He opened his eyes in the darkness.

Above him hung vast curtains draped in overlapping folds, their deep blue-black ground embroidered with fine, intricate cloud-swirl patterns that extended densely from the edge of his vision all the way into the darkness at the far end of the room.

The air carried the particular chill of late autumn. Moonlight, cold as frost, fell through tall and narrow window lattices and illuminated the black stone tiles on the floor, smooth as a mirror.

The charcoal brazier in the center of the floor had already gone out. Not a trace of warmth remained in the embers, and the cold crept through stone and bronze and iron alike.

He sat up from the bed and reached out to feel for the oil lamp on the floor, yet no matter how he stretched, he could not quite reach it.

Suddenly, a piercing sound of metal scraping against metal came from outside the door, and a dark shadow intruded into the pallid moonlight.

He slowly raised his head to look, and on the carved lattice of the door he saw the silhouette of an extraordinarily tall figure cast there.

The shadow did not move, yet it seemed to be staring at him through the door.

A familiar unease rose from the depths of his heart. He stumbled and tumbled off the bed, groped until he found the oil lamp, and scrambled frantically to light the wick, which had already been drowned in the oil.

Creak.

A cold wind gently pushed his room door open.

He could not remember why he had failed to close the door and windows properly, and he dared not raise his head to look. He only forced himself to light the oil lamp as quickly as possible.

Click, click, click.

Heavy footsteps accompanied by the sound of metal striking and grinding grew closer and closer.

At last, he lit the lamp.

The faint firelight cast a small patch of warmth on the black floor. Then he saw those feet — feet clad in rusted greaves.

His gaze moved slowly upward. The dark shadow was standing no more than five paces from him.

It was a person clad in full armor, covered in blood. The helmet was pulled low and the face was a blurred mass. The armor still seemed to carry moisture; water droplets slid down the shaft of the spear, tinged with a trace of murky blood.

Yet he remembered that tonight had clearly been a clear night — not a drop of rain had fallen all day.

He stared fixedly at that figure and told himself again and again that it was only an apparition in a dream.

“Mother?”

His trembling voice echoed through the great hall. For a long while, no one responded.

In the next instant, the figure suddenly moved — dragging the long spear, it came rushing toward him.

He hurriedly flung the oil lamp in his hand at the figure, then, without bothering to put on his shoes, ran barefoot out of the great hall.

The autumn night was clear; not a wisp of cloud could be seen in the sky — only a solitary moon hung above.

The winding corridors were utterly still, not a human voice nor the chirp of an insect to be heard. The cold frost of the autumn night spread across the icy stone tiles. Where he stepped, the frost dissolved into vapor, leaving his feet wet and dripping.

He dared not stop, until he glimpsed the faint glow of a lamp in the pavilion by the lakeside. Only then did he let out a long breath.

She had not left. His mother had not gone.

The cold wind over the lake was bleak and cutting. The gauze curtains around the four-cornered pavilion were so thin and flimsy. The woman’s hair seemed almost to have frosted over, yet her posture was languid. She half-reclined against the projecting balustrade, half her hair suspended in mid-air, swaying back and forth in the autumn wind.

She heard the boy’s hurried footsteps and the sound of his panting breath. Slowly she opened her eyes. Her pupils were colder and clearer than the winter stars of that autumn night; her beauty purer and more luminous than the solitary moon above.

“Did you have a nightmare again?”

He could not speak. He shivered and seized the woman’s hand, desperate for some response. But those slender, delicate hands, as always, only gently withdrew.

“What did you dream?”

He steadied himself, and at last recaptured something of the cool composure of the person before him.

“I dreamed… I dreamed of a general drenched in blood.”

The woman sighed softly. Something weary and helpless passed over her face.

“Wei’er, do not be afraid. You need not pay them any mind.”

He tried his best to appear calm.

“Mother, I remember all you have taught me. But they always appear without warning. Sometimes they even shout and cry out…”

“Those are the people you will meet in your lifetime. You will certainly see them again one day. They may be your enemies — but they may also be the ones you love most in this life. Think of it that way, and you will come to cherish this bond of fate.”

He did not understand, and he could not fathom why his mother always said the same things to him.

“The one I hold most dear is Mother. How could those people ever be those I love?”

The woman’s tone softened. A faint light from years long past entered her gaze.

“At this moment you do not know them, so naturally you cannot gauge how deep or shallow the feelings will be. You only feel it is a meaningless encounter. But as you grow older, you will understand — even if only in a dream, even a single meeting is something precious beyond measure. To know someone deeply yet be unable to meet them — that is the greatest sorrow in this world.”

“But…”

But he had no wish to delve into those people who appeared in his dreams. He only hoped that when he startled awake in the night, his mother’s warm presence would be beside him.

The woman’s eyelids gently drooped once more. The tips of her fingers lightly brushed across his face.

“Go back to sleep now. If your father sees you up, he will punish you again.”

Every time his mother mentioned his father, it was time for them to part.

In the past, no matter how reluctant his heart felt, he would always bow quietly and withdraw.

But this time, he did not leave.

