Believe

Aika felt her heart drop to her stomach. Her last hope seemed to have flown out the window. 

When she first met Ryu, his age was unacceptable even by First Heaven standards, speaking of his cultivation. He had been lagging behind his peers by quite a large margin at that. If not for his combat prowess, he wouldn't have even had the right to enter the Sect at all, and the Radiant Star Sect of back then, at least one the surface, wasn't even top two in terms of organizations that controlled the First Heaven. 

Since then, in just a few years, he's had growth that could only be said to be explosive, but it wasn't enough, it wasn't nearly enough. He simply didn't understand what it meant to be an absolute genius of the Eighth Heaven, at least that was what Aika thought. 

Ryu was simply still too old. If he was still in his teens, if he had come to the True Martial World sooner, everything would have been alright, she could have accepted this risk.