🖤🤍Prologue Two: Black and White Impermanence of the Nine Netherworlds, Two Snakes Bound by an Immortal Pact
He is, in fact, every inch a man.
Three centuries had gone since the lightning fell on Mount Qingcheng. Deep in the mountains, time was a forgotten thing.
The Sanctuary of Eternal Bloom sat wrapped, as always, in mist that had never once thought of lifting, stone walls sheeted white with frost, silence so total it had a texture.
Bai Su, in white, sat day after day on the stone bed, breathing the long slow breath of cultivation.
And somewhere inside that endless stretch of solitude, a single tear had crystallized in his Dao heart, permanent, refusing to dissolve no matter how many years passed over it.
The frost on the grotto walls cracked. Today. Suddenly.
A sound like glass giving way beneath some unseen foot.
Beyond the sanctuary—ten thousand shafts of gold, tearing the sky open all at once.
Something vast. Something compassionate, past the reach of any word ever spoken. It pierced clean through the mountain's own guarding array, and out of the empty air itself—
Guanyin's form began to gather.
"Bai Su."
Her voice fell out of nowhere like one drop of clear dew landing in an ancient well—one drop, and the ripples went on and on, long after the drop itself was gone.
Bai Su was on his feet at once. He joined his palms in reverence and bowed deeply.
"This disciple did not know Bodhisattva Guanyin would grace this place. Forgive my failure to receive you properly."
"You have sat here three hundred years believing this was cultivation. It was not. You spun yourself a cocoon and called it peace."
Guanyin's gaze lowered, and it seemed to Bai Su that she saw straight through to the crimson mark on his brow, faintly burning with every stir of his own buried heart.
"That little bodhi spirit— the one your own spirit nourished into human shape, the one who took Heaven's punishment meant for you until her primordial spirit nearly came apart entirely—for three hundred years that soul has walked the Six Paths, worn a dozen lives like changes of clothes."
"Now, at last, she has been born again. A mortal. Beside West Lake, in Lin'an."
Something kindled, deep and sudden, through Bai Su's clear amber eyes.
"What is this disciple to do?"
"The one who tied the bell is the one who must untie it."
"If you want to be free of your own Dao heart—if you want godhood—you will walk into the filthy roar of the mortal world, find where that soul lives now, and settle what you owe."
The gold slowly thinned to nothing.
Somewhere in the cold stone the faint sound of chanting went on a moment longer, forlorn, echoing off walls that had no warmth left to give it back.
"The heart of the Primordial True Dao must first be broken before it can be remade. Go. Go to the West Lake. Settle your debt of love."
The manifestation dimmed and was gone, and the whole mountain fell silent again, immortal and empty.
Bai Su stood alone.
Inside his snow-white sleeve his fingers had started shaking, very slightly, and would not stop. His Dao heart, which had only just, only barely, gone still—broke open again, all at once.
Was there truly no arguing with Heaven? None at all?
At that same hour, Mount Qingcheng's guarding array shone like an ocean of drifting light. High above it, out past where mortal eyes could follow, two shapes— one black, one white—bled into each other, pulled apart, bled back together, watching the mist below without a word between them.
No wind up there. Only cold, the kind that gets into bone and stays.
Black and White Impermanence stood atop that cold mist, their forms sliding into and out of one another like shadow chasing light across water—one of them soft, seductive; the other iron-hard, unmoving.
And neither one of them had a body real enough to actually touch the other.
White Impermanence lifted one pale finger and let it rest on the earring at her ear—a Crimson Frost-Flow Scale, claimed from Bai Su.
Cold to the touch, pearl-white with rouge underneath like a bruise trying to look pretty, and it fed her own fractured soul just enough that these two phantoms— who by every law of their punishment should never be able to stand here together at all—could borrow, through it, enough substance to touch.
"Cousin. Look. The little white snake's going down the mountain."
Her voice came out delicate, fragmented—a girl's voice ground down to powder and reassembled wrong.
Black Impermanence stood behind her, dark armor cold as the frost itself, arms locked around her waist. He knew—knew perfectly well—that what he held was nothing but two souls' worth of memory wearing the shape of a woman.
