Yun Huang sat high above the nine heavens, his face as still as an ancient well beneath the imposing majesty of an Immortal Emperor. Yet when his divine sense swept over his elder brother below, a flicker of guilt passed through his flawless Dao heart.
He was merely putting on a brave front.
It's fine, it's fine. This is nothing more than a little tempering along the Dao Path. With my brother's wisdom and resilience, how could he fail to understand my painstaking intentions? Across all the heavens, what mighty figure hasn't risen from mountains of corpses and seas of blood? What does this little pain amount to beside the true tribulations of the Great Dao?
Even as Yun Huang consoled himself, he watched the grief deepen on Yun Qing's face. With trembling hands, Yun Qing retrieved a handful of white petals shimmering with a faint silver glow from his storage space and scattered them evenly across the ground, forming a small "bed of flowers."
These flowers were called Soul-Calming Snow Epiphyllum. They grew in places of bitter cold and profound stillness, their petals often holding fine snow. In the cultivation world, they were known to "comfort departed souls and cleanse the road home," and were often used to... mourn the dead.
Yun Huang's eyelid twitched. His sense of foreboding grew stronger.
With a solemn, reverent expression, Yun Qing placed the Ten-Thousand-Year Heart-Soul Jade box Wang Hu had given him in the center of the petals, lining it with a little spirit-pet nest woven from heavenly silkworm silk. Then, with "deep sorrow," he arranged the rare dried spirit insects Little Radiant Chick had left uneaten "in life," along with several little toys, inside it.
And thus, an exquisite, lovingly prepared "miniature coffin" took shape-one that made the Immortal Emperor's scalp