This body... was the final blade that sent her beloved away.
The lake sat empty. The shores, silent.
Mist over West Lake, dyed by the dying sun into a deep, tragic rouge. The pleasure-boat drifted at the lake's center like one red leaf, the cabin hung with low red curtains, incense drifting faint through the air.
Summer night, thickened by the lake's own damp, turned the whole exquisite boat into a world sealed off entirely from everything beyond it.
Xu Xian, robe half loosened, held Bai Su's yielding body close against his chest. Those eyes of his—always so clear, always so carefully kept— had gone entirely under, now, to fever and mortal want, his scalding breath holding nothing back at all.
"My lady..." His voice carried that faint hoarseness passion leaves behind. His fingers traced up slowly from the tip of her foot, lingering, until they found that impossibly narrow waist, and stayed there, moving over silk.
Then his head bowed, kiss after burning kiss down her collarbone, unhurried, lingering past all reason.
"Mm..." Bai Su's eyes lay half-shut, lashes trembling like a butterfly's wings.
She had believed—truly believed—that her own two-thousand-year Dao heart lay beyond disturbance. And still it could not stand against the heat of a mortal body.
She lifted eyes gone nearly translucent, shimmering with liquid light, and reached back to hook a hand around Xu Xian's neck, pulling him closer, letting that faintly overbearing masculine presence close over her entirely.
Their mouths tangled together; his breath came heavier.
He remembered, somewhere in it, the monk's instruction from earlier, and pulled back half an inch, reluctant, reaching for the clear wine set on the low table, quietly dissolving the golden talisman into it.
When he looked up again, his eyes were full of a warmth he couldn't quite hold in.
"My lady, this aged realgar drives off evil and summer heat both. You're delicate—drink a little more."
Bai Su looked at him, caught that sharp, pungent scent, and felt her fine brows draw together, faint. Today, of all days—the festival, yang-energy at its absolute peak— was the one day her two thousand years of cultivation ran slowest, her serpent nature hardest of all to keep leashed.
She glanced down at the lotus shoes beside the curtain.
Small, punishing things, worn long enough now that she'd grown fond of them, without knowing why. She thought of the heat still clinging to his mouth from a moment ago, and in the end, took the cup.
The instant the wine touched her throat, an unexpectedly vast warmth—like spring sun breaking through ice—spread soft through her whole body.
The Buddha-light in the wine was pure and flawless.
Far from tearing at her spirit-body, it resonated with her instead, bringing a peace she had not felt in far too long. Warmth melted into her eight extraordinary meridians, and Bai Su slipped, for one brief moment, into a daze.
She saw a green bodhi grove.
A little monk sitting barefoot on a stone, murmuring sutras under his breath. Herself, coiled along a branch above, basking lazily in the sun. The monk was looking up, suddenly, and smiling at her.
That smile—unmistakably the same light as this Buddha-glow, tonight.
A faint haze of wine, a heart full of feeling, and now this excessive, overwhelming warmth on top of it— her spirit went entirely under, and she let go, whole, of a vigilance she'd carried unconsciously for a thousand years, let body and soul sink, surrender, one breath at a time, into the deepest, softest tenderness she'd ever known.
Little did she know—the deadliest venom in this world so often wears the gentlest face.
This feeling. This love. This single cup of wine.
Bane.
That Buddha-light did her no harm— it only loosened, bit by bit, the thousand-year power that had guarded her, let her own protective awareness scatter like sand slipping through fingers, impossible to gather back no matter how she reached for it.
And at the very same moment, the fierce afterkick of the aged realgar surged up through her like a collapsing tide, draining away the last of whatever strength had kept her mortal, illusory shape intact.
Beneath that sheer veil, thick with desire, something began—quiet, gentle, and terrible, all at once.
Xu Xian, still lost in that tenderness, ran his fingers slowly up from her waist. Then, midway, the feeling beneath his fingertips changed— that skin, which should have been warm, smooth as silk, had, without warning, become something else.
Cold. Hard. Wrong.
Small pale-green scales, pressed close, laid out like polished jade.
His hand stopped. His hazy eyes blinked, fingers trembling faintly. He assumed, first, some trick of the swaying boat, the flickering lamplight.
"My lady... have I had too much? What's this on your robe... what's stitched into it..." He laughed, faint, half-drunk, propped himself up to look closer by the dim lantern-light.
One scale. Two. Three— his whole field of vision, suddenly, nothing but scales.
The haze of wine and want in his eyes froze solid, all at once, under a cold that shot straight up his spine. The figure beneath him still wore that same unrivaled face.
But along that swan-pale throat, a fine sheen, hard as tempered steel, had already begun spreading. Under his own eyes, at close range, that small, delicate body had begun, unstoppable, to lengthen.
To thicken. To swell.
His lady, covered now, entirely, in shimmering scale, was turning into something else. A monster.
Xu Xian fell backward, all at once, onto the floor.
In that same instant, Bai Su came fully, sharply awake. She reached, by instinct, for her own power to hold the change back—and found it gone, like water into sand, answering nothing.
Though she did not yet understand the ancient truth hiding behind that warm Buddha-light, Bai Su knew in a flash exactly whose scheme this had to be. Set right there in the middle of the marketplace.
