Can the mortal world truly not bear even one moment of my madness in love?
After leaving the fishmonger, Xu Xian hurried east along the crowded street. The newly finished longevity lock was still warm inside his robe.
All the way home, he planned how he would hide it in his sleeve and tease his wife before finally bringing it out. Once Bai Su grew annoyed, he would show it to her with his own hands.
Those phoenix eyes were always so cool and composed. If they truly smiled, they would surely be lovelier than the clear light of this Mengdong (early-winter) day.
He could already see the signboard of the pastry shop at the corner. The sweetness of sour-plum cakes drifted faintly through the crowd.
But just as he was about to cross the street, the surrounding voices suddenly receded. A familiar thread of sandalwood incense seeped soundlessly into the smoke and bustle of mortal life.
Xu Xian slowed.
The sunlight was cut off by a tall shadow. The hem of a withered-tea-colored kasaya entered his sight first, its golden Buddhist patterns stirring in the wind like a boundary marker abruptly raised between the mortal world and an abyss.
Fahai stood in the street ahead.
He wore his withered-tea-and-sandalwood kasaya, his expression compassionate. His face, no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, still held the warmth of mortal life, yet his eyes were clear with an authority that admitted no doubt.
Xu Xian instinctively shielded the lock inside his robe. Some of his earlier happiness still lingered on his face when he recognized the monk.
"Master Fahai?" He stepped forward and bowed.
"This humble one greets you."
Fahai gave a slight nod. His gaze rested upon the hand protecting Xu Xian's breast. Only after a moment did he speak. His voice was level, yet the words struck like thunder.
"Benefactor Xu. What you carry is no longevity lock. It is a talisman summoning death."
"Master!"
Xu Xian gave a sudden start. The smile on his face faltered, then vanished.
"I have great respect for you, but please mind your words! My wife is with child. This lock was made for our baby. How can you call it a talisman summoning death?"
"A child…" Fahai paused, considering his words, then continued gravely.
"Benefactor Xu, I must tell you. That is no ordinary child. It is only a semblance of life forcibly condensed through spirit arts."
"Nor is your wife mortal. She is a white snake spirit of Mount Qingcheng, more than two thousand years old."
"Master, enough of this nonsense!"
Xu Xian's face changed. He retreated a step, his right hand still locked over his heart.
"My wife comes from an honorable family. She is virtuous and kind. Though we have met several times, you have no right to insult her so!"
"I know you do not believe me." Fahai regarded him quietly.
"Have you never wondered why you cannot remember what happened aboard the pleasure-boat that night?"
Xu Xian went still. The inexplicable dread buried deep in his chest gave a violent throb.
Fahai swept up one sleeve.
A crystalline memory stone rose from his palm and hung between them.
"This stone gathered the lingering spirit aura and consciousness left upon the pleasure-boat. Today, this humble monk will restore the memory sealed from you. See it with your own eyes."
Blinding white light burst from the stone. A screen of radiance unfolded.
Through an unseen fissure in the deepest reaches of Xu Xian's spirit-mind, the events of that night appeared before him without concealment.
Red curtains hanging low. A dying lamp trembling.
Realgar wine spilled across the floor.
The gentle, graceful Lady Bai in his arms, shedding her human form scale by scale.
Clear, flowery, shining scales breaking across her snow-white neck. Her slender waist replaced by a vast serpent body, blue-white and suffocatingly immense. Icy illuminated scales pressed against Xu Xian's naked skin.
Upon the face that remained incomparably beautiful, amber pupils had narrowed into long vertical slits.
Xu Xian's mind rang hollow.
The memory sealed in the deepest chamber of his spirit-mind shattered beneath the light.
Snake scales. Cold sweat.
The sharp, cloying sweetness of realgar.
Those spirit eyes burning gold with desire and pain. And his own last breath, trapped within the embrace of something half-human and half-serpent, terror closing his throat until he could draw no more air.
The blood drained swiftly from Xu Xian's face. He stared at the enormous white snake coiled across the pleasure-boat. The world pitched beneath him, and he staggered backward.
The longevity lock slipped from inside his robe.
Clang—!
Red gold struck the stone street. The cord fell loose. Mud and dust smeared the eight characters that only moments ago had still been warm.
Free from calamity. Safe through every year.
