🦋💔Chapter Thirteen: The Misty Rain Fades, a Secret New Life Takes Root
So be it. No madness, no life.
Qing's night raid on Jinshan ended just before dawn.
She'd recovered Xu Xian's body, though his soul was still scattered. As the soul returned to its body, one thread of morning light broke through the dark at the edge of the sky.
Bai Su pressed a fingertip to the center of Xu Xian's brow. Sealed the memory of that night, layer by layer, coiling by coiling, into the deepest place in his consciousness. The realgar wine. The great, cold, pale-green body. That look of pure terror in his eyes, right before he died.
All of it, erased. Her own hand.
Only the cold Xu Xian’s body still remembered—even Bai Su was powerless against that.
Next day, noon.
Sunlight slanted through carved lattice, fell across the bed. Xu Xian frowned. Rubbed at his aching temples. Finally woke from the fog. Those clear eyes full of hangover confusion.
"Husband, you're finally awake."
Bai Su walked slow to the bedside, a bowl of fresh bird's-nest soup in hand. Still pale herself, but smiling soft as water, as though nothing at all had happened the night before.
"My lady..." Xu Xian pushed himself up. Pressed a hand to his forehead. "What happened to me? My head's splitting."
Bai Su sat at the edge of the bed. Wiped the sweat from his brow with a cloth. A trace of well-timed reproach in her voice.
"And you ask me?"
"Last night, on the boat, husband was in such high spirits, insisted we finish that whole jar of double-fermented realgar. Barely a few cups in, you were senseless. Ran a fever half the night.
“You frightened me half to death."
"Was it really..." Xu Xian laughed, abashed. A trace of shame rose to his face.
But the instant the words left him, his heart skipped, hard.
A causeless emptiness, a dread, rose from somewhere deep in his chest. As though something truly terrible had once appeared before his eyes. When he tried to grasp it, only a white, formless fog remained where the memory should be.
After what he took for a hangover, Xu Xian fell ill. Not an ordinary chill. A lingering fever, one his body had branded onto itself after his soul's own terror.
Bai Su tended him for three days and nights, barely leaving his bedside.
Deep in the night, the smell of medicine drifted thick through the inner room. Bai Su sat at his bedside, spooned out a mouthful of calming broth, blew it cool, brought it to his lips.
"Husband. Drink this. You'll sleep tonight."
Xu Xian saw the faint shadows beneath her eyes and felt guilt he couldn't bear. Reached for the bowl himself.
"My lady, you've worked too hard. Let this husband—"
The instant his fingertip brushed hers, that skin, which should have been warm and smooth, transformed, in his perception, all at once, into something cold, slick, hard—dense scales, carrying a chill down to the bone.
His hand jerked back violently, as though stung. Half a spoonful spilled, landed squarely on the back of Bai Su’s hand.
The scalding liquid burned an angry red across white skin.
The room fell dead silent.
Xu Xian's face had gone ash. He stared at his own hand. Didn't even know what he was afraid of.
Seeing her brow furrow from the burn, guilt crashed over him at once.
"My lady! Are you hurt?"
He sat up in a panic, voice thrown into disarray. "I didn't mean to—I just felt cold, my hand slipped—I'm sorry. My lady treats me so well, and I—"
"It's nothing."
Bai Su drew her hand back, slow. Summoned a smile without a single crack in it. Used the cloth to wipe the spilled medicine from his hand instead.
"Husband is simply unwell. No need to blame yourself."
She lowered her eyes as she said it. Hid whatever had just been cut sharply in two, beneath her own lashes.
It was true. She had erased his memory of that night with her own power. But a mortal body still remembers a serpent. Still remembers cold scales. Still remembers what it felt like to stop breathing in absolute terror.
That knowing made every step after this one feel like walking barefoot across broken glass. No blood ever drawn. Every step still cut straight to the heart.
Days passed.
Xu Xian's illness cleared. Bao'an Hall opened its doors again.
But deep in the night, whenever husband and wife lay together, the moment Bai Su drew close, an unaccountable chill would rise in him without fail.
She was, plainly, the wife he loved. That face still just as gentle, still just as captivating. And still his body, somewhere far deeper than thought, seemed to remember some unspeakable horror— drew back, by instinct, every time, at the moment of greatest closeness.
He didn't understand what was wrong with him? Could only, again and again, feign exhaustion. Turn his back.
Bai Su watched it happen. Never once called it out. Only watched his back turned toward her in the dark, kept her own eyes open until dawn.
