Precisely! It was because he showed this sovereign such kindness that this sovereign has come to see him off.
Back then, there was no Abbot Fahai.
He had not yet become the abbot anyone in the land would recognize. He had been an infant once, abandoned before a crumbling temple deep in the mountains. His master had carried him inside.
Few worshippers came to that temple. The roof leaked in half its rooms.
Still his master struck the wooden fish and chanted, day after day, never once leaving the mountain in his whole life—and it was this poor, weathered old monk who raised Fahai with his own two hands.
Rested a palm on his shaven head. Taught him slow: leave the household life, and you carry virtue with you everywhere you go.
His master's heart held real pity. Not just for people. For anything suffering in these mountains, spirit or human.
Fahai remembered the year they went up to gather herbs and found a wounded spirit-cat deep in the forest, one hind leg caught fast in a hunter's iron trap, flesh torn, blood soaking the dead leaves under it.
"Master…" Young as he was, Fahai already had spiritual sensitivity enough to feel the strangeness moving under that cat's skin.
"This one's not, not ordinary."
"It's still a living thing." His master hadn't hesitated at all. Set down the basket. Walked straight toward it.
"We've seen it suffer. Does it matter what kind of creature it is?"
Fahai had followed anyway, doubts and all, prying the trap open, cleaning the wound, laying on herbs. Three days and nights they nursed it in that broken temple. Once it healed, his master had carried it back into the woods with his own hands.
One small kindness after another.
That was how his master had lived his whole life—poor, and at peace with it.
That near-stubborn goodness bought him, in the end, on one snow-locked winter night, the most brutal betrayal imaginable.
That winter, his master caught a chill that wouldn't lift.
Young Fahai stayed at the bedside day and night, wouldn't change out of his robes. His master only struck the wooden fish, no fear at all in that gaunt face.
“My disciple… Don’t be afraid… Life and death, coming and going—it all follows the fixed shape of karma.”
He’d held Fahai’s hand, spoken one word at a time, already putting his affairs in order. Fahai's eyes had gone hot. He'd gripped that withered hand back.
"Please rest, Master. We can talk later."
The wind cut like a blade. Midnight, and a gust tore the temple's wooden gate open.
What came through the driving snow wasn't the stink spirits usually carried—it was something cold and commanding, faint sandalwood mixed with open wilderness. A light shape landed soundless on the threshold.
The cat they'd saved. Grown into something else entirely—body long and sleek as a small, elegant leopard, coat catching gold in the moonlight, amber eyes carrying a clarity no mortal beast had any business owning.
Young Fahai, too shaken to think, half believed he was looking at a savior fallen from heaven. Threw himself forward.
"Please! Save my master!"
The cat looked down at him, unhurried, licked one paw. When it spoke, the voice was crisp and had no warmth in it at all.
"Save him? His years are up. His body's already going. This sovereign isn't the Lord of the Underworld—what's death to me?"
Fahai had thrown himself in front of the bed like something struck by lightning.
"How can you stand there so cold? He saved your life!"
"Precisely! It was because he showed this sovereign such kindness that this sovereign has come to see him off."
The words weren't even done before a violent, pure gold wind tore up out of nothing. Fahai, half out of his mind, tried to rush forward and was slammed against the wall by something far past mortal strength, pinned there, unmoving.
"Master!"
He'd fought it with everything he had. Couldn't move a single finger.
The cat crossed the room with elegant, unhurried steps.
Looked down at the dying old man—not with bloodlust in its eyes but something closer to a spirit's naive, entitled hunger, standing in front of a treasure of heaven and earth.
"Old monk, you've been good your whole life—why stop at the very end?" It studied him, lazy about it.
“All that hard cultivation, and a relic's only just now taking shape inside you. But you're mortal. Your body was never built to hold something like this.”
“Die now, and that relic goes into the ash with the rest of you—scattered on the wind, worth less than the dirt it lands on. No, no, such a waste of good work.”
It lowered its head slightly, as though granting a favor.
“It would only be right that this sovereign carry it forward, in your place.”
