wine, and his first conclusion is that he has slept for an extraordinarily long time, restoring both the habits and the Dream imagery attached to him from the beginning. Once Eldest and Second Senior Brother ask after Su Ming, Hu Zi shouts for his youngest junior brother to stop hiding and finally decides to search Su Ming's cave abode. He is alive and home with his family, but his unanswered call leaves the relationship's final consequence intact: the man who spent his life waiting on the Ninth Summit begins another search for the brother who restored him. (Chapter 1481)
Appearance and personality
Hu Zi is a tall, broad, sturdy man with thick shoulders and a back associated with a tiger or mountain. His face is commonly described as simple and honest, sometimes with a foolish grin, while anger makes his eyes red or gives him a ferocious appearance. After long separation and hardship, age and stubble mark him more visibly; in battle he is often bloodied, and in ordinary life wine, loud snores, and drool undo any imposing dignity. (Chapters 219–225, 540–541, 1081, 1169)
He is emotionally direct. Hu Zi cries, laughs, boasts, complains, and becomes angry without much concealment, especially before his fellow disciples. His claims to exceptional cleverness coexist with gullibility and impulsiveness, but the novel repeatedly distinguishes simplicity from stupidity: his understanding of Runes is profound, his observations can be sharp, and his apparent foolishness often belongs to a man uninterested in social polish. Experiences outside Yin Death teach him to hide killing intent from strangers, yet that acquired caution disappears when he reunites with family. (Chapters 223–224, 541, 1169)
His comic habits—drinking, sleeping, peeking, stealing or eating Second Senior Brother's plants, and deploying Runes for surveillance—are also expressions of intimacy and cultivation. Tian Xie Zi ultimately identifies these behaviors as closer to Hu Zi's proper Dao than his later fixation on combat. Beneath them is an unusually serious loyalty. Hu Zi accepts humiliation to preserve the Ninth Summit, risks permanent dreamless emptiness to save Eldest Senior Brother, burns his life for Su Ming, and chooses to remain with the sect's disciples through catastrophe. For him, home is not an abstraction but the place and people for whom he must remain available. (Chapters 540–577, 727–734, 1350–1373)
Abilities and cultivation
Innate origin — Rune Spirit incarnation. Hu Zi is the incarnation of the Vessel Spirit of the Great Yin Sealing Rune over Yin Death Region and was separated from the greater formation at birth. This origin gives him exceptional sensitivity to formations and even to large-scale changes in the surrounding universe. It also lets him fuse his being into defensive Runes and function as their spirit. Separation means destruction of the original sealing Rune does not automatically destroy him, but spiritual affinity creates other risks: the Heavenly Incense Rune calls to him more powerfully than to ordinary cultivators, and remaining too close could destabilize or scatter his soul. When Hu Zi personally fuses with a formation, its collapse can injure his soul through backlash. (Chapters 1049, 1172, 1204, 1224–1229)
Learned craft — Runes. Hu Zi teaches himself runic principles and develops a near-instinctive command that includes analysis, construction, concealment, surveillance, transformation, protection, relocation, and interference with other formations. His arrays fortify islands and the Ninth Summit; his observation Runes and linked mirrors let him watch distant targets; his diagrams can be incorporated into another cultivator's armor; and his preparations can close relocation routes across a sect. He can crack formations that defeat others, but not instantly: dynamic concealment complicates entry, the Morning Dao Relocation Rune requires years, and sufficiently powerful opponents can gradually break even his strongest defenses. His intuitive understanding is also difficult for him to verbalize, which limits him as a conventional teacher even when the products of his work remain valuable. (Chapters 246–279, 520, 723, 1180, 1266–1282, 1353)
Learned Dao — Entering Dreams. With Tian Xie Zi's guidance, Hu Zi turns his natural movement from drink to sleep and from sleep to dreams into a Dao in which truth and falsehood, reality and dream, approach one another. Enter Dream can spread through a ten-thousand-foot area and put nearly all living beings inside it to sleep; it can force captives into hostile dreams, and it can enter and shelter another person's consciousness, as when Hu Zi protects Eldest Senior Brother's fading self. The art's chief cost is vulnerability: Hu Zi also sleeps, closes his eyes, and cannot guard his body normally. A disrupted high-stakes use can trap him in permanent sleep or leave his body without a soul, so he relies on trusted allies and prepared defenses. His later preference for physical battle diverts him from this Dao until Tian Xie Zi tells him to return to sleeping and drinking. (Chapters 224–230, 272, 288–291, 727–734, 1350–1352)
Learned combat — physical cultivation and battlefield experience. Although Dream Dao is his primary path, Hu Zi personally prefers cultivating his body. He fights at close range with fists and heavy weapons, moves with great speed for his size, and becomes a seasoned commander through conquest in the Immortals' Union and True Morning Dao World. Rune-derived armor can absorb blows and release invisible fragments against attackers, while Su Ming's suppression of stronger enemies allows Hu Zi's physical force to appear nearly invincible. This power is not unlimited: early on his cultivation is explicitly below his brothers', he can be grievously wounded by superior opponents, and his frontline aggression repeatedly leaves him bloodied enough for Tian Xie Zi to criticize it as a distraction from his true Dao. (Chapters 284–295, 727, 1167, 1172, 1204, 1284–1288, 1350)
