This gilded cage for her soul—a trial she had chosen for herself.
The spring waters of Lin'an ran fast. Almost before anyone noticed, Grain Rain had come and gone, and the Dragon Boat Festival was closing in.
Not a single neighbor outside Qingbo Gate mentioned Bao'an Hall without a word of praise attached.
Dr. Xu was young, yet his healing bordered on the miraculous.
Just days ago, the Wang family's little boy on West Street had gone down with a fever-fit so severe the city's oldest physicians had already started urging the family to prepare for the worst. Three doses of Xu Xian's medicine pulled him back from the gates of the dead.
Auntie Wang, too—difficult labor, near-disaster—took Bao'an Hall's birth-easing powder and delivered safely. Mother and child both.
Everyone praised Dr. Xu's healing hands.
Everyone, too, quietly envied him his reclusive Lady Bai. Now and then someone caught a glimpse of her past a half-drawn curtain: white as snow, beautiful past reason, an immortal maiden who'd stumbled, somehow, into the mortal dust.
The front hall buzzed with customers. Between the back room and the counter hung only a single, heavy curtain of cloth.
"Dr. Xu!" Old Mistress Zhang clutched the packet he'd handed her, tears already gathering. "My husband owes you his life. No one else on this whole street could have saved him."
Xu Xian smiled.
"Please, Mistress Zhang. I'm only a physician. Hardly a miracle-worker. Your husband's cough comes mostly from years of hard labor, depleted vital energy. Medicine and proper care will ease it a great deal, even if it never fully clears."
"There's no need to worry so much."
After seeing Mistress Zhang off, Xu Xian stood alone in the front hall, genuinely puzzled.
His medical skill was solid—always had been—but the exact same prescriptions had never once, before now, produced results this close to raising the dead. Ordinary herbs. Doses barely different from what he'd always used.
He'd combed his medical compendium cover to cover and found nothing—nothing at all.
So why?
He turned it over, and over, and finally landed, happily, on the only explanation that made any sense at all: his wife had brought this luck into the house with her.
His lady really was his own personal star of fortune.
The fool up front basked in his own glow. Behind the curtain, Qing had one foot up on the bench, bored out of her mind, turning a bundle of herbs over in her hands.
Listening to the flood of praise pouring through the front hall, she chewed on a few slices of licorice root, her mouth curling into something roguish. Something close to contempt. "Tch. A pack of dull, ignorant mortals."
Her eyes drifted past the curtain, landed on that white shape beyond it, gentler now with every passing day.
She muttered, low: "If Brother weren't sneaking a thread of pure herb-essence into that medicine pot every single day, do you really think a few sprigs of angelica and goji would raise anyone from the dead?"
Then, without warning, the beat of a wooden fish from Jinshan Temple tore clean across half of Lin'an and struck the Bai residence dead-on.
That chant came from somewhere beyond the sky, faint as breath, cleansing the miasma of spirits as it passed. No mortal could have caught it at all.
But it drove a dull, cracking pain straight through the scales at the back of Qing's neck. She reached up, couldn't help it, touched the sudden chill there. Cursed under her breath.
"Those damn monks."
Behind the curtain, Bai Su's embroidering hand only paused. Briefly. As though the whole thing wasn't even worth the trouble of noticing. Or maybe—by now—she really had begun sinking, slow, into this mortal woman's flesh.
The soul is like flowing water; the flesh, a lotus vessel to hold it.
Hadn't it been the same, more than two thousand years back, the very first time he'd taken human shape at all? A body was just one more vessel to make use of. What was there, really, to make such a fuss over?
Fine, then.
At first he'd thought of it that way exactly—a new shell, nothing more, for his own primordial spirit to live inside.
But the longer he wore those little lotus shoes. The farther he walked in trailing silk. The more nights he spent lying beside the mortal man who drew him into his arms and murmured my lady— the more this once-foreign female body had started, without asking permission, to fit.
Habit really was a terrifying thing. Given enough time, it could take anything bitter and, slowly, patiently, steep it, then cook it down into something close to sweet.
Bittersweet.
She wasn't consciously playing the gentle, virtuous wife anymore. Somewhere along the way she'd simply started believing she was one.
By day, Bai Su mostly kept to the back room. Slipped a thread of pure herbal essence into whatever Xu Xian prescribed, whenever he wasn't looking.
The rest of the time:
mortal Daoist scripture, medical texts, quiet cultivation. Whenever Xu Xian's voice rose up in the front hall, calling out an order, she'd use the rustle of turning pages, the whisper of silk, to mask the faint circulation of her own breath— tempering, bit by bit, the vast, roiling spirit-power still coiled inside her.
To keep the neighbors from talking, she had to keep an embroidery frame on her dressing table. A convincing prop. Proof of a dutiful wife's needlework.
