One Dream

[Zao]

The stars filled the sky, but they were not the stars that one could see from the human world...not these were the ones from the personal realm of the spirit saint as he floated in the air just above the small island which held only a small bamboo structure upon its grassy surface. He simply watched in silence as one could see comets shooting through the sky in the distance, far off was a series of multicolored planets that filled the sky as the light from those planets and the binary stars further away helped to gently light his pocket of spacetime. This was the last safe space left for the man, that man who had destroyed the genma of each village for his own purpose.

Zao turned his gaze down to the grassy island where ten sealing pots were broken, a strange sealing fuuin around the ground below each pot that all formed a type of ten-pointed star and in the middle was another circular fuuin inscription where a beautiful white haired young woman lay. This woman was the man's love, his wife, returned back to her original state and age right after they were married. Freed of the corrupted dark chakra that riddled her body from his encounter with the Demonic Hegemon but the cost was truly great in the eyes of others, but to have his lover saved from a dark end of becoming a demon...there was no price the once saintly man wouldn't have paid.

Driving here to his personal realm as the only safe spot for the man who was wanted by every village, including his own for stealing away their genma and killing a number of good men and women in the process to accomplish his own, perhaps selfish goal as many would have seen it. Having used the chakra from the great spirits to fuel his own spacetime technique. Anyone who learned the art of spacetime knew that the most difficult type of manipulation was the manipulation of time. The amount of time it took to recycle only a few minutes was enough to drain a large portion of even the Spirit Saints chakra....one could imagine the endless amount of chakra that would be needed to turn back the cloak years.

If the middle aged man would have told anyone of this goal of his, they would not have been wrong to have called him crazy or insane. Thus was the reason that he didn't even speak of it to his love who was being devoured slowly by the dark chakra of the Demon King, only now was she aware of what her husband had truly sacrificed for. Having always told her that it was to eliminate the spirits from this world to prevent something like what happened to both of them, which was partly truth but just not the whole truth. Zao appeared to have aged slightly, exhausted and tired from using the technique that drew out the very last drops of each of the genma's chakra as he slowly floated down to where his beautiful love was barely waking.

His soft finger tips caressed at her cheek, causing her bright blue eyes to flutter open as a hint of redness filled in her face. "My love, you've sacrificed to much for me...." She spoke softly, a mere whisper but it was like the first time for Zao who smiled with his half open blue eyes that had seemingly lost their normal glow, her hand reaching up to hold tightly onto the older man's now. "A small price to pay, my love." A gentle smile, the first smile of its kind in over a year formed on the Spirit Saint's lips...even though he was sure that their was a number of shinobi attempting to break into his personal realm at this very moment the man ignored everything else....for he was truly happy once more.

---

Slowly the dream crumbled and fell apart as the man opened his eyes, setting on an olden wooden chair as he felt the warm breeze flow through the open window next to the bed. Laying within the bed was his young wife, her skin dotted with blotches of dark skin as half her body appearing to be some form of demonic appearance to it as the dark chakra of the Hegemon continued to try and corrode her body and soul. Slowly but surely transforming her into a demon spirit, it was something that he had not been able to remove or even truly slow down. But in his meditation he had done thousands of hours of calculations and simulations until he came to this point, the point where he killed the Konoha jinch host and even claimed the life of one of his friends in the process.

The gentle man had embarked on the blood road that would bring him damnation in the end...but if he was able to free his love from her own damnation that he would toss his soul to the Death God himself if that was the road he must walk. "Rest well my love, I will save you..." Zao reached over to lightly caress the soft forehead of his sick wife who trembled lightly in her slumber...he would kill anyone who got in the way of him saving his soulmate. Exhaling slowly the man cast his gaze out the window...