Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Old Wan was staring at Ryu calmly. He could feel that something about this young man had changed, and many of the plans he had made seemed not to apply properly anymore.

For a moment, it felt like there was a game of Domain between the two and the world shuddered. But the facade... was broken by a voice that was barely as strong as a whisper, so low that it felt like a butterfly was flapping its wings. If not for their cultivations, they might not have heard her at all.

"Ryu... what... what happened?"

Aika looked up with a pale face, her eyes almost pleading. She couldn't seem to bring herself to look at Old Wan as she begged Ryu for an explanation that could wish what she was feeling away.

Ryu hadn't particularly planned on bothering with Aika much at all. As he had said, her Dao Heart was in shambles, so she wouldn't make a good Summon. And he owed her too much to turn her into a Corpse Puppet. He did things by his own letter of the law, and that was simply how his own moral compass weighed things out.

However, when he looked over at her, he couldn't help but pause.

He remembered the first time he met. Aika. She was a valiant old lady at the head of the Sect's library, eager to force her little kiddos to read as many books as they could.

Later, Ryu came to know how powerful she was, even having a hand at helping her break into the Sovereign Realm.

In that time, she had poured her heart and soul into helping him as best she could, even going out to personally hunt for beasts for him to eat. There was not another Sovereign in the world that would take out so much time for him, maybe other than his mother herself.

She seemed to be arrogant to the outside world, but she probably had one of the largest hearts that Ryu had ever seen in a person. It was unfortunate that people like her tended to be the most fragile in worlds like this one.

Ryu could still remember helping her get out of her marriage proposal to the disciples of the Sect back then by defeating them. It was precisely because he respected what she had done so much that he never had thoughts of forcing her to acknowledge that proposal, even if under any other circumstances he would.

If Aika chose to marry someone else in the future, and the world learned that she had once been promised to him, then the results of such a thing could truly harm his Fate... especially if such information was left in the hands of someone with truly sinister intentions.

But in a rare showing, Ryu chose not to care.

Before this moment, he hadn't really considered why it was. But it seemed to be a difference between an underlying respect and the lack of such a thing.

Wasn't there another person he had felt this way toward?

In his first life, he had been perfectly alright with Elena marrying another person. He felt that his life was too fragile to be worthy of her.

He didn't feel rage or discontent at the idea, he just wanted what was best for her, the first woman he had ever truly loved.

Could he say that he loved Aika?

No.

He had never really looked at her that way. Maybe that was because he had first seen her as an old woman, or maybe it was something less superficial than that...

Respect.

Ryu gazed at Aika for a long while. He stood there among four Sovereigns as though he belonged, almost carelessly giving his back to two of them as though any attacks they might make were entirely inconsequential to him.

He took a step forward and his shadow loomed over Aika.

When she didn't have a cultivation realm that made him feel suffocated, it felt a lot more like he was just looking at a frail woman. She was barely over five feet tall and her frame was slight. Her personality had once made her feel much larger than she was, but in the end... right now she looked like nothing more than a petite young

woman.

Ryu smiled and actually reached out, ruffling her hair.

Aika was stunned, not quite knowing what this meant. But it seemed that her heart decided for her.

She burst into tears, choking sobs she had been holding back on for a long while coming out in waves as she found herself tightly holding onto Ryu.

Ryu's brows raised but he ended up shaking his head. He rubbed Aika's back lightly.

"I like the way you do things." Ryu said suddenly.

Aika's shoulders trembled, but her tears were still coming out in too large a torrent for her to respond. Anything she tried to say would just be choked down by more sobs. "I've never blamed you for your recklessness. In fact, I quite like it. I'm not a fan of sitting around in the shadows, plotting and scheming. Though I would surely be able to do so better than anyone else, I'm quite stubborn.

"I knew for a long while that there was an issue with Old Wan..."

Aika's trembling became fiercer, but once more, she didn't respond.

"... However, I ignored it. I thought that defeating him in Domain would have taught him the lesson he needed to know. But in the end, I overestimated myself it seems. At least in this tiny, insignificant frame of time.

"I didn't want to face the reality of having to plot and scheme my way through the next hundred years to deal with a snake in the grass because my ego didn't want to allow

it.

"And in the end, I suffered for it. And it seems like you have as well."

Ryu gripped Aika's shoulders and wiped her tears away with his thumbs. He smiled broadly, one that seemed capable of replacing the sun in the skies.

"You've protected me for many years. Now, it's my turn."

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