Oh, is this not a drowning pleasure? Or salvation? Let this Wushan Clouds-and-Rain passion be my very altar.
To Bai Su, the rites of the mortal world had never been anything more than ink on paper.
Qingbo Gate, Lin'an.
The Bai family's whole history had been stitched together seamless, airtight. Old Master Bai—once a high official, retired to Lin'an, fallen ill, dead. What remained of that grand household: one reclusive young mistress. One sharp-tongued maid.
No father. No mother. Land enough to lose count of. The apothecary itself, thrown in as dowry.
Three days for the proposal. Half a month to the wedding.
The whole of Lin'an had something to say about a match moving that fast. All the gossip ended, in the end, in a blizzard of red paper storming the gates of the Bai residence.
One bow to Heaven and Earth. One bow to the elders—though, in truth, there were no parents left for either of them to bow to. Then husband and wife bowed to each other.
Someone shouted for the bridal chamber.
And just like that, laughter broke loose. Red silk, the sweet sting of wine, hands pushing at their backs—before Xu Xian quite understood what had happened, the whole jubilant crowd had already swept him and his bride away.
Even then, Xu Xian still felt half caught in someone else’s dream.
Any second now, surely, he would wake back in Bao’an Hall—still that poor apprentice weighing out other men’s medicine, with not even a shop of his own.
The veil. The gold incense burner. Dragon-and-phoenix candles cracking and spitting in the chamber, bathing every curtain in a red that had no right to breathe.
The whole room, red. Red enough to hurt.
Bai Su sat rigid at the edge of the bridal bed, drowning in an elaborate wedding robe, a phoenix coronet crushing down on his skull.
Half a month now, trapped in the endless clockwork of mortal wedding ritual and this female body, growing stranger, more awake, with every single day. On one hand, bright human routine. On the other, dark flesh revelation.
Under the veil, the world had shrunk down to one narrow, blistering red box. Wedding incense thick in the air, tangled with the coarse reek of mortal wine. Candles burning too hot. The coronet biting into his neck until the whole room tilted sideways.
He'd cast off two thousand years of pride forged on Mount Qingcheng. Traded it for red silk.
Under those wide red sleeves, his hands had knotted themselves into fists. Knuckles white. Two thousand years of cultivation— he'd crossed heavenly tribulation, watched men live and die, sat alone atop Qingcheng and watched whole oceans of mortal years rise and fall like tides. And still. Still, right now, all he wanted was to run.
The quilt too soft beneath him.
Footsteps, closer now, beyond the door. The thought of another man's warm breath. All of it pressing down at once until he nearly tore his own sleeve open and went straight through the window.
He wanted to run away. Truly.
Creak—
The door. Open, then shut. Noise from outside, cut off clean. The wick popped once, threw a single spark.
A ceremonial scale-rod, wound in red silk, slid up under the edge of his veil. Lifted that whole burning square of red away, slow.
Candlelight hit Bai Su straight in the eyes.
Xu Xian stood there in groom's red, cheeks warm with wine, his clean eyes locked on his bride and not moving. The second that veil came up, he simply stopped. Stopped moving entirely.
Only now did he understand what it meant to lose your soul on the spot.
"My lady..." His voice shook—that particular mortal awkwardness, and under it, something close to worship.
"I don't know what I ever did. To deserve this. To deserve you." He steadied himself. Spoke it like a vow.
"Today, before heaven, I swear this. Through life, through death, through everything after—Xu Xian will never fail you."
Bai Su looked up. Fell straight into a gaze so full of heat it should have been illegal.
That gaze was too hot, too ardent. Some heedless heavenly fire, reaching clean across the space between them, and Bai Su flushed—all at once, blood rushing to his face, his own heart suddenly loud in his ears.
"Husband... you speak too gravely." Bai Su clenched his teeth, forced spirit-power through his own meridians, crushed that cold, clear masculine voice back down his throat before it could get loose.
What came out instead: soft. Warm. An oriole's song.