Nothing hurts more than this. Heartbreaking, painful.
Watching the one she loved drift further away, day after day, a little more each time, that once-proud Immortal Lord finally let go of the last of her old pride.
That night, she lit an incense of passion-flower, rarely used.
Fine smoke curled up along the red curtains, staining the ordinary bedroom in a hazy, ambiguous warmth. Xu Xian lay down fully clothed, searching for some excuse to sleep early, when a faint rustle of fabric sounded behind him.
He turned his head. His breath stopped.
His usually composed, cool-mannered lady had let down the whole of her black hair. It spilled over her shoulders like a waterfall. She wore nothing but a thin white sleeping robe, its collar fallen slightly open, revealing a tantalizing expanse of snow-white skin, half-veiled in moonlight and drifting smoke.
The vermilion mark upon her brow, ordinarily so serene, so untouchably pure, now burned a deeper, more intoxicating red—as though the heat rising beneath her skin, and the desire awakening within her, had drawn every hidden shade of passion to the surface.
Half the noble bearing of an immortal. Half the seductive beauty of the white serpent. As though some deity who'd never been meant to know mortal desire had, with her own hands, fallen from the clouds, coming to stand before a mortal's bed.
Across her brow and eyes: something unfamiliar, shy, and yet utterly, recklessly resolved.
"Husband..." Bai Su drew close. Her soft waist wound around him like spring vine, carrying something close to sacrifice.
"Are you... tired of Suzhen?"
And still, when that cool-scented body pressed against his chest, his limbs stiffened all at once. Somewhere deep in his mind, a vast pale-green shadow seemed, once more, to rise up out of white mist.
Bai Su felt it.
That instant of stiffening, clearer than any refusal. Her eyes flushed red without warning. A single tear slid from the corner, fell silent into the hollow of his neck. She pressed her face against his shoulder, voice thinned to almost nothing.
"Husband... take me." She closed her eyes. Finally, trembling, said the word.
"Please."
That one word carried the most complete surrender, and a despair with nowhere left to retreat, in equal measure.
It struck like fire, burning through the last barrier between Xu Xian's reason and his fear. Mortal love won, in the end, over the trembling deep in his own body. His breath went heavy at once. He caught her waist, bowed his head, kissed her.
Red curtains fall. Lamplight sways.
Warm within the hibiscus curtains, red waves turning beneath the quilt. Half immortal bone, half spirit soul—passion's cold smoke sinks into scented silk. The whole room's incense, in the deepening night, burns slowly, inch by inch, to ash.
That night, they strove with everything they had to close the distance between them, as though the crack running between soul and flesh might be filled back in, with warmth, with breath, with desire alone.
But only Bai Su knew—every piece of sweetness dropped into this affair carried, hidden inside, a shard of bone-deep, cutting glass. The sweeter it was. The more it hurt.
She knew it well.
That single night of passion, in the end, couldn't dissolve the crisis at the bottom of her heart.
Once Xu Xian had fallen asleep, she rose quiet, and by the thin moonlight beyond the window, watched the peaceful, sleeping face beside her.
Watched a long while. Tears fell, in the end, one by one, into the bedding. Spread dark. Vanished without a sound.
"Xian'er..." She murmured, soft.
"You have no memory of your past life. I don't blame you for that. But I can't just let go, either."
She traced her fingers gently along his brow, tenderness turning to something close to grief. "Let me follow your mortal wish, this once, this life. Is that all right?"
Bai Su, at that moment, had already gone this far into madness.
【Twelve Songs of the White Snake — "No Madness"】
They all say long life is sweet.
Who knew she would throw it away?
Look there— smoke curling thin behind the curtain, desire burning beneath the quilt.
This candy, this candy— wrapped around a glimmering blade of glass made to cut the heart out.
This candle, this candle— burning with a sharp, lingering scent, softly to eat the soul alive.
What a clever trick!
Her scheme worked nearly perfectly.
Who could have known— she would trade the cold moon of Qingcheng for a new life inside a mortal womb.
Draw blood from her own heart.
Feed it to one bud, one Scarlet-Heart Lotus Bud.
Throw three hundred years of cultivation after it, only to keep ten years of spring nights with her husband.
What a fool— flowers in a mirror, moon in the water.
Only one long empty dream.
So be it.
No madness, no life— and in the end, all about one grand absurdity.
Why ask about the Heavenly Dao?
Why chase forever at all?
The Heavenly Dao is merciless.
Fahai cannot be escaped.
Then let it be.