Those same hands that had once torn through dragon-flesh, that had once gripped the Originseeker—her own life bound into that blade—now held nothing more than a slender gold needle, stitching twin lotus blossoms into white silk.
The gold needle threads its way through twin lotus blooms. Half a noble wife. Half a soul in chains.
This absurd cage for her soul—a trial she had chosen for herself.
"My lady."
A gentle voice, suddenly, from behind her.
Xu Xian had finished up front and slipped through the curtain without her even hearing him come. Bai Su's heart jumped.
The breath she'd been circulating faltered, just slightly. The gold needle veered with it, drove straight into the pad of her fingertip. A single bead of crimson welled up against snow-white skin.
A bead of blood on the twin lotus, slow to fade.
Hands that once cleaved dragons with frost-cold steel now learn, in the mortal dust, to paint a bride's brow.
As her thoughts scattered, a fine crimson line, echoing the Origin-Mark upon her brow, flickered along her wrist. Vanished almost at once.
"How could you be so careless!" Alarm crossed Xu Xian's face at once. He crossed the room in three steps, took her hand, bent his head, and drew the injured finger into his mouth. Sucked the bead of blood away, gentle.
The warm, wet feeling of it ran through her like a current, straight from her fingertip down into the depths of whatever passed for her soul. She went rigid. Tried, by instinct, to pull her hand back.
Then she looked up. Fell straight into Xu Xian's eyes—focused, and full of a tenderness that hurt to look at.
His broad sleeve blotted out the weak afternoon light. His shadow—unmistakably a man's shadow—fell across her, wrapped entirely around where she sat at her embroidery frame.
He was nothing but a mortal.
No cultivation. No strength worth the name. And still—right then—that flesh-and-blood body of his felt strong enough to shelter her from every wind, every rain there was.
Strong enough to take the whole world's weight and carry it in her place.
She lifted her face. Dazed.
She thought, suddenly, of two, three hundred years back— the sky over Mount Qingcheng cracking open with lightning, this same fool still nothing but a bodhi spirit who hadn't yet taken full human shape. Xian'er had been so small then, so fragile, Bai Su had barely dared close a hand around her at all.
Curled up small inside that cold, wide embrace, her primordial spirit scattering, piece by piece…
Back then, Bai Su had been powerful. Proud. A towering man with a thousand years of cultivation behind him, looking down at the whole of creation from somewhere far above it.
But now.
Now heaven and earth had turned themselves inside out.
Now, locked into a virtuous wife's silk skirts and those little lotus shoes, in this small apothecary steeped in the smell of angelica, white peony, goji berry—she had found, in a mortal man's arms, a peace she hadn't felt in longer than she could count.
"Could my lady be some immortal, fallen out of heaven?" Xu Xian still held her hand, laughing softly.
"How else could you be beautiful enough that every time I look at you, I lose my own soul all over again?"
Gathering her thoughts, Bai Su lowered her eyes, abashed. "Husband, you shouldn't tease me so."
"And if not an immortal—then perhaps a nine-tailed fox spirit, come up from the earth?"
"A nine-tailed fox spirit?" Something stirred in her chest. She kept her voice level, testing him.
"Wouldn't that make me some creature bent on bewitching mortal men?"
Xu Xian laughed.
"Even if my lady truly were a spirit..." His gaze stayed open. Warm. Utterly unguarded.
"You'd still be Xu Xian's one and only love in this life."
Her heart gave a small, sudden lurch. As though something had brushed lightly against it and kept walking.
The love in Xu Xian's eyes only deepened. One hand drew her close at the waist. The other tipped up her chin.
He bent to kiss her.
"Husband, please, not like this..." Bai Su's cheeks burned. She raised a slender hand, pressed it flat against his chest, held him back.
"Qing's still right outside."
Half of that resistance was real shyness. A soul kept celibate for two thousand years could hardly bear this kind of closeness in broad daylight.
The other half was something newer—a wife's proper instincts, growing more practiced by the day. A woman of good family, indulging in such things in broad daylight?
How improper! How scandalous!
Xu Xian took no offense at being held back. Just raised an eyebrow, smiling.
"Was it last night, then? All that Wushan clouds and rain—did your husband forget himself and hurt you, my lady? Let me examine you—see for myself."
With mock solemnity, he took her wrist, pressed two fingers to her pulse. Held it a long moment.
Then sighed.
"My lady's pulse. Truly a disappointment to this husband."
"A disappointment?" Her heart clenched. Her fingertips trembled with it.
Seeing that she'd taken him seriously, Xu Xian laughed, patted her hand.
"Don't worry—you're perfectly healthy. I only mean there's still no sign, even now, of a happy pulse."
She froze. Briefly.
Entirely unaware of the alarm flickering behind her eyes, Xu Xian went on, hope bright in every word.
