Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Tae hesitated but ultimately took Ryu's hand. She wasn't truly sure how to feel about what was going on here, but her will to see Matheus overwhelmed her.

After being alone for so long, she longed for family. It was hard to reject a change like this… especially since she still didn't know what Ryu might do if he was rejected. That was a large part of the reason she was acting like this to begin with.

She was also quite well aware of her current standing.

Ryu didn't look like he had aged a single day. In fact, there was even a good argument to make that he looked even healthier and more exuberant than back then, although not necessarily younger.

His presence seemed to take up more space, and he was even more handsome than she remembered by a margin that wasn't too insignificant.

While she… well, while she wasn't yet in her middle ages, she was already showing signs of aging that were all too obvious to her. For someone who hadn't seen her in so long, they would be even more obvious to Ryu.

On top of that, while she had been a beauty, that was by the standards of the Blossom Plane and she wasn't necessarily city-toppling.

Originally, she didn't quite know this. She lost in her own bubble and didn't have much interaction with the elites of the world to understand the difference.

But after seeing the woman Matheus loved all those years ago… she realized just what kind of gap it was.

She didn't know why the Heavens were so vain, but it was clear and obvious to her that the higher one's talent and the deeper one's cultivation, the more attractive they were.

Well, no… she had always known this. It was obvious.

The universe existed for the sake of progressing to an unknown peak, and every creature under its charge was tasked with improvement and evolution.

How did the opposite sex know that you were worthy of them? Was it not by how you looked?

The more attractive you were, the more you would signal to others of your caste just how healthy and strong you were.

It was the way of the world… the way everything worked.

In some shape or fashion, Tae had always known this.

It was just that she was blissfully unaware of just how large the gap was until that day.

Seeing Ryu return to her now, she was reminded of that truth all the more clearly. So much so that after she took his hand… she somewhat regretted it already.
Read new chapters at empire

Maybe she should just stay in this small little shack, maybe this was just where she belonged.

She wasn't beautiful enough to catch Ryu's attention. Maybe she was better off just staying in this forest.

Ryu looked toward Tae as he suddenly felt some resistance from her arm.

With a glance, he could guess many things about her state of mind.

In truth, she was probably right in many respects. Even back then, she had never really caught his attention. She failed both in temperament and in the looks department, she just wasn't his type.

That said… the way she acted today had actually impressed him quite a bit.

She half expected to come back to find her pining after him. Maybe it was arrogant--no, that was exactly what it was. But he didn't think he was particularly wrong to feel that way.

Although it sounded like he had been joking with Wobbling Fairy, the odds of her finding a man better than himself was truly non-existent. And if it was impossible for her, it was magnitudes more difficult for Taedra here.

The fact that she hadn't been thinking about him despite the early imprint on her he had had from an early age, it went to show her character.

Rather than bruising his ego, it made him more interested in her.

Right now, she was showing signs of hesitation. And sure, much of that came from insecurity. But it wasn't insecurity in the normal sense.

In fact, Ryu would go as far as to say that it was self-assurance.

She knew and understood her limits. She didn't want to be swept up into a storm she knew that she couldn't manage.

While it was true she felt that she wasn't beautiful enough or talented enough to catch Ryu's attention, this didn't make her feel embarrassed, it instead made her feel apprehensive, stand-offish… wary.

This woman, after having lost so much in her life, had her own sense of Dao Heart, and it was quite strong.

'… Interesting…'

Ryu had never seen a Dao Heart like this, mostly because he didn't interact with mortals much at all anymore, and this wasn't quite a Dao Heart, at least not in the normal sense.

It was just strength of character.

Ryu released Tae's hand, catching her off guard. For a moment, she thought that she had enraged him, but Ryu actually walked past her and into her small cabin, not saying anything.

Taedra was taken aback, but she could only bite her lip and follow, not sure of what Ryu wanted to do.

The cabin was truly quaint. There wasn't much at all, just a simple bed Tae probably wouldn't need to use often, many plants, and a single desk by the side that was filled with notebooks.

Ryu walked to the desk and looked down. One of the notebooks was opened to a page of aged leather. There was beautiful calligraphy written across its pages, but Taedra seemed to have stopped in the middle of a sentence.

'… Poetry…'

Ryu chuckled to himself, not because the poem was funny, but it was clear that Taedra had filled these dozens of books and probably much more with these poems.

If this poem was anything to go by, she was highly introspective and yet observant of the world around her at the same time.

Didn't that make it even funnier that she rarely thought of him?