Ten Miles of Red Sakura Blossoms

Chapter One

AN/: EDITED!

Her eyes were bottomless pits of blue. He could tell that her shiny black hair would be soft to the touch, despite how wild and unkept it was. She was unlike most other woman Byakuya had seen in his measly seventy thousand years of living. Immortal women in the nine heavens, the earth immortals of Qing Qiu and even the mortal women of the land of the living, usually wore their hair long as was the standard for high class feminine beauty. Long hair was necessary for them to decorate themselves with all kinds of hairpins and jewels that they adorned in attempts to catch the eyes of men, yet this woman's hair was so short that it barely passed her slender jaws. Even men like Byakuya kept their hair neat and long, as was standard for high nobility.

This woman was unusual. Uncommonly beautiful...and she was lifting his small feathered form closer to her face to better inspect his injuries.

Unfortunately, he wasn't in the best of shape at the moment, but despite the injuries he obtained from his unfortunate encounter with the blue demon lord Nodt, his feathers still shone in all their light ashen-sliver brilliance, and the crown feather on his head as well as his tail tendril, curled majestically to maintain what little dignity he had left, after he lost the fight and he was forced to seek refuge until the danger passed.

"Oh! Aren't you a gorgeous little cockatiel? But you're hurt so badly, poor thing... Don't you worry! I help all kinds of injured critters all the time, I'll get you fixed up as good as new, and care for you until you can spread your wings again." She promised Byakuya, and placed him into the wooden bird cage she used to catch a small golden finch, who, seemed awfully upset that his place as her companion had been just stolen from him, yet he flew off none the less. He never understood how animals could tolerate living their lives under the subjugation of humans, yet even if the feeling was fleeting, he understood their sentiment.

It was kind of the beauty to offer to take care of him, though, it wasn't as if he wouldn't have healed naturally within a few days without her help. If he didn't, he could have always sent for the medicine king who would have healed him at any and all costs.

The woman finally entered an old shack and placed the cage down gently on the table beside a window. There were many little objects and natural herbs she had scavenged from the forest already laying on the table, along with small twigs and scraps of threadbare linin she must have used for bandaging small animals.

"Here," she said, and placed a handful of dirty seeds in front of his tiny talons, "go on and eat up! You must be hungry. If you want to get better quickly, the first thing we need to work on is making sure you get the right amount of nutrition." She then placed a few small berries beside the seeds and watched him expectantly.

He was the grandson of the heavenly lord Hao De, and he was the crowned prince of the nine heavens; yet she would dare to feed him seed and bitter wild berries as if he were some common house pet? To her, he supposed, he was merely a lost pet. He didn't seem to come off as an almighty phoenix god who usually strikes fear and respect into the hearts of all living beings in his current form.

Byakuya clawed at his food dejectedly. It would've been so much simpler for him, if he could have changed back into his human form, but he lost too much of his cultivation to Nodt during their battle, and he wouldn't be able to take on his human form to scare her if he wanted to. Besides, as he looked into her large, emotional blue eyes, he decided that he didn't really want to scare her, in fact, he suddenly felt like humouring her, if only to stop her from worrying over him.

He picked up a couple of the berries in his long, sharp beak, and made an excellent show of swallowing them right in front of her. Something he had planned to continue doing until she was no longer watching him. He would have to spit them out somewhere behind her back before he lost his sense of taste for the rest of his immortal life.