"This husband has certainly been trying hard enough. If you could conceive soon, nothing would make me happier. I keep thinking—our child would surely be as clever, as beautiful, as you."
A child?
Bear a child?!
Something like a thunderclap went off deep in her own spirit. She had been a great spirit of Mount Qingcheng once. Survivor of heavenly tribulation. Her very origin a body of pure, unmixed masculine essence.
The horror of it—his dignity as an Immortal Lord, turned inside out—tangled together with the sudden, absurd, terrifyingly real possibility that this body might actually conceive, and nearly shattered his composure right there on the spot.
Once, lord of Qingcheng.
One day, carrying a mortal child.
A Scarlet-Heart bud, tempered in mortal dust, becomes a flying blossom, drifting into dreams.
And besides—however capable this body had become of receiving a husband's love, it was still not, in truth, a real mortal woman's body.
To bear a child at all, she'd have to draw on her own original essence to wake the Scarlet-Heart Lotus Bud, then secretly draw, too, on Xu Xian's own yang essence—conjure into being a life carrying both human and spirit blood at once.
But Xu Xian was only flesh and bone. Drawn on too deeply, it would cost him years off his own lifespan.
No. Absolutely not.
And even if it worked—once her trial ended, once she ascended and left this world behind entirely—who would care for a child half-human, half-spirit? Could she really leave the child behind, alone, in this cold mortal world?
She didn't dare think further.
And still, against her own will, her heart had already started to.
Seeing the color drain from her face, Xu Xian assumed the thought of childlessness had upset her. He pulled her into his arms at once, low and soothing.
"My lady, there's no need to worry. I have you. Growing old beside you, loving you—that's more than enough for this husband. Even if we never have a child, you'll never once hear a word of complaint from me."
He looked down at her. His expression turned solemn. Almost grave. "In my heart, there's only ever been you."
Those words—steeped so thoroughly in the small, ordinary warmth of mortal life—struck without warning against a Dao heart frozen shut for two thousand years and more.
Deep beneath that icy Dao heart, something trembled. Wouldn't be still.
Mortal love. It really was this ordinary. This absurd?
And wasn't that, somehow, precisely what made it so disarming?
"Husband..." She lowered her eyes. A blush rose quiet across her face.
"Having you—that's enough for me too."
Xu Xian's eyes lit up like starlight fallen into a spring night.
"Oh, that reminds me. The Dragon Boat Festival's only a few days off. Master Fahai, the great monk of Jinshan Temple, presides over the life-release ceremony at West Lake every year. Dragon boats by day, pleasure boats and lanterns by night."
"Shall I take you out to see it?"
"Master Fahai. Of Jinshan Temple?" Bai Su's gaze sharpened, just for an instant.
"That's the one. You've heard of him too, my lady?"
"Of course." A thought flickered through her eyes.
She smoothed it away fast, smiling.
"You know I've never cared for crowds, husband. Let's skip the boat races, the daytime noise of it all."
"When the night comes, though—why not rent a pleasure boat, drift out alone onto the lake, drink beneath the moon? Avoid the crowds. Still keep the occasion, in our own way."
"Whatever pleases you, my lady." Xu Xian smiled.
"Tomorrow I'll go buy a jar of the finest aged realgar wine from the old shop by the lake. This festival, you and I will drink together on the water, until we're properly, happily drunk."
"Realgar wine, is it..."
A faint pause crossed her face. Then she nodded, easy, as though it were nothing at all. "That's fine. Whatever pleases my husband."
The Dragon Boat Festival had always been when a snake spirit's power was at its weakest. To a mortal, realgar wine drove off foulness, warded evil. To a snake spirit, it was little short of poison scraping straight down to the bone.
As for Fahai—Bai Su had already sensed that elusive thread of Buddhist presence more than once, in her time in the mortal world.
Once again, the wooden fish gave a single sharp knock.
The chant that had just cut clean across Lin'an surely had something to do with Fahai. Whatever tribulation had drawn her into this mortal life, she suspected, might well be tangled up with this monk of Jinshan Temple somehow.
But she was, after all, a great spirit two thousand years in cultivation. She'd already crossed her own tribulation once. Her heart held little real fear of it. A single jar of realgar wine might, at worst, dull her power for a few hours— nothing a little quiet cultivation couldn't undo.
And Fahai—even with several centuries of cultivation behind him, what, really, could he do to her?
Since her husband wanted it, she'd drink with him. It was only one mortal festival.
Here, and then gone.
She didn't see it. Beyond the back room, that clear, late-spring light was, at that very moment, being quietly split in two by a cold, distant thread of Buddha-light, cutting silent through the whole city of Lin'an.
Far off, the wooden fish sounded once more.
Thunk—
A low invocation of the Buddha's name seemed to travel through ten thousand feet of drifting dust and settle, at last, before the tightly closed gates of the Bai residence.
"Amitabha."