He held her anyway. Held her like letting go, even for a second, would kill something in him that had already died once.
The world believed Black and White Impermanence never parted. How many in the Three Realms actually knew that these two Sovereigns of the underworld were, in truth, one shared divine form wearing two souls?
This was the punishment.
The most desolate sentence the cosmos had on its books, handed down after they'd defied the Heavenly Dao together.
One body. Two souls.
Never—not once, not for all eternity—permitted to meet as themselves.
White falls and black rises; black recedes and white surfaces; only the borrowed shape gets to stay close.
Three thousand years tangled into each other's blood and bone, and even one honest look at each other in a mirror had become something they could no longer afford.
"Ji Hua. Stay back." His voice rose low out of the blood and bone they shared.
"That white snake's Dao heart is a mess, but his sword's still sharp. He can feel the death-scent of the Netherworlds on us."
"So what if he can?" A faint, indifferent smile.
"There's no outrunning fate. There wasn't for you and me either."
He didn't answer that one. His silence sat there like an unmarked grave someone had tended, alone, for three thousand years—nothing inside it but the wreckage of two souls.
"Don't hold me so tight. I'm not going anywhere—can I?" Self-mocking, head tilted, fingers idly turning over the long hair falling across her chest.
"Cousin."
"When Long-Life Gu tried to gouge out the white snake's spirit core, that was defiance—stealing immortality straight off Heaven's own ledger."
"And now the little white snake goes down the mountain to obey Heaven instead. One looks like rebellion. One looks like obedience. Funny how neither one of them escapes the same wall."
Her smile went colder, degree by degree.
"You defied Heaven once too. Threw away your rank as a Divine Sovereign, sank yourself into the underworld, all so you could lock my living soul inside this, the rust-smelling shell of yours forever."
"And what did it get you? I have even lost my name. Piece by piece. All because of you."
She lowered her eyes.
"Across all Three Realms, they know me as White Impermanence. But Impermanence was never my name—it was yours. You built a lock out of love, blood and bone, shoved me inside it, and swallowed me whole along with everything else I have."
Her voice thinned further. "I had a name once. Before all this."
"I'm sorry, my little Hua." His voice, anguished, rolled through the soul-sea they shared like distant thunder.
"You know I can't live without you."
His arms closed tighter, as though he could physically wrestle the phantom back down into the deepest part of himself and keep it there.
"Then let us stay together… watch it together." She lifted her face toward the blinding river of guardian light spilling below them.
"Let's see if this little white snake is fool enough to do exactly what you and I did."
The mist thickened. The two shapes, black bleeding into white, dissolved atop the peak into one pale wash of ink on water. Mount Qingcheng went quiet again— an immaculate, unbroken white.
At the foot of the stone steps before the Sanctuary of Eternal Bloom, a young man in water-green robes had appeared without anyone marking when.
"Brother, why aren't you out cooling off in the bodhi grove today? Standing here brooding at the gate instead?"
He was handsome in a wild, unkempt way, bronze skin under sharp flared brows, his long upturned spirit-eyes carrying a feral, cunning gleam.
This was Qing—Bai Su's First Attendant, who had called him Brother for five hundred years though not a drop of blood tied them together.
He raised an eyebrow, looked Bai Su over top to bottom, grinning wide.
"What's got you like this, Brother? Point me at whatever witless creature's been disturbing you and I'll deal with it myself!"
Bai Su surfaced from wherever he'd been and looked at the ever-restless boy in front of him with a tired sigh.
"Qing. Nearly a thousand years of your own cultivation. Five hundred years at my side now. Time you learned some compassion. Reined in that appetite for killing. That is the proper path."
Qing pouted, wounded innocence itself.
"Brother, that's not fair. Since we signed the Master–Servant Immortal Pact of Shared Fate I've behaved—I never kill without cause."
A pause, the corner of his fox-eyes lifting.
"Unless some spirit's stupid enough to covet you."
"Stop talking nonsense." Bai Su gave him a flat look.