Here, in this mortal dust,
I will swallow my karma whole— and walk straight into madness!
ten thousand tribulations, never, never return.
Bai Su closed her eyes. Steadied her breath, slowly.
Then raised her right hand, fingers held together like a blade, and drew, from the center of Xu Xian's sleeping brow, a single thread of pure mortal essence. Gathered it, with the utmost care, into her palm.
The thread was faint beyond measure. But carried the purest flame of Xu Xian's entire life. She threw a robe over her shoulders. Slipped quiet through the door. Out to the flower-house at the rear of the residence.
Deep inside, a further, hidden chamber.
At its center now, a pot carved from Kunlun frost-jade, appearing there without anyone quite noticing when. Inside: a bud not yet open, pure white from end to end.
The Scarlet-Heart Lotus Bud. An art from primordial antiquity.
Using a mortal's own life-flame as catalyst, a spirit-cultivator's original essence and cultivation as nourishment, forcing the two lineages, immortal and mortal, together into a single breath of life.
What took form was no ordinary child of flesh and blood.
A spirit-embryo. Carrying the souls of two beings, forced into being by the workings of heaven and earth.
Bai Su walked to the pot.
First infused Xu Xian's thread of essence into the bud. Then, without hesitation, cut open her own chest. Blood ran slow down her white robe. From the depths of her heart-meridian, she forced out a single drop of blood, pure past measure, sent it into the flower's core.
The white bud trembled, faint, at the touch of that blood. Deep in its petals, a sacred and uncanny thread of red light began, slow, to brighten.
Thump. Thump.
An extraordinarily faint sound, like the beating of an infant's heart, rose soft from within the bud. Across Bai Su's pale face rose something close to besotted tenderness.
At that moment, the stone door of the chamber was pushed open by a single hand.
"Brother!"
Qing strode in, face cold.
The instant she made out the flower in the pot, feeding on that drop of blood, her whole body froze.
"The Scarlet-Heart Lotus Bud… The Immortal Elder of the South Pole gave you this?"
"You've used primordial forbidden art?"
"Brother, you know what happens if this art is disrupted. The backlash could destroy you."
Bai Su didn't deny it. Only murmured, low: "Qing. Quiet. Don't wake your brother-in-law."
Qing crossed the room in strides. Seized Bai Su's wrist.
"You took his own essence? And you're feeding it with your own blood?"
"Yes."
"You know what that costs? A mortal. Ten years off his life."
"I know."
Qing stared at her pale face, voice finally beginning to shake.
"What else have you done?"
Bai Su was silent a moment.
"I gave those ten years back. With three hundred years of my own cultivation."
The chamber fell utterly silent.
Qing stood frozen a long while before finally letting out a low, red-eyed laugh. "Brother. You really have lost your mind."
Bai Su offered no defense. Reached out. Brushed her fingers gentle across the faintly pulsing bud.
"Today, it's finally taken shape."
At the touch, the bud seemed to come alive all at once. A thread of red light rose from its heart, wound around her fingertip, dissolved into a streak of light, sank into her lower abdomen. The blossom takes flight, and enters the flesh.
The breath of life has begun.
Bai Su laid a hand over her own abdomen, by instinct. An extraordinarily faint pulse of life had already begun, slow, to take root, somewhere between flesh and spirit-core.
Red flickered, broken, in the depths of Qing's eyes.
She looked at this elder brother—once above all other spirits, now ruined this far for one mortal man—and her voice came out hoarse, barely audible.
"Do you really have to take it this far?"
Bai Su cradled her own abdomen, eyes besotted, resolved.
"If husband knew we had a child, he'd be overjoyed. Maybe... he wouldn't be afraid of me anymore."
Qing bit down hard on her own teeth.
"Maybe, just maybe? Is it worth it?"
Bai Su lifted her eyes. A faint smile at the corner of her mouth.
"It's worth it."
Qing closed her eyes. When she opened them, only anger and pain remained.
"When I look at you now, do you know what I think? Brother?" Then she laughed. "You're insane. Absolutely insane."
She released Bai Su's wrist. Swept out of the room. Left behind only a cold, grief-soaked laugh, echoing a long while in the chilled flower-house.
Bai Su stood alone before the frost-jade pot, palm still over her abdomen. Lamplight swayed. That newborn heartbeat, faint as it was, struck deep in her own flesh, clear as anything.
Thump. Thump.
Outside the window, the first rain after the festival had, at last, stopped. But above the Bai residence, the clouds of a new tribulation had only just begun to gather.