Fahai.
But there was nothing left to do about it now. In the space of a few breaths, that soft, warm woman's shape had vanished entirely behind the curtains.
What remained: a huge python, pale white from end to end, glowing faint and cold, scales terrible to look at.
No fury in it. No struggle.
Only a slow, helpless coiling, filling the narrow cabin floor, one loop at a time. Only the thick reek of realgar, gone suddenly cold, for no reason she could name.
Xu Xian, collapsed in the corner, pressed his back hard against the wall. Eyes blown wide, bloodshot with pure terror, face drained to paper-white, breath gone somewhere it couldn't be found.
"Mo—monster..." A broken sound tore up out of his throat. His three souls, seven spirits, shaken nearly loose from his own body—and, unable to bear any more of it, he fainted, dead away, right there.
Bai Su was fully awake now.
Even stripped of the power that held her spirit-body together, weighed down so heavily she could barely move, tears—the kind only mortals shed—began falling, unstoppable, from those slit, ice-pool eyes.
The crimson mark on her brow, faded almost to nothing until now, suddenly burned blood-red and bright as a fresh wound, throwing the full sorrow of her true form into the naked spotlight.
The cabin fell into dead silence.
Only that great serpent's low, mournful breath left in it.
Bai Su forced back a weakness threatening to tear her own spirit apart at the seams, gathered what little power remained, and began drawing that vast serpent body in on itself, inch by inch.
The great coiled mass shrank, slow, in the narrow cabin.
Still her power wouldn't fully gather.
She couldn't reclaim that unrivaled woman's face entirely—her upper body had only barely managed something close to human shape, while below the waist a massive serpent's tail, glowing dim and pale green, still remained; scattered patches of scale still clung, stubborn, across her arms and collarbone.
But she had no thought left to spare for any of that. She dragged herself, stumbling, across the cold boards, hauling that heavy tail, crawling toward Xu Xian in the corner with something close to madness.
Something close to begging.
"Husband... wake up, don't be afraid... it's me..."
Fate, it turned out, could still be cruel enough to laugh at itself.
Just as Bai Su reached, trembling, to gather the collapsed Xu Xian into her arms, his eyelashes fluttered, violent, twice. This mortal man, his soul nearly scattered from terror, drew one faint, final half-breath and—opened his eyes.
In the instant his awareness returned, what met him was no longer his lady's face, gentle as flowing water, but a human face half-covered in pale, ghostly scale. And below it, coiled beside her, that thick, monstrous tail, giving off in the dim light an aura cold enough to chill bone.
No illusion. Real.
All real. Spirit monster.
A true, living, breathing horror—past anything a mortal mind was ever meant to hold. His pupils blew wide, flooding with blood, in an instant. In those eyes—fear, dread, alienation—all of it, turned to a blade of ice and driven straight into Bai Su's heart.
"Mo—monster..." A broken whisper, caught fast in his throat.
Every limit of mortal flesh, every bond of human morality he'd ever known, shattered together, in that same instant.
That last half-breath, barely reclaimed from the edge of terror, having now seen the truth beneath the dreamlike illusion, would not, in the end, be drawn again.
His head fell, limp, to one side. Eyes staring, empty, into nothing.
That breath never came. He'd been frightened, simply, literally, to death—by the sight of what she truly was.
"Husband—! Xu Xian, Xian'er!"
A wail tore loose from Bai Su, fit to split her own chest open. She clutched his rapidly cooling body to her, tears falling, kept falling, endless, one after another, onto Xu Xian's pale, lifeless face.
The White Snake wept. Silently.
Only now did she finally understand—this body...this true form of hers—the one she could never fully hide, the one she could no longer hide— was the final blade that sent her beloved away.
【Twelve Songs of the White Snake — "My Karma" (also known as "One Last Look")】
The pleasure boat drifting on and on— the lanterns dim and fading, a mortal life was always short.
I only never knew how short. How short.
West Lake. Mist and rain.
Red curtains breathing in the night.
warm with spring.
I thought you would be mine.
Morning after morning.
Your eyes meeting mine.
A thousand things unspoken.
I thought— our love had made them unnecessary.
And now—fear.
You looked at me one last time, your eyes filled with fear.
A monster.
It was not your fate to die tonight.
It was mine.
Watched the warmth leave your eyes.
Everything turned white between one breath and the next.
For so long, for so long,
I feared the scales beneath this skin, the body I couldn't hide.
But in the end, what I feared most was the terror in your eyes.
So tell me, Buddha— is this my karma?
So tell me, Guanyin— is this the trial you have set for me?
Had I known it could cut this deep,
I would never have gone so far.
I would have kept ten thousand years of silence.
I would have given up ascension.
Stayed in Mount Qingcheng.
At least then you would still be somewhere beneath the mortal sky—
Alive. Safe.
And I would still be allowed to miss you.
To meet you in a dream.
Hearing you call me gege.
Not this, Xian'er.
Not this.
Not one pleasure boat alone upon the dark water.
Not your body growing cold inside my arms.
Not one last look— the last thing you ever gave me.
Fear.