As the twenty-eighth-generation sect leader of the Starfall Sect, he sat before the mirror, serene and unhurried, combing his long hair, as azure as a swath of sky.
It seemed he had sat like this for thousands of years.
He smiled, the color of the sky cascading like a waterfall from his topknot to his shoulders, shimmering blue. Looking at the face in the mirror, he could not help sighing, as faintly as a flower breathing in the wind.
Three hundred whole years, day after day, year after year. He could not resign himself to it. Was he to live another three hundred years with this same expressionless face? Then die quietly, merely to repay his master's kindness in raising him, merely to pass this mirror on to his disciple Wuyi?
"Hmph! In my six hundred years of life, what has ever been my own?"
Resentment rose from his heart, and his hair stirred without wind. All these years, his heart had always been as still as water. Even when facing the strongest enemies, even when injuries left no part of his body whole, he had remained undistracted and dealt with everything calmly.
The sunlight seemed to be striving to pierce the thick morning mist, struggling, churning, stirring up wind.
A wisp of wind slipped through the grove of osmanthus trees outside the window and stole into the room. He did not punish it; instead, he felt grateful. The wind carried the fragrance of flowers, and seemingly birdsong as well. They were so fresh that they actually quickened his heartbeat. His nose was not meant to smell flowers, nor were his ears meant to hear songs.
His gaze swept across the mirror, and he saw a thread of gold glimmering in the waterfall of hair, drifting down dazzlingly in the