Whenever that old affair came up, True Person Xuanwei felt a suffocating tightness in his chest.
He was a mighty Immortal Venerable Realm cultivator, the sect master of the Supreme Dao Sect. His heart had long since become a mirror-still lake, unruffled by anything. Yet whenever he remembered that incident, a sudden, needle-fine ache still gripped his chest.
It cut straight to his heart.
The story went back more than ten thousand years.
Back then, True Person Xuanwei had not yet become the sect master who ruled the Supreme Dao Sect. His cultivation had not reached its present heights, nor was his temperament as mild as it was now.
One year, he descended the mountain to wander the mortal world and seek enlightenment. Among the refugees at the mountain's foot, he found a young child.
The boy was skin and bones himself, yet in the bitter winter, he shared his last half of a flatbread with an even younger girl.
True Person Xuanwei saw at a glance that the boy had an extraordinary Root Bone and an innate air of gentleness and compassion, so he brought him back to the Supreme Dao Sect.
The child later became his disciple. True Person Xuanwei personally bestowed upon him the Daoist name Qingheng and raised and taught him himself.
An immortal laid his hand upon my crown, bound up my hair, and granted me the path to everlasting life.
He raised him from a little child into a graceful youth, then into a young prodigy of outstanding character, watching him grow step by step into the finest disciple of the Supreme Dao Sect's younger generation.
True Person Xuanwei took boundless joy in being his master. This was his eldest direct disciple, the one in whom he had placed the greatest hopes of his