I sat cross-legged staring out into a field of flowers, and I watched. In the distance, thousands of miles away from me was a man.

I could have used a lot of words to describe this fellow, powerful, angry, resilient, persistent.

But none of those would be enough.

He leaped forward banging his fists against the doors of immortality, and once again he was rejected.

Mad would have been a good word for him, insane maybe.

But I would call him sad.

A false immortal was a person who had managed to gain an unaging body, something that would persist for millennia but did not have the dao to persist.

Ah-Min Tah, I had asked about the strongest person within the region back when I had first talked to Cai, but now that I was looking at him, I felt nothing but pity.

The body could persist. It could be fixed, healed, remade, and rejuvenated, but the soul was such a delicate thing.

The man pounded against eternity once more, and eternity did not care.

The pursuit of cultivation was a beautiful thing. Cultivators themselves could be disgusting, but cultivation, cultivation was beautiful.

To push yourself beyond the edge and into the depths of infinity, to seek an absolute existence and rely on nothing but your own strength, there was beauty in that. That was the beautiful side, the thing Wukong represented, determination and power, independence and freedom.

There were also virtuous souls who sought power, not for themselves, but for the world. They sought to be a force of good and to make the world change for the better. I wasn’t one of them, but I admired them.

And there were the evil bastards, the selfish animals who fought to control all they could and use everything as they pleased. They were repulsive, but beautiful in their own way. Even though they were admirable in their attempts, a great evil was still great after all.

But this, this failure I looked at. This made me sad.

I had watched him for three whole days, during which he had failed to break through the gates of immortality five hundred times.

Only to immediately try again afterward. His failure didn’t register, not anymore.

Maybe he had been growing at some point, changing each attempt to better push against his mortal coil, but he would not shed it.

Immortality wasn’t a light thing. It could not be brute forced, at least not by him.

By living beyond your allocated time, you wore down your very existence. The body then became an anchor giving you more time and if you could manage it, it would become an island. An esoteric healing technique, a strange energy, a sacred artifact, something to keep not aging and alive.

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After that you’d assume you had all the time in the world. You’d be a bit lazy, then you’d be smart and try to make it into the immortal rank there. And a few would make, a lot would die, this poor bastard did neither.

Then for the first time in your life, you would feel another thing age. Your soul, your very mind would wither, you would forget lovers and children, lifetimes would slip away like the memories of an errand. First events, then people, then language, and eventually, even whatever dao you had left.

Time, it was the dementia of the soul.

I sighed and took a breath, then I moved.

The man, no, the thing saw me and in its primitive little brain it sensed what I had. It knew what I was, and it striked.

I dodged and kept dodging. It kept attacking, and sometimes I would block, if only to save any innocent below us.

After three days, he withered. His qi was all but spent and his soul was all but empty.

He stood on the ground, glaring hatefully at me for a moment before his eyes lit up.

“I… lost,” the man noted.

It wasn’t just an admission of defeat, it was the admission of defeat. It was apathy and complete concession.

The man stood there for a moment, then looked at me.

“Am I complete?” He asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Oh,” then he stared for another moment.

“I feel complete,” he added.

“You’re not.”

“I…see.”

Even now he wasn’t a man, just a shadow of one. This was the dream before the slumber, a last thought before death.

The man’s eyes widened, then he looked at me and laughed.

“You wouldn’t happen to have any clothes on you by any chance, would you? And a shaving knife if you got one, and some soap maybe, and could you carry me to a river?”

There was a sad joy within his words, an acceptance.

I nodded.

I took him to a river where he bathed himself clean. I gave him a sharp blade to cut himself with and I let him wear fine clothes made with beautiful fabric.

He looked good after that. He looked civilized.

“I failed,” the man finally said, staring sadly at the sky.

“You failed a long time ago,” I replied.

The man nodded, still smiling at the sky.

“Do you… do you know my name?” He asked.

“Ah-Min Tah,” I answered.

“Ah-Min Tah,” he spoke, sounding out the name as if he were saying it for the first time.

“I can’t believe I ever forgot that,” he chuckled. “And my sect?”

“They left long ago.”

“Did they now?” He asked. “Do you know their names? Did any one of them ask about me?”

I simply shrugged.

“To have outlived them, what a strange thing it is. Though I haven’t outlived them have I?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t remember much. I remember struggling. I remember living. I remember my third rank tribulation and I remember, I remember trying. It’s strange, I thought there’d be more than this. Even if I died I always thought it would be in battle, noble and proud, not… not this.”

His eyes didn’t shimmer, his voice didn’t quiver, and the words left his mouth like plain description.

“Would that have been better, I wonder? Death by the sword?”

Then he turned to look at me.

“Would it be better?” He asked.

“You can’t kill what’s already dead,” I replied.

“Haha, yes. I suppose you can’t,” he laughed.

He sat there for a bit more before talking again.

“I… I remember I had a cat when I was young. A small little grey fellow. I was horribly heartbroken when it died. I cried for weeks then. I wonder if that’s why I tried to be an immortal?” He asked.

“Is it?”

“I don’t know,” he chuckled. “But if it was then, what a silly little reason to have lived for.”

“Do you regret it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he laughed. “At least, I don’t think so. What a curious thing.”

Then as the flames died out, they shined.

“I don’t,” he spoke. “I don’t regret it one bit. I regret the way I went about it, but I don’t regret it at all.”

In his final moments before death, he smiled.

“What a wonderful thing it was.”