Ming Yue finally decided she would take a stroll and familiarize herself with the town and also check out the missions building.
Now that she had taken her first step as a cultivator she wanted to see if she could be useful to the sect so that she and Jun Xi wouldn't be so criticized. She remembered the look and the words of the elders when she first arrived and she remembered the words of the girl she met at the training fields. She didn't like how people criticized Jun Xi and she had come to realize it was partly her fault.
As she moved down the narrow trail toward the ninth peak through a bamboo forest she heard something crack in the forest. The sound was loud and heavy, like a tree falling down.
Curious, she diverted from the path and entered the bamboo forest. She walked for a few moments and then she suddenly stopped.
Her eyes grew into two glaring ponds of glittering stars. Before her sat an enormous and fluffy panda. It was black and white and was as big as an elephant. She had never seen such a big panda in her life!
It was calmly sitting on its big round bottom eating bamboo leaves and every now and then it would pull a new bamboo tree toward it and continue eating, producing that cracking sound she heard before.
"So cute!" Ming Yue blurted out. She moved towards it slowly, trying not to scare it as she wanted to pet it.
The giant panda noticed her and looked at her for only a moment before it continued eating.
Taking this as approval she plunged herself into its fluffy fur and almost disappeared in all that fluffiness!
"Aww! So fluffy!" Ming Yue squealed as she rubbed her face into the fluffy black and white fur. After several minutes of enjoying herself in the fluffiness she faced the panda and asked, "Do you have an owner? If not can you be my pet?" Her eyes blinked as she tried to look as cute as possible.
Unknown to her an old man with a long white beard that reached his feet and a pair of eyebrows that were thick and fluffy like clouds and hid his eyes stood on top of a bamboo tree a few hundred meters away and watched this scene. This was the sect's patriarch.
He was calmly stroking his long beard as he saw the girl petting the giant panda and seemed deep in thought. But upon hearing her last sentence he almost pulled his long beard off!
He chewed on his teeth as he grumbled quietly to himself, "How daring, asking our sect's guardian spirit beast to be her pet!" For a moment he wanted to fly over there and give a knock on this silly girl's head. But he had a face to keep as the sect's solemn patriarch. What would people say if he ran around knocking young girl's heads? Even if they were at fault it would be silly. So all he could do was to hold back his anger and stay rooted.
Ming Yue climbed off the giant panda and began to jump and spin around in front of it cutely as she kept asking, "What do you say? Do you want to be my pet?"
The giant panda stopped eating for a moment and looked at the lively girl who seemed to be dancing in front of it, but quickly lost interest and pulled down another tree and continued eating.
Seeing this, Ming Yue frowned as she put her hands on her hips akimbo and looked at the giant panda with disapproval. "Hmph!"
Then as if a light bulb went on she looked at the panda then at the branches it was eating leaves from and then back to the panda an idea was formed!
She broke off a bamboo branch near her and then waved it in front of the panda. "These leaves will taste much better! Nom! Nom! Nom!"
This caught the giant panda's attention again as it looked at the girl and then toward the branch that she waved in front of it. Then it reached its paws toward the branch the girl was holding, but just as it was about to grab it, the girl pulled it away. The panda bent forward and tried to grab it again, but once again the girl pulled the branch away. Failing to get the branch again the panda gave the girl an aggrieved look as if it was a small child being bullied.
Ming Yue chuckled. "Agree to be my pet and I'll give you this branch full of delicious and tasty leaves. What do you say?" She shook the branch and the shaking leaves seemed to almost ring like tiny bells.
The giant panda looked like it was on the brink of crying as its eyes moved from the branch to the girl and then back to the branch again.
Finally it couldn't take the bullying anymore and nodded its head as it made a low growl which seemed to cause the air around them to tremble.
Ming Yue's eyes lit up and she smiled happily as threw the branch to the panda and then pounced into its stomach and hugged it as if it was an enormous teddy bear!
"We're going to have so much fun together!" She said as she rubbed her face against the panda's fluffiness.
Witnessing this, the old patriarch suddenly pulled two tufts of hair out of his long beard and his face turned red. "Impossible! It has been our guardian spirit beast for thousands of years it can't be that stupid and be fooled by this silly girl!"
However as he continued looking at them he saw the girl climb up on the panda's back and then kicked it lightly with her heels as she shouted: "Giddy up!"
The old patriarch almost swallowed his wind pipe as he turned around, no longer able to continue seeing this scene as if all hope had left him. "Demon! She's a demon! I shouldn't have let her stay, our sect is doomed! Doomed!" He wallowed quietly to himself and left with a few steps that brought him miles away and soon seemed to disappear in the horizon.