WHITE DREAM🤍
A New Legend of the White Snake
Logline: Not war. Not death. His final trial before godhood was becoming another man's bride.
🖤✨Prologue One: Heartstrings in the Thunder Trial, Three Hundred Years Unforgotten
Even one spring night with you, gege, would have been enough...
BOOM—
The nineteenth bolt fell, and Bai Su had time to see only a shadow, slight and pale, already throwing itself in front of him.
Then she was falling backward into his arms.
Her primordial spirit was already coming apart at the seams. Blood at her mouth. And still—still—those glistening eyes stayed fixed on his face and would not look away.
"Gege…"
"Xian'er loves gege. So long. So long now."
Something in Bai Su locked shut. For one whole breath he had no language at all—not a single word, in any tongue he had ever known, that fit.
He did not know it yet. That this whispered gege, so small, so easily lost in a dying girl's mouth, would be the one tribulation he'd fail to cross. Not in a year. Not in a decade.
Three hundred years.
—Three hundred years later.
Mount Qingcheng's ancient spine. The Sanctuary of Eternal Bloom. A thousand years and the cold mist here had never once lifted—no cookfire, no human breath, had ever crossed this threshold.
The mist broke apart like jade ground fine and scattered on water, and out of it stepped a figure whiter than the snow it stood on, silent, sleeves trailing through fog that clung to the stair like something unwilling to let go.
He caught himself against the stone wall. A crease cut deep between his brows. Tall as a lone pine stripped bare by wind, black hair loose down his back—and the one wrongness on that cold, clean face:
a thin vermilion line at the brow, half-hidden, uncanny.
Two thousand years of cultivation, and Bai Su's Dao heart should have been a frozen lake, flat and glass-calm.
The mark was his Origin-Mark.
Some days it lay there, dim as dried, wine-dark blood, and did not so much as twitch.
Today it woke the moment he crossed his own threshold. Woke and burned, keeping time with his pulse, and even his eyes—his famously unreadable eyes—held a ripple he could not smooth away.
Not fear of an enemy. Not dread of catastrophe.
Karma. Come, at last, to collect.
Bodhisattva Guanyin's words still rang through him like a temple bell struck at dusk and struck again at dawn, on and on, refusing to fade: enter the mortal dust, and cross your trial of love.
His Dao heart hadn't stopped shaking since.
Years back, mid-molt, powers thin as paper, the Daoist Long-Life Gu had come at him from the dark and nearly finished him. Black and White Impermanence had saved his life. Qing had fought to the death at his side.
Without them he would not have walked away.
And afterward White Impermanence had clung to him shameless as a beggar, wheedling for a Crimson Frost-Flow Scale to hang from her ear like a trinket.
Crimson Frost-Flow Scale.
Almost no one knew—across his whole body, only that intimate place, just above the point a snake calls its seven inches, carried those scales: pearl-white, a rouge blush underneath like something ashamed of itself, pulsing to his own heartbeat.
A life saved is a debt heavier than the whole weight of Mount Tai.
Immortal Lord of Qingcheng or not, he'd nearly blazed scarlet to the Nine Heavens from sheer mortification—and yet, in the end, he'd gritted his teeth, plucked the scale free with his own hand, and given it over.
Even then, even at his most humiliated, his Dao heart had never come apart like this.
Back then he'd surrendered one scale. One. Now—was he to walk the filthy, roaring dust of the human world, live and die as some little bodhi spirit's husband for one entire mortal lifetime, and only then, only then, call the debt paid?
He thought of himself as a creature who repaid what he owed.
There were a thousand ways to do it—elixirs, transmitted arts, a mountain of gold, a lifetime wrapped in silk. Any of them would serve. Why this? Why did Guanyin reach for the one instrument guaranteed to humiliate him— the tangled, sweating, undignified business of mortal love?
The heart of the Primordial True Dao must first be broken before it can be remade.
What a phrase.
Broken, only to be remade—how tidy, how convenient. Bodhisattva. Did you look at me, still virgin after two thousand years, and think: here. Here is where I'll make him bleed.
And yet the debt was carved into his own reverse scale, unarguable, permanent. Leave it unpaid and the debt of love festers forever; ascension seals itself shut and never opens again.
Where had it even begun, this rope tied around his fate? That grove, maybe.
That whole green tangle of bodhi trees.
Fine. He'd admit it.
Cultivation was long and it was tedious and out of that entire grove he had wanted one branch, and only one. Coiled around it as a serpent or seated beneath it wearing skin—it didn't matter which.
That was where he closed his eyes.
That patch of shade, and no other. Year on year the bodhi leaves hissed against him, and their scent—cool, green, faintly drunk on its own sweetness—worked itself thread by thread into whatever passed for his soul.
Then one evening, on the very eve of his divine tribulation, he went back to the grove and the branch was gone. Vanished. Not a splinter of it left.
He tore the grove apart looking. Nothing.
A mere thing of grass and wood. One flicker of green in an ocean of mortal dust—why did it have to be that one, gone, taken, missing? A restlessness rose in him with no source he could name, and his power churned with it, unbidden.