Xu Xian looked down, his stomach heaving.
Half a year of tenderness, nights spent entwined, even the image of himself that very morning with his cheek against Bai Su's belly, waiting joyfully for the child to stir—all of it twisted into cold, slick scales winding around his limbs and bones.
Had the love he believed they shared been nothing but a monstrous deception from the beginning?
"Impossible…" Xu Xian shook his head again and again. He braced himself against a wall, nearly retching in the street.
"The memory stone does not lie." Fahai looked at him without triumph, only grave sorrow.
"Do you believe she is merely a female spirit?"
Xu Xian raised his head blankly.
Fahai spoke each word distinctly.
"The warm and fragrant beauty you cherished is, in his true form, an enormous male serpent. When he first assumed human form, he was a man."
"What…" Xu Xian's voice broke.
"Male… a man… a man…"
The world collapsed around him piece by piece. The word she suddenly felt strange.
Yet to call Bai Su he at once seemed to erase with his own hands the person who had shared his pillow for the past half year.
Xu Xian opened his mouth. For a long while, no complete sentence came.
"Her feelings for you may be genuine," Fahai said, even.
"But affection, carried past all reason, becomes obsession. She erased your memory to keep you at her side. She took your own life-essence—your own Yang—and forced it, against nature, into the shape of a child not yet born."
He let that sit for a moment.
"That life feeds on her heart's blood now. Her own power poured in without end. And you were the spark that lit it. Your fate is hers now, whether you willed it or not."
His gaze did not move from Xu Xian's face.
"Such arts turn on their makers, in the end. Always. When it turns on her—it may not be her life alone that it claims."
"My wife… How could it be?" Xu Xian murmured.
Bai Su's face rose without warning in Xu Xian's mind—so pale of late that it had seemed almost transparent. Those cold fingers.
That weakness she could no longer conceal. The white robes always fastened high at the throat. And that morning, when he had held the hands pricked by tiny needle holes, Bai Su had dismissed his concern with a single quiet sentence.
I did not sleep well last night.
"No…" Xu Xian raised his hands helplessly, then let them fall.
"No. My wife, she…"
The word she stopped upon his tongue. He remembered what Fahai had just revealed, and his body shuddered again.
"She would never harm me. Even if she deceived me, she would never harm me."
"Perhaps she bears you no conscious malice," Fahai said.
"But such defiance carries a price. Deep feeling has never once bought a discount on it."
Fahai's eyes did not leave Xu Xian’s face.
"Her bones will wither, feeding that life with her own. And when Heaven's punishment falls—it falls on more than the two of you. The Bai residence. Bao'an Hall. Every soul within reach."
Xu Xian looked rattled, pained, as though someone had thrust him to the edge of a ten-thousand-foot precipice.
"What am I to do? If I remain, I will harm her. But if I leave…"
He looked blindly toward Bao'an Hall.
"If I leave, what will become of her?"
Fahai lowered his eyes.
"Sever your mortal bonds. Follow this humble monk to Jinshan Temple, enter monastic life."
Xu Xian was stunned. He stared at Fahai in disbelief.
"Become a monk?"
"That's the only way—the only way that could save both of you. You should spend the remainder of your mortal life cultivating merit beneath the Buddha, repaying this Heaven-defying karma."
Fahai slowly removed his kasaya and placed it over Xu Xian's shoulders. The heavy Buddhist garment fell across the ash-grey robe still carrying the warmth and dust of ordinary streets.
"If you are willing to enter the temple, this humble monk will shave your head and ordain you. Your Dharma name shall be—Daolin."
Xu Xian stood motionless.
The marketplace remained noisy.
Vendors cried out their cakes; children tugged at their mothers' sleeves and chased one another through the crowd. A seller called out his tanghulu, bright red candied hawthorn glistening on bamboo skewers. Not far away, the sign of the eastern pastry shop stirred in the wind.
The scent of sour-plum cakes drifted faintly across the street.
He had been only a few steps, a few steps from buying the cakes Bai Su wanted.
Another half hour's walk would have brought him home. His wife was waiting.
The tiger-head shoes with their mismatched eyes still rested beside the couch. That very morning, they had promised to remain together for a lifetime.
Xu Xian slowly bent down and retrieved the longevity lock from the mud. Dust smeared the gold.
