Yet tonight, in the city of Lin'an, this ancient male snake lies pinned beneath a morta…
A gleaming red in the dark of night.
Beneath the eaves, the bridal chamber's lattice window turned the candlelight inside into one vast slab of glowing red jade—as though blood itself were seeping through the paper.
On the paper: two silhouettes, overlapping.
One tall. One slight. One pressing forward. One yielding.
The night wind carried it all up to the rooftop—strained, stifled breath, soft as an oriole's cry, tangled together with the low, lingering murmur of a mortal scholar's voice.
Blood seemed to burn behind Qing's own eyes as she stared at those two entangled shadows. Her nails bit into the cold seams between roof tiles. Her mouth twisted into something half-mad.
Self-mocking.
"Brother... you truly let him touch you."
The wind lifted the hem of her green robe, scattering into the dark a tearful song that would never once reach the person it was written for.
We were both steeped in the same Qingcheng snow. Why, then, do these red curtains refuse to carry your name?
【Twelve Songs of the White Snake — "The Color of Qing"】
One pact, one life between us.
One thread, woven by my own hand.
Who knew— this love of mine would turn into the Milky Way, a river of stars lying between us.
Laugh at you two— one glance, and already pledging life and death.
What I hate is this—it's me.
I stayed beside you.
Five hundred years. None.
I thought we were two lives bound on Mount Qingcheng.
Who knew—
I would become the one left outside the wedding curtains?
What use is this immortal pact?
What use is this thread of love?
None.
Then let this cold moon watch me drink alone and alone.
Until I can forget the winter of Qingcheng.
We once walked through the Qingcheng snow.
I traded an immortal pact for nothing but this fall.
Oh, this fall, this fool— all of it, in the end, for nothing.
And now— every spirit-bone in this fool has become a chain.
His red heart lies sealed in white.
White ice. Ice white.
One inch of love.
One inch of white.
Let a thousand trials break his body first— before he betrays his own heart that loves you with an undying devotion.
until it stops beating.
We both walked through the same Qingcheng snow. Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
You and me.
So why does the bridal chamber never bear the color of Qing?
Note: Qing (青) means green in Chinese.
Strong liquor ran down her fine jaw, into her collar. Cold as ice going down. On her face, the last of the day's rain and something that wasn't rain at all had long since become impossible to tell apart.
Heaven and earth, silent. Only the soft, endless patter of rain on green tile left.
"Heh..." A soft, distant laugh from the far end of the roof.
"Not bad, that song. Pity you've got it all wrong."
Qing whipped around.
White Impermanence lounged there on the eaves, same as ever, the Black Fan of Flowing Gold half-raised to hide her face, two slender legs swinging off the edge. The Soul-Claiming Bell at her ankle chimed, faint, scattered, with every stir of the wind.
She smiled. Enchanting. Cruel. Both at once, no contradiction in it at all.
"Our little Qing here—it's not the curtains that refuse your name."
White Impermanence's curved, peach-blossom eyes narrowed.
"It's half your life that's already taken the name Bai."
Qing was already raw—grief and rage both scraped down to the nerve. Hearing five hundred years of carefully buried want laid out this plainly by some underworld sovereign was more than she could stand.
Fury and humiliation hit her at the same instant.
She snatched up the wine jar and hurled it, no hesitation at all, straight at the phantom.
"Get out!"
White Impermanence dissolved like a wisp of smoke. The jar shattered hard against tile, wine and shards flying everywhere, the sharp reek of it bursting through the cold rain.
"Heh heh... what an unenlightened, hot-tempered little snake." The laughter hadn't gone far.
Before Qing could even leap down off the roof, a thick, cloying fragrance of red spider lilies had already pressed itself against the curve of her ear, clinging there like a sickness in the bone.
In the moonlight, a face leaned silently into view—half seductive, half the chill of something long dead.
White Impermanence's living soul, ordinarily, was locked away inside Black Impermanence's cold, rust-scented body. Right now, though, she'd borrowed death-energy from the Nine Shades to conjure, once more, the graceful phantom of the beauty she'd once been.
