Jiang Ding listened to old friends speak of the Dao, feasted and drank with them, and talked freely about their shared past. He was glad that Sun Slayer and the others had advanced.
There were a few more people he knew in the world, a few more points of emotional connection. That was a tremendous stroke of fortune in life.
After catching up with them, he returned to the sun's side and quietly cultivated, working to derive the Immortal-Dao Cosmic Constant.
For a time, all was still.
Jiang Ding sat in a daze, his thoughts unknown.
A long while passed.
"Time..."
"Can time really wear feelings away...?"
Jiang Ding sighed softly.
The question had answered itself the moment he asked it.
Time
really could wear feelings away.
As he spoke with Sun Slayer and the others, Jiang Ding had joked and bantered, talked about the past, and behaved no differently than usual.
Yet the feelings in his heart had not surfaced.
It had been like recounting a movie he had already seen, a sequence of images stripped of its old joys and sorrows. The past could no longer stir his heart.
Before he knew it, nearly a million years had passed.
The days gone by truly were just days gone by. Their feelings had gradually vanished into time, leaving only something like a black-and-white picture book.
And yet the feelings that still held color in Jiang Ding's heart were those he bore for his mother and younger sister.
They had been frozen in slumber for too long. Current technology could not thaw them without killing them. Yet those blood-deep feelings for his mother and sister had not faded with time. Instead, they had grown more vivid, standing out starkly among all his other, equally dimmed emotions.
Was this what blood