Birds of a feather flock together.
The Three-Headed Bird, usually the craftiest, most cowardly, and most prone to screwing over his big brother, had dared to enter the formation alone at the critical moment, kill Jianchen with a sneak attack, and break the Formless Hidden Void Formation by force. That instinctive choice in a moment of peril caused the reincarnated Buddha's Son to look back on his past life in his fury, awakening the Buddhist art of Myriad Forms Suppression in an instant.
The Three-Headed Bird was named Chu Qing. He had met the Buddha's Son when he first began gathering spiritual energy and had followed him ever since. More than forty years had passed. Though they had long since assumed human form, they still shared everything, accompanying each other like inseparable shadows.
Chu Qing had neither exceptional talent nor much ambition. Whatever the Buddha's Son pursued throughout his life was what he pursued as well. He liked hiding behind the Buddha's Son and cheering him on, swaggering outrageously when they won and running away together when they lost. He even often acted like an old father, urging the other to work hard rather than squander his years and waste his talent.
Neither had any close family, but their shared memories and experiences had made them each other's closest kin.
Jianchen had shattered two of Chu Qing's three heads with a single palm strike. Inside the formation, all his feathers had fallen together in one final, burning attack. Only by fighting almost as though he meant to perish alongside his enemy had he dazed Jianchen and killed him atop the formation's core. He had done everything he could, but he himself resembled a plucked fledgling, his body soaked in blood as he fell into the ruins, barely alive and unable