A cinnabar-painted fingertip grazed, almost by accident, the raised scales rising along Qing's neck. White Impermanence leaned close to her ear. Laughed—soft, low, sticky-sweet.
"Oh, little Qing-Qing. What are you so angry about?"
"Look at him. Your Brother, tonight, handing this body he broke and rebuilt over to some mortal, to do with as he pleases..."
Something cold—something that had no business belonging to any living thing—flickered through those smiling peach-blossom eyes.
Cold as death. Beautiful as anything.
"But do you know—that thing you've wanted for five hundred years, finally, finally granted—Umm—falls exactly on the one day you're in the most pain of your entire life."
"One day you look the most like a spirit. And the least like one. All at once."
"Get away from me—!"
Qing's pupils blew wide. Her origin-light burst out wild, green, uncontrolled. She struck out backhand, hard, and shattered nothing but pale moonlight, scattered thin across the air.
White Impermanence's laughter drew out long, thin, and far, on the night wind, and finally dissolved into empty sky.
Qing's chest heaved.
Shame, shock, and the raw madness of having something secret—something she'd never once said out loud—laid bare in front of a stranger drove her right to the edge of coming apart.
She swept her green robes aside, leapt off the roof, and fled, half out of her mind, into the black mouth of the alley below.
At that exact moment, farther down the stone-paved lane, quick footsteps, panicked, uneven.
Dao'an was heading this way.
The young monk of Jinshan Temple hurried through the dark with a heavy jar of consecrated oil clutched to his chest. Sent that day by his master, Fahai, to some century-old press west of Lin'an for oil for the Buddha-bathing ceremony.
Delayed on the road. Now racing the city gates before they locked for the night.
One of them: heartbroken. Half-mad.
The other: flustered. Hurrying for his life.
At the corner: the sharp bite of strong liquor collided head-on with the rich, sacred weight of temple oil, spilling and mixing together in that narrow, dark passage.
Thump—
The collision sent Dao'an staggering, the jar nearly flying from his arms. He bent, steadying it, breath knocked loose— and when he looked up, found beneath the cool moonlight a face streaked with tears and still, somehow, dazzling. Fey and dangerous. Almost unnaturally beautiful.
The "pretty maid" in front of him stood with one fist on her hip, brows arched in fury, the corners of her sharp, lovely eyes still glistening wet. Liquor clung to her whole body. She spat straight at him, no warning at all:
"Where'd this little bald donkey come from? Watch where you're going—you dare walk straight into me!"
Dao'an had never once, in his whole life, seen a woman this vivid. This radiant. Carrying about her something so close to destruction it was hard to call it anything but beautiful.
Her long, spirit-sharp eyes, ordinarily bright and narrow, glowed faintly red now with grief and fury both, catching the moonlight like a pair of gems freshly pulled out of fire.
The instant their eyes met, the young monk's whole face went up in flame.
His heart slammed against his ribs like something startled and cornered, blood rushing straight to his skull. Even the robes on his back seemed steeped, suddenly, in some cool, unshakable scent of pine-and-bamboo he couldn't force out of his own head.
"Forgive this humble monk, benefactor... I meant... I meant no offense..."
Watching him stand there, dazed as a wooden idol, his whole face burning, Qing's disgust only deepened. Every mortal fool in this world, apparently, got more tiresome the longer you looked at them.
She gave a disdainful snort and swept past him without another word.
A cold wind rose. In the silent alley, only a thread of cool pine-bamboo fragrance remained, still faintly laced with liquor, lingering long beside the young monk whose meditative heart had, for the very first time, been thrown into complete disarray.
Dao'an stood frozen where he was. Still clutching the jar tight to his chest. Fingertips trembling.
High above, White Impermanence's shape gathered once more out of the empty air. She looked down at the whole scene in the alley, the corner of her mouth curling in idle amusement, her voice carrying a lazy, world-weary knowingness.
"Hm. That little monk. Quite the romantic soul, isn't he?"