The red cord was wet. He rubbed at the eight characters again and again, but could not restore the warmth and brightness they had held only moments before.
"If I go with you…" Redness gathered at the corners of Xu Xian's eyes, and his voice was so hoarse it was scarcely audible.
"Can you truly spare my wife? Her life."
Fahai pressed his palms together.
"Amitabha. If she will release her obsession and cease defying Heaven, this humble monk will do all within his power to keep her alive."
Xu Xian closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, every trace of sunlight in his gaze had shattered.
"Very well," he whispered.
"I will go with you."
Xu Xian looked one last time toward home. His fingers closed around the mud-stained lock until it nearly cut into his palm.
"Even if she is a spirit…" He faltered.
"Even if… she deceived me…" His throat worked painfully.
"We have still been husband and wife. My lady, if entering the temple will keep you from the heavenly punishment, then I will go."
At the same moment, inside the hidden chamber of Bao'an Hall, a heavy stone door stood sealed. The air was thick with the smell of blood.
The ethereal shadow of the Pristine-Heart Lotus Bud hovered in the air.
The floral apparition, translucent and white, pulsed with a faint, flickering light—brightening and dimming with the unborn breath within Bai Su's slightly rounded abdomen.
Bai Su's robe had slipped from one shoulder, exposing her pale neck and the wound over her heart—cut open again and again, never given time to heal. With a spell, she drew a wisp of the Lotus Bud's spirit from within her body and guided it into a white-jade vessel.
Bai Su held the vessel in her left hand and a jade dagger in her right.
Once more, the blade passed across her heart.
Bright primal blood wound down her skin and fell, drop by drop, into the flower-shadow. Pink light trembled within it, like an unborn child greedily drinking in her life.
Bai Su lowered her eyes to the spirit-shadow. Her expression held a tenderness of which even she seemed unaware.
"Wait a little longer," she whispered. "Your father will be home soon."
"Brother—!"
The stone door thundered open. Qing struck the chamber like a streak of green lightning. Her face was bloodless; before she had even seen the wound over Bai Su's heart, despair was already shaking her voice.
"Brother, Xu Xian has gone with Fahai!"
The hand gripping Bai Su's dagger stopped.
"What did you say?"
"Fahai stopped him in the street." Qing spoke urgent, blurting out everything in one breath.
"Told him everything. He placed his kasaya around Xu Xian's shoulders and persuaded him. Xu Xian agreed to go with him to Jinshan Temple."
The last words seemed torn from her throat.
"He is going to become a monk. He does not want you anymore!"
Bai Su wheeled around. The fingers holding the white-jade vessel opened soundlessly.
Crash—!
The vessel struck the stone floor and shattered.
Jade broke. Blood splashed.
Crimson spirit-fluid mingled with Bai Su's primal blood and blossomed beneath her feet like red plum flowers ground brutally into the floor. The wisp of the Pristine-Heart Lotus Bud's spirit-shadow fell into that pool of blood at the same instant.
Its pink radiance flickered like a dying heart.
Deep within Bai Su's belly, the warm stirring she had forged at the cost of three hundred years of cultivation abruptly ceased as her mind and spirit broke.
She pressed a hand to her abdomen. Pain—severe pain—came at once.
There was a cold beyond description, spreading inch by inch from the deepest reaches of flesh and blood.
Bai Su remained frozen in the posture of carving open her own heart, yet it was as though her soul had been torn from her body. Upon that face of cold, peerless beauty, an expression of utter absurdity slowly became a smile.
"Become a monk?" she repeated softly, her empty gaze resting upon the broken jade and blood.
A sudden ache stung her eyes.
"What does he think this is?"
Bai Su raised a hand to her forehead and gave a low laugh. It scarcely sounded alive.
"Redemption? Salvation?"
No one answered.
Only broken jade lay soaking in blood, reflecting the last pink glimmer as it slowly went cold.
Mortal bones and an immortal heart could not be reconciled.
Was there truly no place in the mortal world for the madness of her love?
Qing stood at the doorway, her eyes filled with fury and tears, yet she did not dare take even one step forward to support Bai Su.
At that same moment, at the far end of the street, Xu Xian walked toward Jinshan beside Fahai, the kasaya upon his shoulders. The longevity lock, still stained by the mud, lay heavy against his heart.