Why, then, should I ever hide from it?
The vajra nature inside Fahai had been sounding warning after warning, day after day. Above Lin'an coiled a presence of near-unbelievable scale. Ancient. Pure. Nothing like any lesser spirit he'd ever crossed.
He hadn't met the thing yet, not properly. But he understood, in his bones, this might be something he himself could not beat.
It changed nothing about his resolve.
Fahai untied the deep tea-and-gold kasaya of his office, folded it with care, laid it before the Buddha. Changed into a plain pilgrim's robe. Wound prayer beads around his wrist. Set a sun hat on his head, almost absently.
Those bright eyes still held nothing but plain, sincere reason and virtue.
Mortals lived bound by human ties. Even a cultivator chasing immortality couldn't simply do as he pleased.
Spirits were different—free, unbound by mortal law. A great spirit, coiled that long above Lin'an, taking mortal shape, marrying into a mortal household, meddling with the order between men—how could Fahai let it pass?
He couldn't trust an entire city's safety to whether a spirit happened to feel like being kind that day. Of course he had to act.
He turned and walked out through the mountain gate.
The plain-robed pilgrim folded into the morning breeze, into the festival crowd, toward Lin'an across the water—toward that stretch of calm surface—hiding a current strong enough to drown a city.
Fahai was going to meet that thousand-year snake spirit, face to face.
Rain in Lin'an always came without asking.
The two heavy vermilion gates of the Bai residence stood shut, sealing out the market's noise, the sharp bite of mugwort and realgar. The whole estate sat too still—a painting gone quiet under a fine layer of dust. Even the bluestone before the gates had grown a coat of moss.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
One knock, two, three. The wooden fish's dry, hollow note cut through the thin rain, unhurried, exact, falling before the gates like Heaven's own ruler, striking judgment.
Every strike, and the slanting drizzle froze for a heartbeat before that gate, then dropped straight down—corrected, disciplined, into rows of vertical thread.
The bronze door-ring, untouched by wind, trembled against the door under some invisible pressure, like the whole gate was fighting for breath.
The air went heavy as mercury. Moss in the stone cracks blanched, inch by inch.
Creak—
The gate split a narrow gap. Qing stood there in green, a half-finished blue-green silk handkerchief still clutched in one fist—something Bai Su had shoved into her hands a few days back, mid-embroidery lesson, without so much as asking.
Then her eyes landed on the barefoot monk outside, and whatever curse had already reached the back of her throat simply died there.
A young monk. Fine, full features.
His face was warm and smooth as jade. Nothing but a plain white pilgrim's robe on him, standing barefoot in the drizzle, and not one drop of water clung to his hem or his hat brim. The wooden fish in his hand had gone still.
Fahai raised his eyes. Large. Bright. Two pieces of black glass.
The instant their eyes met, every hair on Qing's body stood up without asking permission. In her spirit-sight this monk was wrapped in a warm, living breath of ordinary human life. Warm. Vivid.
Almost scorching.
Behind that blood-warmth stood, faint, a colossal golden figure towering to the sky. Its eyes lowered, indifferent, watching her through the rain.
Her pupils snapped into thin serpentine lines. Nails biting her own palms. Not fear of something stronger. Something older than fear—revulsion carved into instinct itself, deep as bone.
The golden light around this monk didn't resemble fire. Didn't resemble a blade. It resembled a law. Unquestionable.
Indifferent to good or evil, joy or grief, concerned only with putting every last thing in creation back where it belonged. And she was exactly the kind of anomaly that law existed to cast out.
Her hands clenched inside her sleeves. Nearly a thousand years of power surged through every limb at once, bracing.
Fahai pressed his palms together, expression sincere despite the wariness rolling off her.
"Amitabha. This humble monk has traveled here to ask for a small offering of good karma from this household."
"You want alms, you've got the wrong door."
Qing's teeth were gritted, voice cold as broken ice. Feet planted dead center in the threshold. Not moving.
"Qing. Stand down."
A voice, cool, composed, and impossible to argue with, drifted out from somewhere deep in the residence. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
"Open the gate. Let the master in."
That voice moved through the courtyards like a spring breeze, and the storm about to break loose from Qing's whole body simply smoothed itself flat, without a word. Her face shifted, twice, three times, before she stepped aside, reluctant, and pushed the vermilion gates wide.
Fahai didn't look at her again. Walked barefoot across the wet bluestone, along the winding corridor, expression never changing, moving deep into the Bai residence.
The rear courtyard opened wide and empty.
At its center, an ancient tree spread a canopy dense enough to blot out the sky—layer on layer, a great jade umbrella.
Two thousand years of Bai Su's own pure spirit-energy had fed that tree until faint green light moved through its leaves on its own, vitality thick enough to feel solid.
To a mortal, just an unusually thriving tree. To Fahai's Buddha-sight—not a tree at all. A vast, breathing sea of spirit-power.
He walked forward, barefoot, expression unmoved.
With every step, an almost ascetic breath of Heavenly Dao spread out beneath him, and where his sole touched stone, rain and mud vanished, leaving a dry, straight, disciplined white line. A faint chant rose with each step, condensing into an invisible golden wall.
The moment gold touched green—the whole ancient tree stirred, though no wind moved. A thousand leaves gave one low rustle, all at once. The vast power sleeping inside that tree woke, faint, alert.
No thunder broke the courtyard.
But an invisible line, unseen by mortal eyes, split the whole space into two entirely different worlds.
On one side: the disciplined, ordered chant of the vajra. On the other: the wild, self-renewing power of creation itself. On one side: the ancient tree's deep shade, jade canopy spread wide. On the other: a wooden fish's note, cutting through rain.
Vajra footsteps shatter the mortal rain; the ancient canopy presses down against the chant.