She sighed, soft, as though speaking half to herself, half to Black Impermanence somewhere in the night wind.
"Give it a little time. He'll be breaking his vows."
"That faint scrap of Buddha-light on him won't cling to him much longer, either."
The Soul-Claiming Bell at her ankle gave a soft chime. The sound drifted, swaying, through the dark, without disturbing a single soul below.
"Little monk. Oh, little monk."
"The day you finally lay down your robes, this sovereign will grant you a treasure of heaven and earth, and see you safely through the rest of your days."
Her smile deepened, distant and knowing.
"Consider it my way of honoring the fate that sent you headlong into your own trial of love tonight."
She drew her gaze back.
Turned once more toward the blood-red candlelight still glowing from the bridal chamber below. Whatever playful, teasing looseness had lived at the corner of her mouth cooled now, degree by degree, until nothing was left of it at all.
Just stillness. Bone-deep.
"That line of Guanyin's—not broken until remade. What a blunt blade. Kills you without ever drawing a drop of blood."
She leaned into the tall, dark shadow beside her, her voice light as a thread of cold wind.
"Two thousand years of proud, solitary cultivation. A sword cold as frost. And yet tonight, in Lin'an, this male snake lies pinned beneath a mortal behind red curtains."
Black Impermanence said nothing at all. He only reached out with both arms and drew her, fierce and silent, fully into his chest. Tried, with his own warmth, to warm her through— though he knew, better than anyone, that two entangled souls of the underworld could never, no matter how tightly bound, kindle the warmth that belongs to the living.
He rested his chin against the crown of her trembling head. Voice low. Hoarse.
"The white snake chose this. Chose to fall into it herself."
"You—I was the one who forced you back."
At those words, White Impermanence went soft all at once, sinking into his arms. Her cinnabar-painted nails hooked hard into his dark armor, nearly clawing straight through the seams into the blood and bone beneath.
"I hate you, Cousin."
"I truly do."
Her voice shook.
"But I love you too, I ache for you too..."
"Ache for you—for giving up your rank, for willingly falling, becoming nothing but a spirit of the underworld, all just to keep me."
As she said it, White Impermanence turned her head aside in mock petulance, tapped Black Impermanence lightly on the chest with her golden fan, and let out a low, soft laugh.
"That mark on the great snake's brow. Burning so hot, just now."
"I want to know what that tastes like. Myself."
Her gaze turned playful—and still, underneath it, an ache she couldn't quite hide.
"Back then I told you, plainly, that I was willing. And still, Cousin, you wouldn't consummate our marriage. No matter what I said."
"You held me. You embraced me. So why—why did you always stop there, one breath short of complete surrender, one breath short of even a brief taste of pleasure?"
"What are you talking about? Xiao Hua, my little Hua..." Something violent and anguished tore through the blood and bone they shared.
Black Impermanence closed his eyes. His hoarse voice carried a grief three thousand years had never once managed to dissolve.
"Our wedding was so close. How could I have brought myself to dishonor you before the wedding night itself? I thought it would be no more than a short journey to the Great Pass. There and back."
"Who could have known Heaven would play such a cruel trick..."
His voice sank. Lower. Lower still.
"By the time I made it back, the wedding curtains were already ash. I couldn't find a single trace of you left, anywhere."
Black Impermanence didn't say any more. He only tightened his arms further, as though he might, if he tried hard enough, drag that fragmented soul whole back into his own blood and bone— to fill, at last, the aching void left by a wedding night unfinished for three thousand years.
Beneath them, the red candles hadn't gone out yet. That faint, half-heard sound still drifted up from behind the curtains, carried on the night wind to the cold tiles above.
And there, beneath the frost gathering slowly on the roof of the Bai residence, the whole deep, solitary, tragic history of Black and White Impermanence froze over. Again.
From that night on—
She was no longer that aloof, solitary Bai Su of Mount Qingcheng, whose courtesy name had once been Zhen.
Bai Suzhen.
She was, in the mortal world, from that moment on, known as Lady Bai.