In the modern world of the Earth he’d left behind long ago, a person would most likely be lynched for saying such things, but here, everything was simpler and yet more complicated at the same time. To tell a woman that she couldn’t behave like a woman or, even worse, shouldn’t behave like a woman, was to insult her and her ancestors, to strike a blow that could be washed away only with blood. It didn’t matter if she was a cultivator or not. There were no mysteries more sacred than those that mothers passed on to their daughters. There were no lessons more honest and righteous than the ones that fathers passed on to their sons. Hundreds of epochs of the Nameless World stood on this foundation. To Hadjar, who sometimes still felt the poison of the civilization of Earth lingering within him,