Leadership and perception. Hu Zi becomes a popular Sect Elder by personally leading campaigns and treating ordinary disciples with the same open manner he shows his brothers. He can sense changes in cosmic formations more clearly than many cultivators above his level, organize prolonged defensive preparation, and translate the Ninth Summit's reputation into battlefield protection and recruitment. His directness helps inspire followers but can make him impulsive, while his aversion to remaining still pulls him away from long analytical work. His best leadership therefore combines movement and personal presence with the runic tasks that only he can complete. (Chapters 1180, 1204, 1224, 1303, 1355–1358)
Item-derived and prepared effects. Alcohol and the Hu Zi's Wine Gourd support the drunken-sleeping state associated with Entering Dreams, but the gourd is a vessel and emotional possession rather than the source of the Dao. His axes, later battleaxe, and spiked mace extend his physical fighting style without granting its underlying strength. Mirrors, diagrams, armor layers, and large defensive fields produce specialized effects because Hu Zi inscribes or operates them; their performance depends on preparation, intact formations, and, in some cases, his continued spiritual connection. (Chapters 219–230, 279, 284–295, 1204, 1284, 1353)
Relationships
Su Ming. Hu Zi receives Su Ming as his youngest junior brother and quickly gives him access to both the Ninth Summit's hidden paths and Hu Zi's runic work. Their relationship is built on reciprocal protection: Hu Zi trusts Su Ming to defend his sleeping body, preserves the summit and later an Ecang clone so Su Ming can find home, and repeatedly places himself between Su Ming and death. Su Ming avenges Hu Zi's mistreatment, restores him from grave wounds, heals his damaged soul, and finally searches across cosmic cycles to bring him back from erasure. Hu Zi's final act is to search the restored Ninth Summit for the absent Su Ming. (Chapters 219–295, 540–579, 1169–1205, 1478–1481)
Tian Xie Zi. Tian Xie Zi gives the Rune Spirit a place in a human family and guides him toward insight into dreams. Hu Zi remembers his Master's lessons, guards his cave and summit during his absence, and continues searching for him with the other disciples. Tian Xie Zi sees potential in Hu Zi greater than that of his elder disciples, but also recognizes that his troublemaking and love of combat can misdirect it; his late instruction to drink, sleep, and peek again is an attempt to return Hu Zi to the habits through which his actual Dao grows. (Chapters 219–225, 540–541, 1049, 1350–1352)
Eldest Senior Brother. Hu Zi respects his eldest brother's authority even when he complains about it. He risks permanent loss of self to protect the consciousness inside Eldest Senior Brother's stone body, later accepts his harsh training plan outside Yin Death, and fights with the elder brother's weapon when the Ninth Summit's defenses collapse. Eldest Senior Brother in turn trusts Hu Zi's specialized art and tries to discipline his honesty into strength suited for the galaxy. (Chapters 223–224, 727–747, 1167, 1204–1206)
Second Senior Brother. Their relationship combines sincere attachment with relentless comic intrusion. Hu Zi spies on him, damages or eats his plants, and exposes his secrets, while Second Senior Brother teases and punishes him. Beneath that routine, Hu Zi obeys the order to hold the summit, waits years for his brother's return, and works with him to save Eldest Senior Brother. Even across later forms and cycles, Hu Zi remains close to him, appearing as the wind around the phantom life Second Senior Brother becomes. (Chapters 223, 540–541, 723–734, 1164, 1353, 1481)
Zi Che. Zi Che's invasion of the Ninth Summit and destruction of Hu Zi's gourd provoke an early display of Hu Zi's vindictive dream art. Later, once Zi Che belongs to Su Ming's circle, Hu Zi responds immediately and violently when he is injured. The change reflects Hu Zi's family logic: a former intruder can become someone whose harm demands the Ninth Summit's collective answer. (Chapters 226–230, 283–295)
The disciples of the Ninth Sect. Hu Zi grows from one eccentric member of a four-disciple household into the most approachable elder of a vast sect. He fights beside the disciples, recruits and shelters cultivators in the Ninth Summit's name, and is entrusted to choose those who will inherit it beyond the River of Forgetfulness. He ultimately shares their fate rather than treating them as a resource subordinate to his own survival. (Chapters 1180–1204, 1303, 1355–1373)
Items
Hu Zi's Wine Gourd. Hu Zi carries and drinks from a gourd or wine pot throughout the story. It supports the drunken state from which he sleeps and enters dreams, and its destruction by Zi Che enrages him because it is also a familiar personal possession. The vessel does not independently create dreams; Hu Zi's Dao and cultivation do. After his final restoration, his first instinct is to reach for wine, only to discover no pot beside him. (Chapters 219–230, 288, 1164, 1481)
Axes, battleaxe, and spiked mace. Hu Zi's early weapon is a huge rusty axe with a beast-bone handle. In the New Dao Sect siege he takes up Eldest Senior Brother's battleaxe after the defensive Runes break, and in the later invasion he manifests a large spiked mace. These heavy weapons match his close-range physical style, but none is shown as the origin of his bodily power. (Chapters 284–295, 1204, 1284)
Runic diagrams, mirrors, and defensive arrays. Hu Zi's crafted objects and prepared fields are the material expressions of his Rune mastery. Diagrams given to Su Ming become armor components and island defenses; a transformation Rune lets Hu Zi impersonate Second Senior Brother; linked mirrors support covert observation; and enormous layered arrays defend the Ninth Summit and close its relocation routes. Their strength comes from Hu Zi's design and operation, and their limits include construction time, the need for preparation, vulnerability to stronger formation-breakers, and soul backlash when Hu Zi fuses himself into them. (Chapters 246–279, 520, 723, 1204, 1266–1282, 1353)
The blood-marked stone monument. Before leaving the reconstructed Ninth Summit, Su Ming leaves a drop of his blood in a stone monument and gives Hu Zi control of it. The blood contains Su Ming's will and the power of one full-strength strike, and its connection allows him to notice a disaster too great for Hu Zi to handle alone. It is therefore both a defensive reserve and a promise that Hu Zi's vigil will not again be isolated from his junior brother. (Chapter 578)