In that silent standoff, green light scattered from the tree in countless threads, pressing steady against Fahai's dry white trail, holding it, refusing to let it creep forward another inch.
Beneath the tree, Bai Su stood with her back to him, white-robed. A jade ladle in her hand, unhurried, watering a pot of unnamed orchid beside a stone table. Half her black hair pinned up with white jade, the rest falling like a black waterfall down her back.
Her posture had nothing urgent in it at all—as though this whole standoff, enough to send any lesser spirit fleeing in terror, wasn't worth the trouble of turning around for.
Fahai stopped ten feet short of the ancient tree, tucked the wooden fish back into his sleeve. Studied her back.
To his Buddha-sight, no woman in white at all—unmistakably a great white serpent, dormant in the mortal world, powerful enough to overturn rivers.
But what actually surprised him wasn't the depth of her cultivation. Deep within that vast reservoir of spirit power flowed a thread of Buddha-light—ancient beyond measure, almost primordial.
The presence was impossibly pure. Pure past all reason.
Pure enough that, for one brief instant, even the vajra body within him—the very one bestowed upon him by the Buddha himself—gave the faintest answering resonance.
Maybe this spirit had once received some enlightenment of her own?
The thought crossed his mind. But a bond with the Buddha couldn't cancel out the karma of the mortal world. If this spirit truly disrupted human bonds, endangered the living—he still couldn't stand by.
"By your robes, Master, you'd be from Jinshan."
Bai Su turned, slow, to face him. Voice light. The ladle kept working, unhurried, on the orchid. "West Lake runs cold today. You've come barefoot—whose karma are you here to beg for?"
"Heavenly Dao has its constancy. The mortal world has its law."
Fahai pressed his palms together, voice warm and clear, carrying the quiet reason of a truly accomplished monk.
"You've cultivated two thousand years and more, benefactor. You could have stayed in the mountains, watched the moon, waited quiet for ascension. Instead you've taken a mortal woman's shape and married into the mortal world."
He studied her, calm.
"Mortals have their bonds. Spirits have their own road. Take one wrong step today, benefactor, and what follows may set ten thousand lives in motion."
Bai Su's hand paused, faint, over the orchid.
She turned her face. A face of unrivaled beauty, cool past any trace of mortal warmth. She looked at him with a thin, surface courtesy still on her lips. Those bottomless amber eyes held nothing but the flat stillness of a well no wind had ever touched.
"You're mistaken, Master." Light. Even.
"This lord came here guided by Guanyin herself, to settle karma, to cross my own trial. The karma isn't settled yet. The trial isn't done. Where's the suffering of living beings in that?"
She let the last of the water fall into the orchid's roots. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
"The Dharma lives in the mortal world. So does cultivation." She raised her eyes to him.
"Why, then, should I ever hide from it?"
So that thread of Buddha-light had been Guanyin's own doing?
Relief flickered through Fahai's eyes. Still he didn't withdraw—took one step forward instead, those black-glass eyes still burning with a wholehearted, uncompromised resolve.
"Since you've received her compassionate guidance, benefactor, you should know better than anyone when to yield and when to press on. Step back today, and you may yet keep this merit whole."
Fahai’s voice stayed gentle.
"Press forward, and you'll bear the whole weight of your own karma. Alone."
The wind in the courtyard died all at once. The ancient tree's rustling leaves froze, as though the chant itself had reached out and stopped them mid-motion.
Bai Su watched him in silence.
She'd long since known some trial of the mortal dust would come before her ascension. Heavenly Dao was unpredictable—she'd braced for that already.
What she hadn't expected was a monk with only a few centuries behind him, standing in the middle of it. She set the ladle down on the stone table without ceremony. A soft click. Whatever thin courtesy had lived on her mouth vanished, entire, without a trace.
She lifted her chin. Faint. Cold.
Two thousand years of a great spirit’s pride surfaced at once in her eyes and across her brow. It was not fury.
It was something more instinctive: the scorn of one who'd watched mountains change hands, rivers shift their beds, looking down at the brief, fragile rules of the mortal world.
"Fahai."
She said his name for the first time.
"I've watched mountains change hands. Rivers shift their courses. Your mortal rules are the blink of an eye against an ocean of years, to me."
A thread of cold gold light rose, slow, in her amber eyes.
"You mean to sever my karma? You. Alone?"
An overwhelming spirit aura crashed down. Fahai's plain robe cracked in the wind.
His young cheeks still held their warm color, even under that darkening sky. Facing a force that would have crushed any ordinary cultivator to dust in an instant, he didn't retreat.
Not half a step.
Stood straight beneath the ancient tree and met her stare, calm. In his sleeve, the demon-subduing prayer beads gave off a faint, cold grind against his own wrist.
Spirit and monk. Standing there, silent, across the courtyard from one another. The air beneath that tree went thick enough to bleed.
"Amitabha."
After a long while, Fahai closed his eyes and murmured an invocation. When he opened them again, the gentle warning had sunk beneath the surface. What remained: a calm of the deepest compassion, and a stillness that chilled straight to the marrow.
"Since you believe in karma, benefactor—when it comes for you, one day, I hope the heart you carry today hasn't changed."
He bowed slightly. Turned.
Walked barefoot back down the corridor he'd come by, out of the courtyard, expression unchanged, pace unhurried.
Bai Su stood beneath the tree a long while, watching him vanish down the winding hall, something faint and unreadable moving through her amber eyes.
She'd foreseen this trial. Never once taken it seriously. A monk with a few centuries of cultivation—what could he possibly do to touch the foundation of what she was?
What Bai Su didn't know: Fahai hadn't come today to settle anything, here, within these walls.
Jinshan Temple had its own manifestation. And the Buddhist path had further recourse.
Fahai was still on his way.