But this body—yin and yang wrenched sideways, flesh rebuilt from the ground up by spirit-craft—had a mind of its own. Xu Xian had barely settled beside him before their robes whispered against each other.
That was all it took. His skirts stirred. And underneath every layer of silk, that newly-woken body shivered—fine, tingling, unmistakable.
Bai Su trembled. His pale, always-cool ears flushed a helpless, undefended red.
What else could Xu Xian read it as but a bride's shyness? Nothing more, of course. The love in his eyes only deepened. He reached out, testing, laid his warm palm over Bai Su's cold wrist.
Something in Bai Su's Dao heart—silent for two thousand years, still for two thousand years—wrenched, hard.
Was this a bridal chamber, or some exquisite engine of torture, built specifically to crush an immortal's pride and a man's true self, all at once?
The curtains hung low. Candlelight swaying. Xu Xian looked at him and didn't push further.
"My lady, why are your hands so cold?" He cradled that slender wrist, voice gentle, careful.
"Are you afraid?"
Bai Su's lashes trembled. No answer.
Seeing how rigid he'd gone, Xu Xian softened further.
"If you're not ready, we can wait. We're husband and wife now—there's time. All the time in the world. Tonight we could just talk. Nothing has to happen at all."
He'd assumed mortal marriage meant no room for hesitation—that Xu Xian would never think to spare him this. And yet this fool. This fool was actually willing to stop.
One nod, right now, and the whole night could end exactly here.
And then—Guanyin's words, surfacing again from somewhere deep in his own consciousness. Enter the mortal dust. Cross your trial of love.
Bai Su closed his eyes.
"There's no need." Very soft. Face burning. But the words came from his own mouth, his own choice.
"Husband... you needn't wait."
He lowered his head as he said it.
Xu Xian took it for shyness. Heat kindled behind his eyes. Still, he asked, low: "Truly?"
Bai Su said nothing more. Just the smallest nod.
The red gauze, half-undone. Stirred now by turbulent feeling, by rising want, the vermilion Origin-Mark on his brow burned vivid under the candlelight—one plum blossom bursting open, alone, across a thousand miles of unbroken snow.
Xu Xian stared, transfixed.
"My lady—were you born with this mark?" His fingertip traced the vermilion.
"It's beautiful."
The next moment, he cupped Bai Su's face in both hands and pressed a warm, reverent kiss straight to the center of his brow.
Bai Su's whole body shuddered.
That was his Origin-Mark.
The one place in his entire being where a single stirring of feeling could shake the foundations of his own spirit. Xu Xian had no idea.
He only followed mortal instinct—kissed his way down from that snow-pale brow, over the corner of an eye, a cheek, the slender line of a throat. Warm breath, falling inch by inch.
And rising between their two bodies, that faint, drunk-on-itself scent of leaf and wood—the bodhi twig Xu Xian had once been, in another life, bleeding through.
Mortal warmth. Mortal want.
Like molten stone, slow and unstoppable, burning clean through two thousand years of an Immortal Lord's frozen reserve.
Xu Xian's hand found the sash of his robe. Loosened it.
Bai Su's body trembled—fine, involuntary, a tremor he had no say in at all.
Two, three hundred years ago, this same little spirit had hung above his head, drawing on his own spiritual energy, shading him from the sun. Now the fool held him instead.
Now the mastery belonged to Xu Xian, and it was her husband's hands loosening the ties of a wedding gown.
Bai Su's spine locked straight.
Deep under his own skin, he could almost feel his serpent scales ache. Desperate now, he repeated it to himself, over and over, like a prayer that had stopped meaning anything—
All of this is for ascension. All of this is for ascension.
This is only the tribulation. Only the tribulation.
But when the mortal's warmth finally, fully came down over him, every one of those self-deceiving little justifications went pale. Absurd. Useless as smoke.
Bai Su shut his eyes. Let that searing warmth close over him, inch by inch.
His primordial spirit still seemed to hang somewhere out past the Nine Heavens, watching cold and detached as his own Dao heart betrayed itself. His flesh, though—his flesh had already fallen. Long before his spirit caught up to it.
