"Still not going smoothly?"
Lady Bai poured him a cup of wine and asked softly.
Hou Niao raised the cup and drained it. He had nothing to hide from this woman. Keeping certain things bottled up left him feeling stifled; speaking them aloud would make him feel better.
"Not exactly. It's a complicated feeling... put it this way: if I wanted to return to my old state, with the same flying sword, that would probably be relatively easy. I'm confident I could do it within five years... but I'm not quite satisfied with that, because I want to try a new way of nurturing my sword, one that could resolve the weakness that's always plagued me. But this is new territory for me. I don't know how much time it would take, or even whether I could succeed..."
Lady Bai sighed. "You're already a Constellation True Disciple. Didn't you say you feared none of the other Constellation True Disciples? Then why change? Wasn't what you had before good enough?"
Hou Niao poured himself another cup. "On the path of cultivation, there's no best, only better. If I were easily satisfied, I'd still be out on the Lizhi Sea smelling fish. What does being a Constellation True Disciple amount to? I've never set my sights on merely standing level with them. I'm..."
"Beyond the Heavens?" Lady Bai understood her man's temperament all too well. What she could not understand was why, for minor cultivators like them, men always set their sights so high. Higher even than this world's limits?
Of course, she knew nothing of the Soul Realm, much less Sword One, Two, and Three. It was precisely these beings who had weighed so heavily on Hou Niao from beginning to end, and the higher his realm rose, the more intense