They say that the way Time is laid out looks very much like a vine on a wall: one, central stalk decorated by countless shoots going off in all directions. Not all of the branches come to an end, and not all of them bear fruit; sometimes, in fact, there hardly seems any point to the smaller shoots at all.
There are those, however, that grow to be thicker and more grand than even their original parent; those expand to the point that they must be cut off to form their own colonies of grapes and their own offshoots to nourish. These branches are started, like all the others, with the tiniest of roots; there is often no way to tell what will make one branch so very different from another.
Sometimes, one single action makes the difference.
The sword that he held in his hand was very strange; it was thick, too dark to be metal. The weight was different, the texture too smooth, and the edge didn't seem to be comparatively sharp at all. Upon inspection, the reason for these things became immediately obvious: this particular blade was made of wood.
Perfectly balanced to be graceful in spite of its thickness and weight, the wooden sword had been made using techiniques developed by Chinese warlords toward the end of the Han dynasty. The techniques had been lost; the swords, however, had not. By altering the normal swordsmanship method to allow for the unusual lightness and differing wind sheer, the determined soldier - according to legend - found such wooden blades to be more effective in battle than their metal counterparts. The blades were sturdy, specially treated for strength and durability; nothing could break them. Lighter than normal, they sliced the air more cleanly than a metal blade, and were more difficult to see as they failed to reflect the light. All in all, they were a near perfect weapon.
Chang Wufei had never seen anything so marvelous in his life.
"Xie xie," he said, thanking the store manager in native Mandarin; and clutching the odd blade closely to his chest, he left.
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Wufei had made a simple choice that altered his particular timeline; like the butterfly that flaps its wings once in Tokyo and causes rain instead of sun in New York, he had, on a whim, stopped to look at this isolated weapon depot, and in the process found something that changed his path irreparably. In the world with which you and I are familiar, Wufei passed the store without going in, went his way, and was eventually responsible for the death of Treize Kushrenada. In this one, however, things were not so straightforward; and now that he had made this decision, there was no going back.
A new destiny had been born.