You missed him too much...
Longing was like poison, a thing in this world for which there was no cure!
She missed him too much, but who did not miss him?
Did the old man not miss him?
If he did not, why had he returned here?
Every blade of grass and every tree here bore the aura of that white-robed figure... The bamboo covering the mountain seemed like his proud, unbending bones!
The old man's words instantly brought tears to the woman's eyes.
"I often wonder... If I hadn't asked him to come with me to the Demon Realm back then, would none of what followed have happened?" the woman murmured softly.
"He wouldn't have met the Great Peng in the Demon Realm, wouldn't have been reviled by the world!"
"Nor would he have left the Demon Realm heartbroken, to face everything in the Nine Heavens alone..."
The woman's hands trembled ceaselessly as she bowed her head low, the moisture in her eyes like a river of bitterness that would never disperse.
"He chose to save the people of this world with his own life, then departed alone."
"Perhaps he was already utterly disappointed in the people of this world..."
Back then, he had said: the people of the world were pitiful, but what did that have to do with him?
It seemed that even then, he had known what he would face after accompanying her to the Demon Realm...
Yet he had gone anyway!
He had prepared himself then. And everything that followed had indeed borne out those preparations.
The whole world became his enemy...
No one in this world knew just what he had borne in his heart. They knew only that, in his deepest heartbreak, he had hidden away, yet continued laying his plans for the