Then it had opened its jaws wide. A stream of pure gold Buddha-light burst out between its teeth. It raised one paw. Pressed it, hard, into the old man's chest.
A sharp, tearing sound—claw through flesh, terrible in the silence of that snowbound night. Blood welled at the wound. And the instant it touched the light gathered at the cat's claw-tip, it dissolved into pale gold vapor.
"Stop!"
Fahai's eyes had blazed fit to split. His voice gone nearly to nothing.
The cat hadn't so much as glanced his way. Before his despairing eyes, with the most brutal, most primal method it had, it tore that half-formed, still-burning relic straight out of a mortal's chest.
Flesh and bone with it.
Blood everywhere.
The dry altar gone red in an instant.
The moment he lost the relic, the old man's already-failing body began to wither, fast. And in his last breath, he'd summoned one final scrap of strength from that ruined frame and gripped Fahai's wrist. Read the latest chapters at novelping . com.
"Disciple…"
Blood-soaked, and still that same kind, gentle expression—the one he'd worn every time he taught Fahai the sutras.
"Don't hate it. It doesn't understand. Doesn't understand human pain. Doesn't understand what mercy really means…"
His voice had gone fainter.
"This master holds no resentment. The Buddha ferries all beings across… it's only karma, in the end…"
Fahai had knelt in the blood, weeping until his chest tore open. Held his master's hand as it went cold. Nodded, again and again.
“Your disciple promises. Your disciple won't hate it. I won't hate it…”
Then, without warning, the night lit gold.
Buddha-light tore open a century of accumulated snow above Lin'an. The cat, relic in its jaws, was on the verge of vanishing into the void when an overwhelming presence came down instead, thundering from beyond the Nine Heavens.
The Buddha's own manifestation over the ruined temple. Golden light on the falling snow. Golden light on the blood and broken bone spread across the ground.
The Buddha spoke a single low invocation.
"Spirit-cat. You've broken the precepts."
The cat froze. The Buddha raised a hand. A chain of gold light dropped from the void and wrapped its neck.
"Return to the Pool of Merit. Reflect."
Even a sovereign of the Western Paradise, striking down a mortal—the Buddha himself had come to reclaim it. Then that grave, golden figure lowered his eyes to the boy kneeling in blood and bone.
"Fahai. Is there hatred in you?"
Fahai's whole body had shaken. His master's blood, still thick and warm on his wrist. Hold compassion, do not hate—a nail driven straight through him.
But the one who'd killed his master would go home for nothing worse than quiet reflection, just for being a sovereign of the Western Paradise. How could there not be hatred.
And still he hadn't dared. Dared not hate the Buddha's own spirit. Dared not betray a dying man's last wish, spoken with a heart still full of the Dharma.
He'd raised his head slowly.
Those young, bright eyes full of tears he'd forced back down, fear, resentment. In the end he'd bowed low before the Buddha, forehead striking cold blood-soaked ground.
"This disciple… dare not."
Ten thousand tribulations cannot dissolve the grievance at the heart’s core; the eyes hold it, empty, yet dare not call it hatred.
Dare not. He’d said dare not. Not that there was no hatred.
The Buddha had lingered a long moment, wrapped in gold. He'd already seen it—a whole mountain of unacknowledged hatred growing, quietly, into this boy's own sinew and bone.
At last, a sigh.
"Where a mortal heart holds anger, the vajra form appears. You've suffered this. Now cultivate that very heart. Don't let your anger wear the robes of compassion and call itself something else, until it turns to a karma of killing."
Fahai had stayed prostrate, not daring to lift his head.
"I grant you now a vajra body and the Purple-Gold Alms Bowl. Sixty years of blossoming and decay, then dissolution, then rebirth once more."
“Deliver spirits from their evil. Watch over all mankind—only when some spirit disrupts human order or brings harm to living beings may you subdue it with this vajra strength.”
The voice had fallen through the storm like the toll of some great bell.
"Go, now."
Only once the light had faded entirely did Fahai understand—some things are not a crime. They're fate.
