He never thought of himself as anything special.
Anyone could look at the silver-haired, golden-eyed general and see just how divine he is. The way he carries himself, the way he speaks, the way he thinks -- his smile, his beauty, his skill, his strength, his spirit; all these things truly make him seem like the epitome of the divine. To the people of the Xianzhou, who live in perpetual warfare, is it so hard to see why General Jing Yuan is held in such esteem, almost god-like even, when his wisdom has carried him and the Luofu forward for centuries while his peers fell in but a fraction of his reign?
What a surprise it would be for them to know that he never saw himself as anything unique at all -- still doesn't, in fact.
But when your parents, brilliant in their own right, are diligent scholars while you'd rather climb trees or hide a book on warfare between the pages of your reading assignments or roughhouse with a makeshift sword rather than do your studies, how is your own brilliance defined?
...The answer is it isn't.
Of course, Jing Yuan never found anything wrong with that, it simply was as it was. He was just an ordinary boy with two ordinary parents who had ordinary jobs in the Realm-Keeping Commission -- all very important work, of course, but... ordinary.
And horribly, horribly boring.
What he wanted to do was explore. Travel the worlds and see what the universe had to offer. Maybe save a person or two. Jing Yuan will fully admit now that his desires were an escape from the shackles of responsibility, and thus became his path to becoming a Cloud Knight. He never pursued that path for honor or glory.
And so Jing Yuan, an ordinary boy, joined the Cloud Knights -- was lucky enough to attract the attention of the Swordmaster of the Luofu, lucky enough to find that he did actually quite enjoy fighting; and, eventually, became very good at it, too.
And how lucky was he to be invited by his master to join her ranks? How lucky was he to meet such incredible, talented people, to be able to soar fearlessly through the air on a starskiff driven so swiftly it seemed weightless? How lucky was he to grow close to the High Elder of the Vidyadhara himself and the most brilliant blacksmith he'd ever know, both awe-strikingly clever and beautiful? How lucky was he?
And Jing Yuan, this ordinary young man barely past the dawn of youth, who would laugh and insist that he's good at nothing but fighting and hardly even that, this boy who did not dream of greatness, did not see how the sunlight caught his hair and turned it to white fire. He did not see the lightning in his eyes.
He did not see the awe-struck eyes trained on him until he was the only one left.
He did not choose divinity. He did not wish for it. But divinity chose him, and the proof of it is in his survival where all others have fallen.
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Had a dream that instead of a little finch, Jing Yuan had a massive kiwi
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don't you hate when you literally write a whole novel worth of rants and rambles and honesty you can't even remember all the points you made by the end because it was just so long and everytime you hit a certain point you would go on a tangent and it have to bring it back and then you put the tags on it and press post and it tells you to try again and lose all the writing with no way of getting it back because you didn't save it anywhere, hell you weren't even going to write a post but it came to you while scrolling through Tumblr and you were like hell why not? You didn't even put it through a spell checker completely unfiltered thoughts and it shows and now it will never be seen again, do you even bother to rewrite it? It just won't be the same.
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