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It was a day like any other.
The sun was high up in the sky, its artificial blue spread far and wide. The people of the Luofu went about their mundane business, talking about what they were having for dinner, some were leading their children by hand as they walked side by side, and some enjoyed tea as they sat with their companion.
It was a day like any other, except the streets were adorned with the visage of a lovely young boy, where bouquets of flowers were left underneath the streetlamps.
He had silky blond hair, his smile as bright as the ship’s noon daylight. His golden eyes were reminiscent to that of the Luofu's general.
A month went by, and yet the general’s heart still felt as if it had been freshly cleaved in half with a butcher’s knife.
He stared outside of his window in a daze. The mountain of paperwork behind him was left facing his back. The room was cold, as if all signs of life were stripped out of it by a malevolent force.
The pains of the past finally caught up to him. The curse of immortality, the fear of all long-life species. The once clear laughter of the old times, now muffled and left in a dizzy static.
And he tried so hard to move on from it. He knew that the passing of time was inevitable, knew that the bond he shared with them would eventually be severed, he knew. And yet, it still hurt all the same.
His worst fear finally came crashing down to him.
The sight of the crazed gaze staring back at him, its golden eyes full of intense hatred, shook his core down to the last bits of his bones. It burned as if it were the sun itself, and it burned his entire being down until all that was left of him were ashes.
What he saw back then wasn’t his own reflection. It was his own son.
Someone who he saw went from a tiny bundle of a crying mess, to someone who could fight his own against two Luofu legends. Someone who he cherished more than even the Luofu itself, and someone that if he could, he’d carve his own heart out and give it to him.
But fate, as always, was cruel. Merciless, stone cold, and objective.
His glaive pierced through his son’s own heart. Even as pain seared throughout his entire body, all he could do was look down on the man who raised him his entire life, and gave him a weak smile. His eyes dimmed like a cloudy day, before he slumped down to the ground.
And ever since then, he hated when the cloud covered the sun’s shining rays. Because he’d be reminded of that day, be reminded of the aching that was only getting worse as time went by and be afraid of what the future held for him, and when he looked over to his side, there’ll be no bright pair of eyes that would greet his own.
He was too young. So young.
He hadn’t known what it felt like to lead expeditions on his own yet. He hadn’t learned not to spend all his money on a brand new sword yet. He hadn’t learned to hold himself back in the battlefield yet.
That all too familiar sense of pain stung the general’s eyes again. The bile forming in his throat was getting too heavy and bitter to swallow.
Three knocks could be heard from the office’s front door.
It was business as usual.
It was a day like any other.