It was a strange thing about beings who had lived for centuries.
They were supposed to be the brave ones. They had seen everything, survived everything, accumulated power across spans of time that made the lives of ordinary creatures look like single breaths. By every reasonable expectation, they should have been the hardest to frighten.
The opposite was true.
When faced with overwhelming strength, the beings who had lived the longest became the most cowardly, because they had the most to lose and had spent the most effort keeping it. A creature with one short life could afford to gamble it. A creature with centuries already spent and centuries more expected guarded those centuries with everything it had, and when something appeared that could take them away in the span of a finger tapping the air, that creature wanted nothing in the world except to keep on living!
Damian watched Xuanwu prove it.
