Her eyes had seen but she still didn’t understand. The fight had been one-sided and incredible. It was a thing to witness, a gift of wisdom and strength.

But the villain lived. She had come here and traversed across the region in search of her half-brother.

Xaio Wang knew her father. The man was a disaster. He was powerful and one of the elders of the Raging River clan, but he was a selfish fool. He had a hundred bastards within the Raging River’s territory and two hundred more outside of it. The man was an animal.

So as soon as she had heard of her brother, as soon as she had known of him, she had come. Her father had too many children to save, but she knew what it was like to unlock the talent in her blood. The politics, the pressure, the unending wave of judgment she had gotten. She had intervened trying to spare him the same fate.

But she was too late, someone was trying to kill him. And then someone had saved him, an immortal. The immortal.

Xaio Wang had seen immortals before, whenever they visited they would normally stay at the Raging City seeing as the Raging River Sect was the most powerful out of all the five sects.

They were rare, but every few decades they would grace the region with their presence. They were ethereal and amazing, a thing of myth and mystery, and yet this one wasn’t. He came with a mortal old man and talked to him while he fought a fifth rank.

He wasn’t noble. He wasn’t beautiful. He was…not dull, but lacking. The thing that made immortal ethereal, he lacked it.

And he had let the enemy live. He hadn’t even shattered the assassin’s cultivation, and more than that, he had let Cai Xuin cripple himself. What sort of cultivator would allow something like this?

If he cared for her brother he could have healed his arm and taken him in underneath his wing. But his actions, while they were kind, were light, undecided. He lacked resolve.

She walked with Cai, who carried his mortal servant in his arms while the immortal guided the horses while carrying Cai’s guards. She hadn’t ever heard of immortals reattaching heads, or anyone else for that matter.

Sure it was possible for small attacks, but an attack from a fifth rank? A cultivator was more, and a fifth rank was just a step away from the immortal realm. If a mortal’s actions were charcoal on a rock then a fifth rank’s actions were gashes in the stone.

They were just more. And yet the man had treated him like a child. They had fought, and yet the attacks were contained, making it so that not even she could feel the shockwaves.

The immortal’s aura had done that, not a technique. The man’s sheer residual qi that leaked passively from his body, without any instruction had restricted the fifth rank’s attacks.

It was a sight to behold.

And yet… she felt disappointed. Sad even.

There was a fundamental lack of demeanor and elegance, but it was more than that. The things the immortal had said and the way he had spoken were as if he disliked cultivators.

Xaio Wang walked in silence. Cai was looking around in awe. The space was being bent and compressed, making every step they took equivalent to ten miles worth of travel. It was a movement technique, one that she was using unknowingly.

She observed and soaked in the phenomenon. All the sects had teleportation enchantments, but those were enchantments, made with the labor of a hundred years, and even then, they could only transport them across the region, not beyond it.

It was more of a sign of wealth really. Any fifth rank could traverse the whole region within the hour and the fastest among them could do it within minutes, but to casually bend space like this, it spoke of power and understanding beyond her own.

And yet, it was unnecessary. She and Cai could traverse the distance within the day, within the hour if Cai let her carry him. This confounding of time and space wasn’t being done for them.

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It was for the mortal that walked with them. It was for the old man with the scythe.

Even now, after all that talk of pride, she still wasn’t willing to just let it go.

“The inn is full,” the old mortal spoke. “I don’t know where you’re going to put them.”

“I’ll give them a house around your place. It’ll be fine. Rin Wi’s staying there, right? She can look after them.”

“Oh the poor girl’s busy enough as it is, she doesn’t need this as well.”

“Relax Chin, this’ll barely be a bother to her. Besides, it’ll just be for a few months I think.”

“You think?” The mortal scorned.

“Depends if that kid back there takes my warning seriously. If he does, it might be years before Cai can leave the area safely, but… I don’t think he will.”

“That cultivator guy?” The mortal asked.

“Yes, him.”

“A bit too full of himself that one,” the mortal quipped.

Xaio Wang almost bit her tongue. A mortal daring to speak of a cultivator who lived his lifespan five times over in such a way was unheard of.

Insanity.

