The wind at Nine Heavens Mountain's peak carried the scent of distant rain and something else—something Liang Zhenwu hadn't smelled in a hundred thousand years. Hope, perhaps. Or fear. He could no longer tell the difference.
His white robes, once pristine as fresh snow, now bore the stains of time itself. Not blood—he'd stopped bleeding long ago—but the gray patina that settled on things too old to remember their original purpose. Like himself.
Behind him, Li Tianming's breathing came in shallow bursts. Forty millennia together, and still the boy—man, Zhenwu corrected himself—couldn't hide his tells. The slight rustle of silk as trembling hands smoothed imaginary wrinkles. The careful spacing of footsteps, as if the ground might crack beneath unworthy feet.
"Master." Tianming's voice carried that particular strain of someone forcing words through a closing throat. "The village... Green Mountain Village. Are you certain it still—?"
"Every spring," Zhenwu said, not turning around, "my mother would send me to gather peach blossoms from the tree in our courtyard. For tea, she claimed, though I suspect she simply wanted me out of her kitchen." He smiled, and felt the unfamiliar pull of muscles long unused. "I always refused. Too much trouble for leaves that would taste bitter anyway."
The memory crystallized without warning, sharp enough to cut:
Rain pattering on the Jialing River's surface. His fishing line slack in the current, more for show than purpose. His father's voice booming across the water: "Twenty years breathing and you've never brought home so much as a minnow!"
His mother's softer approach, pressing a worn coat into his hands. "Let him be, Dacheng. Our son sees things we cannot."
"Sees what? Empty hooks?"
But she'd only stroked his hair with calloused fingers that smelled of flour and mountain herbs. "His eyes... they look beyond the surface."
And then the river had changed. Gold spreading through brown water like spilled sunlight. The stone rising from the depths, humming with power that made his teeth ache and his soul sing.
One touch. One moment of contact with something greater than himself.
And everything he'd ever known had dissolved like morning mist.
"Venerable Zhenwu." Long Aotian's voice rumbled through the clouds, each word precisely measured. "Your service to the cosmic balance will echo through eternity."
Mo Wujie's laughter cracked like breaking bones. "Spare us the poetry, lizard. We all know you're counting the moments until he's gone. How long before you start eyeing the mortal realms again?"
"Peace, demon." Huang Yanyu's tone could have frozen flame. "Show respect for—"
"No."
The single word from Zhenwu's lips silenced them all. Not with power—he'd sealed most of that away already—but with simple, tired authority.
"I am not a god. I never was." He turned to face the assembled powers of three realms. Dragons, demons, phoenixes, and things that had no names in any mortal tongue. All of them bowing, though whether from respect or relief, he couldn't say. "I'm just a man who lived too long and killed too often. Who mistook strength for wisdom and isolation for peace."
His disciples stood in formation, as they had for thousands of years. But today, their rigid perfection felt different. Fragile.
Tianming stepped forward, his movements precise as always. "Master, I still cannot master the third form of your Heaven's Edge technique. Every day I practice, every day I—"
"You think too much." Zhenwu reached out, clasped the young man's shoulder. Felt the slight flinch, quickly suppressed. Even now, after all this time, they feared his touch. "I never mastered it either, you know. I simply... acted. Through fear, through pain, through failure. Perfection is the enemy of progress, Tianming."
Yue Qingcheng approached with her characteristic icy composure, but Zhenwu caught the tremor in her hands before she clasped them behind her back. "Without your guidance, Master, I find myself... uncertain of my path."
"You've always known where you needed to go," he said gently. "You've simply been afraid to walk that road alone."
Her breath hitched—barely audible, but he heard it. A crack in ice that had protected her for centuries.
Zhao Wuji shuffled his feet, massive frame somehow managing to look sheepish. "Uh, Master? About that strategy book you keep pushing on me... do I really gotta read the whole thing? I mean, punching problems usually works fine..."
Despite everything, Zhenwu chuckled. "Keep punching walls, and eventually your fists will break instead of stone. Read the book, Wuji. Slowly. And for heaven's sake, stop eating those fermented bean buns before meditation. Your qi isn't the only thing that stinks."
Su Ling'er had been crying since he'd announced his departure, tears streaming down her face without shame or attempt to hide them. "Master, Ling'er will be strong! But... but who will listen when I'm sad? Who will help when the nightmares come?"
He knelt before her, ignoring the protest in joints that had moved for too long without rest. "You don't need someone to listen to your sadness, little one. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is simply sit with silence. Let it teach you what words cannot."
"But... what about the candy you always bring me?"
His smile felt like sunrise after endless winter. "I'll see if my mother's recipe still exists. No promises, mind you—her standards were much higher than mine."
Finally, Xiao Bao. Twelve years old in body, ancient beyond measure in spirit, currently stuffing his face with honeyed cakes while trying to pretend he wasn't listening to every word.
"Master smells funny," he announced around a mouthful of crumbs. "Like old socks and sadness. Are you really leaving? Because Big Brother Tianming never shares his sweets, and Sister Qingcheng is mean, and Brother Wuji keeps trying to make me exercise, and—"
"And you," Zhenwu said, reaching out to tap the boy's forehead, "talk too much with your mouth full."
"Ow! Master's being mean again! First you're leaving, now you're hitting me!" But the complaint dissolved into giggles, which dissolved into sniffles, which became the quiet, desperate crying of a child who understood more than he wanted to.
Zhenwu lifted him, felt the small arms wrap around his neck with desperate strength. "Listen carefully, little one. You're the smartest among them, though you hide it well. But promise me something—don't become like me. Don't let strength become a cage. And if you ever find a home..." He tightened his embrace. "Guard it with everything you have."
The wind stilled. Even the clouds seemed to pause their eternal drift.
Zhenwu stood among powers that could reshape reality with a thought, disciples who could level mountains with their weakest techniques, beings that existed before mortal concepts of time and space. Yet in this moment, he felt smaller than he had in a hundred thousand years.
Mortal.
"I leave now," he said, his voice carrying to every corner of every realm. "Not from weariness, not from defeat. I leave because I finally remember what it means to want something more than duty."
He drew forth a fragment of the Destiny Stone—the same stone that had called to him from the Jialing River so long ago. Golden light spilled between his fingers, warm and welcoming as a mother's embrace.
"But understand this." The light intensified, and for a moment, the cosmic cultivator they had known flickered back into existence. "If you wage wars for conquest, if you prey upon the defenseless, if you mistake might for right..."
The stone pulsed, and reality itself seemed to hold its breath.
"Then I will return. Not as your guardian. Not as your judge. But as someone who has learned the difference between power and strength. And I will show no mercy."
The portal opened. Not with thunder or earthquake, but with the soft whisper of morning breeze through peach blossoms. Light enveloped him gradually, gently, like water rising around a stone.
In his final moment, he smiled—not the careful expression of an immortal master, but the genuine joy of a son going home.
And then he was gone.
The five disciples knelt. Not immediately—Zhao Wuji scratched his head first, Xiao Bao finished his cake, and even Tianming hesitated before assuming the formal position. But eventually, they all bowed their heads to empty air that still smelled faintly of rain and distant peach blossoms.
In Green Mountain Village, three realms away, an old woman set water to boil and wondered why she suddenly had the urge to make tea from flowers that hadn't bloomed in a hundred thousand years.