That was when the centipede-spirit came scuttling out of the dark. It had a young wood-spirit cornered, not even fully human yet, and it was spitting filth at her, intent on forcing itself upon her.
He watched from a distance. His frown cut deeper.
He was aloof by nature and held nothing but contempt for the way lesser spirits chased "dual cultivation" like dogs after scraps—courtship among spirits bored him, disgusted him a little, was beneath his notice as a rule.
But this. This was not desire meeting desire. This was simply a strong thing grinding down a weak one. Dual cultivation, if it deserves the name at all, wants two hearts saying yes— not one screaming no!
And he had lost his branch that very day. His temper was already a blade half-drawn.
He watched the robe tear off her shoulder and something in him snapped its leash. A cold snort. A sweep of his sleeve. He didn't need to kill it—one strike, palm-force through open air, sent the thing hurtling out of the grove entirely.
But it turned as it fled and spat a mouthful of poison-green mist back at him, one last vicious parting gift. On any normal day that venom would have cost him half an hour of meditation, no more.
Who could have known—that the very instant it entered him, checking the smooth flow of his power for one heartbeat, only one single heartbeat, his tribulation would choose that exact moment to arrive?
The sky over the grove went the color of a bruise. Thunder low and building. Clouds beginning their slow, monstrous churn far off.
How. How could this be?
By every calculation the hour was still far off.
Had saving one spirit truly been enough to snag the whole fabric of fate and drag his fixed hour forward?
No time to think it through. He turned back toward the girl, and through the smearing green mist and flying grass, really saw her— for the first time.
She was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with a siren's oiled, practiced allure. She was beautiful the way glass is beautiful. Fragile and nearly transparent.
Her hair had come loose from its pins, one living bodhi twig still crooked above one ear, its leaves trembling over a face gone white with terror except for one high spot of rose at the tip of her nose.
Her collar hung torn, one shoulder bared— pale, smooth, a peeled lotus root—and her collarbone rose and fell, rose and fell, too fast, with each ragged breath. Some tender immortal shoot, snapped clean off in a storm not built to spare anything so young.
But it was the eyes that undid him. Round, wet, brimming—a fawn's eyes, looking up at him as though he were the only solid thing left in the world.
And for the first time in two thousand years, Bai Su heard his own heart.
Heard it, and could not stop hearing it.
Terror still had her by the throat. Her whole body shook where she knelt, clutching the ruined edges of her robe.
"Th-thank you… for saving me… gege."
No blood between them. That word—gege—carried none. It was a word for something older and closer than kinship—soft, unguarded, already leaning somewhere it had no business leaning.
Her voice was a breath, thick with tears, and something in his chest drew tight for no reason he would admit to. Before he could examine it—could stop himself and ask why— he lifted a hand, called a clean robe out of nothing, and let it fall over her shoulders.
"Go. Now. Somewhere safe."
The words weren't even fully out of his mouth before the first bolt came down. Heaven's whole weight rolling across the sky at once, thunder enough to split stone, crack mountains open at the root.
Two thousand years of cultivation held the first eighteen bolts. Held them, barely. But the centipede's venom, only just leashed, caught his power as it surged and rode it, burning through blood and bone into every last corner of him.
He spat scalding blood onto the ground, dropped to one knee, and refused to let the rest of his body follow it down.
"That filthy, wretched—"
The curse ground out between his teeth. His hair a black ruin around his face. The mark at his brow burning brighter with every surge of blood, as though it meant to crawl off his skin entirely.
Even so.
Even so. He never once believed he could actually die here. Two thousand years was two thousand years—an early tribulation and a mouthful of venom might gut him, might leave him hollowed out for a century, but it would not kill him.
The little one, the fool, she thought otherwise, apparently.
That frail, wind-thin little plant spirit chose her own particular flavor of madness. Threw herself forward before fear could catch her. Arms spread wide. Put her own body between him and the sky.
The sky tore itself open.
The nineteenth bolt—purple-blue, world-ending—came down with everything it had, and her small body went flying backward like a kite with its string cut, then slammed straight back into his arms.
He looked down.
She was laced with scorch marks, her primordial spirit already tearing loose at the seams. And something in his own voice tore loose with it:
"Have you lost your mind?!"
"Two, three hundred years of cultivation—you thought you could take Heaven's punishment for me? That's a death sentence! Even I can't pull you back from that!"
"I know… Xian'er doesn't regret it…" Blood kept welling at her lips, but her eyes never left his face, and in them, finally, unguarded, was everything she'd never dared say.
"Xian'er's heart belongs to gege… I've loved you for so long… and today, saved by your own hand… Xian'er is content…"
What. Loved me—so long?
"Xian'er? You aren't—" His heart lurched sideways. That name…
She managed one small, unbearably sad smile.
"Gege… I'm the branch. The one that hung over your head every day. Shaded you from sun, from rain…"
She looked at him the way you look at something you're memorizing on purpose, her fawn's eyes already dimming, her voice thinning to nothing, a candle guttering in the wind.