"At my level of cultivation, who in the Three Realms could possibly best me? Who'd even dare covet me?"
A beat.
"Besides… do I not still have you here?"
Still have you—and Qing's dim eyes went bright at once, and he stepped forward almost before he'd decided to.
His water-green collar fell open as he moved, showing the close-fitting armor underneath, faintly glowing—not silk, not anything mortal, but the first whole skin Bai Su had shed during his millennium tribulation.
Qing had sewn that skin into armor with his own two hands and had not once taken it off since. It clung to him like an old scar that refused, on principle, to heal—an obsessive, clinging devotion.
The grin came back a beat later, irreverent, and he leaned in close.
"Do you trust me that much, Brother? You know I'm the greediest of everyone who covets you. And it's not just your shed skin I want. What I actually want is your—"
"You little wretch. Begging for a beating?" Bai Su's face darkened, cold warning flashing through his amber eyes.
"How would I dare?" Qing flicked his forked tongue and stepped back half a pace, knowing exactly when to stop.
"Brother cultivates the Primordial True Dao. As your First Attendant I'd fight to the death to keep you whole. If some shameless little spirit ever takes your virginity, I'll just go smash my own skull into a wall and be done with it."
"But, Brother—" He rubbed his nose, eyes sharpening.
"I saw gold light flare over the sanctuary from a hundred miles off. I came running. Has Bodhisattva Guanyin come again? Are you finally ascending?"
The cool in Bai Su's eyes shattered, piece by piece, into something too thick and sad to name. He let out a long breath.
Qing's grin died instantly.
"Brother. Has something happened? Something real? I've never once seen you look like this."
"It's no great disaster." Bai Su turned, stood before the steps with his hands folded behind his back, voice already going somewhere distant.
"Guanyin's shown me what I have to do to ascend. I have to walk into the mortal world and pay off a debt from two, three centuries back. Qing… do you remember that little bodhi spirit?"
Qing went rigid.
The whole horror of that old lightning came roaring back— how fast it had happened, how he'd arrived one breath too late, how he'd found Brother with that little bodhi spirit cradled in his arms, her primordial spirit already tearing loose. The words came out of him before he could stop them.
"The one who kept calling you gege while she died. Said she'd find you again in the next life?"
"That's the one."
Qing's face changed completely.
"Brother. You cannot mean—Guanyin doesn't actually expect you to go down there and marry that thing. Live through all that tedious business of love and devotion?"
His voice dropped, cutting through the cold mist like a shard of ice. A rim of red rose around his eyes, unbidden.
"What about me? Why not me? Why!"
"Enough." Bai Su's handsome face went dark, his sleeve cutting through the air in rebuke.
"I go down only to repay a debt on my own life and close out this karma. You and I signed the Pact five hundred years ago. We are brothers. Fellow cultivators. But Xian'er—she is a woman."
"A man and a woman carry different karma. That is simply how it is."
At the word woman, something twitched at the corner of Qing's mouth. Then, unable to stop himself, he laughed—low, raw, dropping into the mist that never lifted, the sound of something wounded coughing blood out of its own chest.
He looked at Bai Su—supreme in cultivation, and in matters of the heart blank as paper no one had ever written on—and felt his own nails bite into his palm, deeper, deeper.
A drop of dark crimson spirit-blood hit the dirt and raised a thin green thread of smoke that vanished almost as it rose.
"A woman? Ha. A woman." Qing lifted his eyes slowly.
"Brother. Oh, Brother. Two thousand years cultivating the Primordial True Dao. You think you can see clean through the karma of the Three Realms—and you can't even tell male from female?"
He came forward, one step at a time, breath thick with something dark and close to madness. Every word landed like a blade, cutting straight through a misunderstanding two, three centuries old and untouched.
"Did you really spend all this time believing that little bodhi spirit—the one who hung over your head every day shading you from the sun, the one who tore herself apart to shield you from Heaven's own lightning—was a woman?"
Qing held his gaze, unblinking, and gave it to him plain, one word set down after another.
"He is, in fact, every inch a man."
For one full moment, every sound in the world simply stopped. Even the wind through the mountains went dead still.