Luckily, Shang Qinghua has a point. "Anyway—Shen Jiu. So he was a slave, and he had this really close friend, and. Um." He knows this story, obviously, but he knows too many details, and his alcohol-marinated brain is having trouble figuring out how to present it to Shen Yuan. "They were supposed to go become cultivators together. But when it was, like, time—I mean, when the cultivators were recruiting—Shen Jiu was locked up by the evil Qiu family, and he couldn't go."