"Gege… your cultivation—the spirit that drifted off, all those years—fed me. I only just took human form. I thought—I thought I'd become something worth looking at, something real, and stand in front of you properly and pay back everything you'd given me."
"But now… there's no time left for that, is there."
It was her.
That branch he'd torn the whole grove apart searching for.
The one that hung low, swaying, that had once wound itself so gently around his true serpent form while he slept. Without his ever knowing—without one single sign—she had crossed over.
Become someone.
The lonely stretch of two, three centuries flickered past his eyes like paper shadows spinning on a lantern wheel.
And out of that blur rose one clear evening after rain: himself in meditation beneath the tree, that branch reaching out on its own, winding slow around him, leaves trembling, that cool green scent breaking his focus completely.
He'd opened his eyes.
Touched a budding flower at his side. Murmured, half a joke, half not: "Such a scent. Such grace for a little immortal thing. Shall I promise you a name?"
"Xian'er…" A pause. Something warm in it. "Yes."
"Then from today—you're Xu Xian'er."
Xu—"to promise." Xian'er—"little immortal."
A name he had given her on a whim, never once imagining she'd spend an entire lifetime holding onto it like holy scripture.
"Xu" was his promise to her, and her eternal answer to him—a fate he had carved, with his own hands, into the very rings of her bodhi soul.
"Xian'er…" His voice broke. For the first time in his life, it simply broke, out of rhythm, out of control.
His branch. His own branch.
She had become this—this thing dying in his arms, unraveling because she'd taken his lightning into her body instead of letting it take him.
She shook faintly against him.
Blood he'd just wiped from her mouth was already welling up again. And still her eyes burned bright, throwing back at him a naked, helpless fear he had almost never once let the world see on his own face.
“Gege…” Softer now. Fading, word by word, into the wind.
"The greediest thing Xian'er ever wanted—the most Xian'er ever let herself want—was to stay at gege's side forever. To walk the path with you, as your Dao companion."
"And if gege thinks my roots too shallow for that… then even one spring night with you, gege, just once, would have been enough to make Xian'er glad…"
"You—" Cold water down his spine. Shame climbing the back of his neck into his hairline. Two thousand years untouched, pure, and it had never once crossed his mind that this innocent little branch carried thoughts this bold— dreamed, in secret, of his bed.
But her spirit was already going translucent in his arms, and the rebuke stuck in his throat and would not come.
"But now… Gege… none of it, none of it will happen. I’m…"
Before he could find words at all, a small, bitter, self-mocking smile had already touched her mouth. Her bloodied hand rose, trembling, and settled against his cold, snow-white cheek.
For a thousand years the great white snake spirit had not known desire.
Now heat rose behind his own eyes, unbidden, unwelcome, undeniable. His arms tightened around her before he gave them leave. His chest ached oddly like something had been dragging a feather back and forth across it for hours— an itch that hurt.
"Don't—don't talk like a fool! I'll save you!" The words left him before thought could catch up.
"Yes—Kunlun. The Immortal Elder of the South Pole. He has an herb, it calls back the dead, I'll go—"
He was desperate enough to say something that unguarded.
The elder's herb could raise mortals. Could raise immortals, even. But her primordial spirit was already scattering at the edges, and no herb on any mountain in any realm was going to reel that back in.
"It's not… not foolish talk. It's Xian'er's true heart." She looked at him like she meant to press every line of his face into her soul and carry it forward, into whatever life came next.
"Knowing gege cares this much—Xian'er can die and not regret it. Only remember me. That's all I ask… I loved the name you gave me… Xu… Xian'er."
"This life, I'll go on ahead. If there's a next one… Xian'er will find you again."
"Xian'er. Don't go. Stay."
He could only watch. Watch her dissolve, right there in his arms, into a wisp of smoke, and the smoke scattered into the bloody light of the dying sun, and there was nothing—nothing—he could do to stop any part of it.
For the next three hundred years, Bai Su kept cultivating on Mount Qingcheng, day folding into day.
But in all those long silent hours of breath and stillness, the instant he shut his eyes, her face would rise—that sorrowful face—and a voice, soft, impossibly far away, would find him:
"Gege."
Every single time, then.
He would jerk his eyes open like something had struck him. The mountain wind combing through his black hair, and along the frost-pale curve of his ear—unbidden, once again—a flush of red would rise and would not be told to stop.
【Twelve Songs of the White Snake — "Startled Awake" (also known as "Gege")】
I cannot forget— one cry of gege, in the flash of thunder and fire.
I cannot let go— half a thread of karma, beneath a dying crimson sky.
I thought my heart had long been polished to a flawless mirror.
Who knew— a dream could still breed demons.
Ah... three hundred years.
A love through a thousand tribulations.
Mountains and rivers may change.
This heart will not.
I have searched the Dao through emptiness.
This love, still, I cannot end.
They say the Great Dao knows no feeling— that only then comes true attainment.
And now, every breeze brings you back.
Every flame stirs the old ache.
The thunder passed.
Your soul could not gather again.
What I fear most is waking from a dream into hollow silence, unable ever again to call out...
"Gege..."