“You’re telling me,” the immortal replied. “But I doubt he’ll change much. Maybe he’ll master the Flowering Sword to its full potential, but that was never his problem in the first place. If he does master the Flowering Sword, he’d be treating the symptom and not the problem.”

“A narrow dao,” the mortal spoke. “What a strange thing.”

“It’s quite common. A wide dao is one that tries to encompass everything and tries to derive a fundamental truth about existence. A narrow dao is the opposite, taking one minor truth and applying it everywhere you go. Either way, a dao isn’t supposed to be a truth, it’s supposed to be your own. Your will, your way, your path. It’s not an observation of the world but an observation of you instead. Tying your dao to the world, as reasonable as it might seem, makes it all the weaker. You cannot rebel against the Heavens by submitting to them, after all.”

She listened. There was truth in every word he said. Wisdom many would die to know, but hearing it be tossed so cheaply in a conversation with a mortal nonetheless. It soured something.

“Honored Master,” she said gently. “Forgive this Xaio Wang’s audacity, but I seek insight.”

The honored master turned to her, still carrying the two passed-out guards upon his shoulder like a mortal carrying bags home from the market. She almost asked to take them from him.

“Ask away then,” he replied.

“I do not understand the current situation,” she replied.

“Specify.”

“I…I do not understand.”

“What exactly is it that you don’t understand?”

“Everything,” she sighed. “This was not what I was expecting to witness.”

The immortal raised an eyebrow, turned around, and kept walking.

“Well, start with the basics then.”

“The assassin. He was of the fifth rank, an elder of the Flowering Sword Sect. Why did he try to kill Cai Xuin?”

“Oh, Cai can answer that one, right?”

“Yes Honored Master,” Cai replied. The boy was distant, one hand still rubbing the spot where his hand used to be. Xaio Wang was pained at the sight. Her brother was a cultivator, carrying the blood of two of the greatest sects within the region. And now he stood here, crippled.

His sword hand was gone and it would take years to build up the proper strength in the other hand, and even then he would still be a cripple. Another wave of confusion hit her.

“I was a pawn, I believe. The elder had been using me for several years, though I know not why. And when I showed potential, he wanted to kill me before I could grow powerful and hunt him down.”

“Do you truly know his name?”

“I don’t know,” Cai replied. “I thought I did, within the moment I guessed, but I do not-”

“You know his name,” the immortal interrupted. “Tai Lui, I recognized him from the delegation.”

How had the immortal know Cai’s thoughts? Was it a mind-reading technique of some sort? Was he reading her mind-

“Relax,” the immortal spoke. “Cai’s aura reflect Tai Lui’s memory. I couldn’t help but notice.”

Xaio Wang turned quiet at the revelation.

“Is that what it’s like?” She asked. “Is that the world in the eyes of an immortal? Everyone laid bare and open?”

“It is for me,” he replied. “So stop beating around the bush and ask your question already. Your aura is practically yelling it at me.”

Then he already knew what she was thinking. He knew what she was feeling.

“Then why?” She asked. “Why would you let a villain like that go? Why let him leave? Why teach him his faults? How… how could you allow such a man free?”

The immortal chuckled.

“It ain’t his job that’s why,” the old man answered. “He’s not a jailer or a policemen, so he won’t jail anybody.”

“He has power and those with power should exercise it to the best of their judgment,” she replied.

“Well, that’s what he did then,” the old man replied.

“What if he comes back then? Tai Lui is a capable cultivator. If he receives a breakthrough somehow and reaches the immortal realm and comes back for vengeance, then what?”

“Dying is the burden of the weak,” the immortal replied. “Killing is the burden of those above them. I have no such burdens. If he comes back I’ll handle him. But he’s still a child. So I’ll give him a chance.”

A child. A fifth rank who had lived half a millennium was called a child. If he was a child then what was she? Then her eyes saw it, the mortal, Cai Xuin, herself, and even Tai Lui, they must have seemed so young to this man, so small.

The mortals who she towered over were no different from herself in his eyes. And the old man, the loud brash old man spoke what was on his mind, to an immortal that was her equal. No, possibly her better.

Was that what it was like in the eyes of an immortal?