The first few days of my little adventure with Meimei were honestly relaxing. It was just really nice to spend time with the person you love. We did have our mission to repair the Dragon Veins… but we could also afford to just live a little in our search. It was just the two of us. No extra cart, no extra dependents, just travelling across the sheer vastness that was the Grass Sea. The landscape changed as we went. The grass came in varying sizes and widths, and even colours. We passed a patch of grass that was crimson red; another on our path had blades the width of my palm and grew as tall as a tree, pointing directly up. It wasn’t all grass either. We wandered past old growth forests that had untouched trees thousands of years old within them. We crossed rivers that had so many fish and frogs in them you could probably walk across without ever touching the bottom. I had to say, the best thing about what we had with Tianlan? It was the ability to just… be in the world. It moved on like we weren’t even there, and revealed its deepest secrets to us. If you had given us a camera and Sir David Attenborough, we could have filmed the greatest nature documentary of all time. …hells, I still might do that, because this was amazing! Where we walked, no animals took notice of us. We strode through a great herd of bison without a single head turning to regard us. We watched the calves gambol around and headbutting each other with glee. We watched ripperbeak males practising their moves for next spring—they wove together great bowers of grass while they danced and chirped, strutting their stuff with exaggerated swagger.