2: gentle goodbye?

Calm, so frighteningly calm. So calm it was scary, a calm that Yuan Ming had grown unaccustomed to. Yuan looked around the now monochrome garden Hei had once planted for him. It used to be a paradise filled with color, just like Yuan Ming's life. Like that life, it was also something he had destroyed.

Everything was gray and dull except for a small tree growing with bright red clusters of flowers. Alstroemeria... Hei had carefully tended to these just for him. He had even overwatered the poor flowers and accidentally killed them before finally growing this batch that was infused with the Phoenix tree Hei had personally raised.

It would've been so easy for the man to just grow them, but Hei instead carefully tended to them the traditional way to show his sincerity. Yuan Ming couldn't help but chuckle fondly at the memory even if he could never see Hei again.

Yuan Ming could return now. He could return to his sect and live quietly as the Grand Elder once again. Everything could go back to normal...

Normal...

Yuan Ming's normal once again no longer included the bright and cheery Hei.

The white robed man raised his pale hand while his silver hair glimmered. A simple and elegant sword embedded with ruby gems appeared and Yuan Ming lightly stepped onto the sword body. Nostalgia once again hit him, Hei carved the hilt of this sword for Yuan himself.

Gritting his teeth, Yuan Ming put away the elegant blade. It wasn't like he needed a treasured sword to fly anymore... right, it was again because of Hei that his cultivation realm raised so rapidly wasn't it?

When had that little foxed weaved his way into his life so intricately?

Yuan Ming kept reminiscing, this whole courtyard he had been trapped in for decades, hadn't Hei build it to his preferences? Hardly anything Hei himself liked could be see throughout the large courtyard. Even the smallest details. Yuan Ming had only mentioned once several hundred years ago that he enjoyed cloud patterns, yet Hei Kong had kept that to heart and incorporated it everywhere within the coutyard.

The gray colors made it feel so empty.

There wasn't any use reminiscing about it now. Hei was gone. No one has ever survived going through a spacial fracture. All they led to was nothingness and an endless, bloody battle field. Going through one was a death sentence and you wouldn't even leave a corpse behind.

==========

"Did you hear? The Grand Elder of Falling Cloud Sect has returned after decades of being missing!!"

"Are you kidding me? Isn't he the one that sold out humanity to that demon Hei Kong?"

"What are you going on kids? It's Venerable Yuan now!"

"Right right! How ignorant, to thing that you youngsters theses days actually believed those rumors about Venerable Yuan he was the one that killed that devil!"

"What!? You're joking, no way that demon has actually died?"

"Haha! Those devils must be so distressed now right? Their Devil Venerable has actually been vanquished!"

"If you ask me, that whole betrayibg humanity thing must've been nonesense, how ,ould our good and great Venerable Yuan possibility have done that? He's been the Grand Elder for over ten thousand years now hasn't he?"

"Yeah! Finally after so many years of suppression, we can push those nasty devils back where they belong in the barren north!"

=========

"Master!" Such a cheerful voice and with a crisp bell like tone could only belong to a young lady.

This young lady looked just as good as her voice had sounded, like dozens of windchimes all singing in the wind. Her dark hair was all pulled back into a simple pony tail that gave her a youthful vitality.

The girl swiftly ran up to a handsome man in white robes with cloud embroidery. He looked clean and otherworldly as long as you didn't pay attention to the nearly unnoticeable red stain across his lap as he sat down. His black hair cascaded down his back like a water fall dispide most of it being pulled back, and the healthy luster did not make it look like it some from a man as old as he was. Infact, this man looked at most in hsi twenties but was the current Grand Elder of Falling Cloud Sect and Human Venerable, Yuan Ming.

"Yu Rui," Yuan Ming spoke, his voice clear and gentle as spring water was flowing down a mountain. "You should learn to be more lady like or you won't be able to get married in the future."

Yu Rui stuck out her tongue in a playful manner. "Bleh, no! I just want to stay and learn with master forever! Yu Rui doesn't want to get married!"

"By the way master," Yu Rui turned her head to look at the small and strange tree dotted with red flowers. "You still won't tell me what kind of tree this is! Yu Rui is already thirty and you said that you would tell Yu Rui the species of this tree when I did turn thirty and am able to break into golden core realm!"

"Indeed I did." Yuan Ming softly replied while gazing at the tree Yu Rui pointed at with a gentle expression. "The truth is, I don't know either. It was given to me by an old aquaintence quite a long time ago."

"Master! You lied to me!" Yu Rui cried out in aggrievence.

"I did not lie," Yuan Ming chuckled at Yu Rui's childish antics. "I would tell you if I had known but.."

"but...?" Yu Rui

"The creator of this particular tree passed before passing me the name." Yuan Ming sighed with eyes full of nostalgic reminiscent.

Sometime Yu Rui was almost jealous of this tree. Her master paid so much attention to it, obviously the person who made this tree was much more than just an aquientence to Yuan Ming. It wouldn't even need a smart person to figure out that Yuan Ming was still hrieving over this loss.

This tree had been here since way before she got acceptance as the Grand Elder's disciple. She had been accepted around twenty years ago when the Grand Elder had been pressured by the sect keader and other elders to take in a disciple. She was simply the one with the best talent out og that batch and Yuan Ming could've easily chocen someone else. She didn't have the rights to know anything about Yuan Ming other than what was public kmowledge and what he told her himself.

The Grand Elder from before his disappearance was said to be cold and aloof, but this Grand Elder was clearly grief written and extremely gentle. They sounded like two completely different people. What had happened during those forty or so years that the Grand Elder had dissapeared in?

"Yu Rui," It was time, every year at the same hour, the Grand Elder was close off his courtyard to all visitors despite who or for what reason for around three days. No one knows why. "Leave me to grieve."

No one except Yu Rui and Yuan Ming himself. He was grieving. Yet only he himself knew for whom.

"Hei... I miss you. I wish I could see you again, even just once. Even if... you never forgive me. Prove to me that everything I did was worth it."