At that same hour, in the Western Paradise, beside the Pool of Merit—a leopard-spotted spirit-cat sat with its ears down, a gold chain wrapped tight at its throat, and still, still, its head held high and unrepentant.
Vairocana Buddha lowered his brow, voice a deep bronze bell.
"Spirit-cat. Do you know your fault?"
"This disciple doesn't!" Spirit-cat’s head snapped up, indignant.
"That old monk's years were already spent, he was going to die anyway! I wasn't trying to kill him, I only wanted to carry his relic forward, and he told me himself, dying, he didn't blame me. Buddha—"
"Where did I go wrong?"
The Buddha sighed.
"Stubborn thing. He still had one breath left, and you seized the relic by force. You spoke of carrying it forward, but greed rose in your heart, and killing intent with it. That thought alone broke the precept."
"Face the wall at the Pool of Merit. Three months. Reflect."
"I never broke any precept against killing…" it muttered. "That old monk was dying anyway, the very next moment."
But the decree had already fallen, and it hadn't dared defy it—only lashed its tail and turned, fuming, to the wall.
Through those three months, it brooded on one thought, and one thought only.
This was all that white snake's fault.
If it hadn't overheard Guanyin's own praise: that white snake holds great love in his heart, his consciousness untainted, one of the most exceptional spiritual roots in the entire Pure Land—
Would a sovereign of the Western Paradise ever have lowered itself to slip down uninvited, just to see how it measured up against some jumped-up serpent?
Of course not.
This was Bai Su's doing, plain and simple. All of it.
And worse: before it had even found the snake, it had blundered straight into some hunter's trap. Iron jaws, smeared with herbs bred specifically to suppress a spirit's own power— Find the original chapter at novelping dot com.
Three full days, trapped, helpless, and in the end, owing its life to a mortal master and his disciple.
The more it thought about it, the angrier it got. Claws scraping stone.
Bai Su. You wait. This sovereign will settle this. Sooner or later.
Deliver spirits from their evil. Watch over all mankind.
Fahai walked this road for more than three hundred years. Now, six years into his sixth cycle, five deaths and five rebirths behind him.
The Buddha's whole vast decree, across that long stretch of years, got sifted down, again and again, by a Buddhist heart too afraid to face its own hatred directly—until only the phrase closest to his own old wound remained.
Deliver spirits from their evil. Watch over all mankind.
He'd stopped remembering where a mortal heart holds anger. Forgotten, the Buddha had told him to cultivate that very heart. That undying, unbreakable vajra body had become the strongest shield he owned.
And the cage he could never once break out of.
Three hundred years, and Fahai had believed, truly believed, that he'd let that snowy night go. But some things never leave. They only put on the robes of the Dharma and hide themselves inside every spirit subdued, every invocation that left his lips.
"Deliver spirits from their evil. Watch over all mankind."
"This disciple's promise to the Buddha. And this disciple's promise to his master."
Within the Mahavira Hall, Fahai spoke this vow low, before the Buddha's own image. He bowed once more, low. A moment later, rose.
Across that face—always so warm, so bright—a shadow had fallen. Rare enough that no one who knew him would have recognized it.
【Twelve Songs of the White Snake — "Dare Not Hate"】
One lonely lamp shines upon the mortal world.
My master's words still remain— compassion falls equal on all beings.
Mercy! Mercy!
Do not let anger rise.
Do not ask what came before.
That night of heavy snow—
Buddha-light tore through wind and dust.
There, where the spirit-cat's spotted fur blurred the sight within my eyes.
The golden figure bowed its head to question grievance, to question wrath.
And this disciple, fallen to the ground, could only cry out—
"This disciple does not dare!"
Does not dare.
Does not dare.
Ah—
Vajra upon the bones.
The Dharma bowl upon the body.
This mortal flesh and bone is this heavy, after all.
Three hundred years—one vow alone.
Three hundred years—one teaching only:
Deliver spirits from their evil.
Watch over all mankind.
Blow by blow, it carved one line through heaven and earth— one boundary scar.
Mercy, mercy.
Does not dare.
Does not dare.