He'd believed he would resist with every trembling nerve he had. He'd believed that proud, primordial heart of his would never once let mortal intimacy trespass on the man he still knew, underneath everything, that he was.
But what shamed him—what shamed him worst of all—was that this body did not resist. Not once.
At first he could blame every tremor on pain. On punishment, deserved.
But Xu Xian was too gentle. Kissed him again, and again, moved slow, murmured low words like he held something priceless. Something one wrong touch could shatter.
The pain dissolved into something strange and tingling. Then the strange, tingling thing rose in waves— flooding flesh, flooding blood, seeping straight into spirit. Bai Su's fingers dug into the brocade quilt. Heat with nowhere left to go burned across his cheek and ear, then spilled, finally, down the fine line of his own collarbone.
Suddenly he understood.
The virgin heart and body he had guarded for two thousand years were crumbling—bit by bit, breaking into a mosaic across the floor, each fragment catching the light. Breathtaking. Stunning, even.
Two thousand years of spotless virtue, and this was how it all chose to end. But the worst part—the part that actually terrified him—was that he no longer knew whether it was only the body giving way.
Or whether the Dao he'd believed unbreakable was cracking straight down the middle along with it.
"Don't be afraid, my lady." Xu Xian threaded their fingers together. Bent low. Kissed his tightly-pressed mouth.
"I won't hurt you."
Tenderness and burning want braided together into a tide with no bottom, and finally, finally, shattered the last fragile line Bai Su had managed to hold.
He fell into Mount Wushan—cloud, rain, spirit rising, sinking, no ground beneath any of it. And at last—low, hoarse, restrained, almost despairing, and unmistakably, undeniably touched with pleasure—a sound broke loose from his own mouth.
The instant it left him, Bai Su's eyes flew open.
That sound had come from him. He could not believe it.
Was this still himself?
In the arms of a mortal man, he had felt something close—too close—to drowning. To bliss.
The smoke cleared. The clouds scattered. A thousand years of Dao heart lay in pieces on the floor.
【Twelve Songs of the White Snake — "Wushan Clouds and Rain"】
One moment gone soft, this flood of pleasure, breaking over me, melt away— a thousand years of cold bone.
Hide— drunk beneath clouds and rain.
Grit my teeth, I'm ready to flee.
Wave after wave—those cursed hands only pull me back and closer.
What kind of great cultivator am I now?
Feel it—my spirit bone melting to marrow, cracking, bit by bit.
Feel it—my soul shattering clean apart.
All gone, wild, unstoppable.
I thought I was only bowing to fate, meeting the trial I was owed.
Who knew—
Some trial. Some fate.
Cannot gather my power back.
Cannot let go of this hunger for pleasure.
Ah—
One hand sinking, the other reaching for shore.
Is this what it means— to worship beneath Wushan clouds and rain?
A certain enlightenment, this.
Fine, then.
Let these red silk curtains swallow me whole— undo me to the very end.
Beyond the bridal chamber, red wedding silk snapped and rattled above the rooftops of the Bai residence—like flesh, torn open again and again in the dark.
Qing sat alone on the high, sweeping eaves.
A jar of stolen wedding liquor dangling from one hand. She glanced once at the window glowing red below. Shapes moving, indistinct, behind the gauze. Candlelight swaying with the wind.
She looked away. Fast.
Tipped her head back. Swallowed hard. The liquor went down like a blade and still couldn't cut through whatever was choking her chest shut.
Five hundred years.
Five hundred years walking beside Brother through wind and frost on Mount Qingcheng. And now—one layer of roof tile, one curtain of red, and that's all that stood between her and listening to some other man call him my lady.
Her grip tightened on the jar.
Knuckles carved white against the clay. After a long while she laughed, low, under her breath. Carried out on the night wind, that sound was colder than any weeping could have been.
"Oh, Brother..." She tipped her head back. Drank again.
"Are you enjoying your tribulation?"