“Why will Mother not speak to me gently, the way the wet-nurse does — softly, and hum some little tune when I cannot sleep and my heart is frightened…”

“Because life has many long nights that must be endured, and I cannot be with you on every one of them.”

He remained kneeling where he was, motionless.

The woman opened her eyes and looked at the child before her. It was as though, behind him, in that cool and pale shadow, she glimpsed something buried deep in his blood and bones — a wildness and obsession still growing, still raging.

She sighed softly.

“Do you know why Mother never speaks her own name aloud, nor writes it down?”

He shook his head.

“The Zhong Li clan is destined to be alone. The two characters of ‘Zhongli’ — meaning ‘final separation’ — are a curse upon all those in this world who wish to remain together forever. No matter how deep the love, no matter how long the bond, the day of parting will always come. This is the fate of you and I, and the fate of all people under heaven.”

“I do not believe in fate. Mother should not believe in it either.”

“When I was small, I did not believe in fate either.” The woman actually laughed. For a fleeting moment, her expression came alive and she seemed to return to some earlier version of herself. “Someone once told me that flowers bloom brilliantly — but what does it matter? They are destined to fall from the bough. Yet every day when I walked beneath those pear trees at our gate, I always felt that those blossoms would never wither…”

Hearing the woman speak of the past again, he instinctively leaned closer — but her words stopped abruptly.

“Only those who refuse to believe in fate must endure a great deal of suffering. I do not want you to suffer.”

After saying this, the woman spoke no more.

She only stretched out her hand and drew him close before her, then held his hand and traced strokes across his palm — seemingly at random.

They were signs that formed no recognizable characters. Since his mother would not hum, he let himself receive them as a lullaby to ease him into sleep.

The evening wind was cold. He settled heavily into slumber against the embroidered cushion before his mother — the one decorated with twin mandala flowers — and his consciousness gradually dissolved and drifted away beneath the woman’s slow, gentle movements.

Then again, after what seemed like a long while, he heard his mother’s young voice in the darkness.

“Wei’er, wake up. You were dreaming.”

Dreaming? Had he not already woken from his nightmare?

“Wake up. It is time for you to go back.”

Go back? Go back where?

His body was so heavy. Even croaking a finger required great effort. He wanted to open his eyes, yet he was still engulfed in darkness. He felt his already-lucid soul struggling desperately inside this dead-still body, until a crack appeared in the darkness — and a thread of light seeped through.

He opened his eyes in the darkness.

Above him were crude wooden beams. From the beams hung a tattered paper lantern; the flame inside had already gone out.

Morning light was just beginning to filter in. A slightly cool breeze came through the sparse window slats along with the light. The air carried the smell of earth and fresh vegetation.

He slowly sat up from that simple plank bed, stepped barefoot onto the creaking old wooden floorboards, and walked step by step toward the place where the light was.

At the junction where the southwest of Huozhou, the northeast of Chizhou, and the southeast of Minzhou converged, there was a small village — little-known, sparsely populated, scarcely visited by anyone.

The village nestled in a desolate mountain hollow. At the base of the hollow lay a small plain, divided into three sections by a three-pronged fork in the road, each section belonging to Huozhou, Chizhou, and Minzhou respectively.

The people inside the village did not know to which place they truly belonged. The people outside the village did not know to which territory it properly fell.

To the northeast of the village rose a mountain — neither tall nor treacherous. To the southwest lay a patch of land where not a blade of grass grew. To the southeast stood an ancient pagoda, built at some unknown time. This mountain, this land, and this pagoda were the village’s entirety.

The hollow in which the village sat was year-round ringed on the outside by thorny bramble trees. In winter the hollow was blanketed by thick fog for months on end. The path leading into the hollow was often swallowed up in a sea of thorns and mist, and so few merchants or travelers were willing to pass through. Outsiders were even less inclined to take root and live in such desolate, forbidding terrain.

Those outside did not wish to come in. Those inside did not wish to go out.

The people of the village seldom strayed more than ten li from the three-pronged junction, and had even less contact with the outside world. They sustained themselves on the small patch of farmland at the base of the hollow. This tiny sliver of arable land was the fruit of generations of hard labor by the village’s forebears, for the hollow produced a type of white stone in abundance, scattered throughout the soil everywhere one looked.

This stone was neither truly hard nor truly soft. It could not be fired and polished into floor tiles, nor used for carved stonework. It could only be laboriously crushed and laid in courtyards — time-consuming, labor-intensive, and yielding little profit. Nobody had ever bothered to quarry it.

And so the village sitting atop all these white stones came to be called Baishi Village — White Stone Village.

How small was Baishi Village? A five-year-old child could run from one end to the other in a single breath.

How obscure was Baishi Village? An elder who had lived in the small Chizhou town thirty li away for fifty or sixty years could not tell you its name.

Everyone only knew there was a village somewhere in the pile of white stones. For the sake of having something easy to say, they called it Baishi Village.

For such a small village — perpetually cut off from the world, entirely self-sufficient — the ways in which its people spent their leisure hours were limited and meager indeed. From sunrise they labored hard all day; if by sundown they could light a lamp at home and take a sip of local spirits, that was the greatest comfort they could ask for.

And so Baishi Village had no rice shop, no oil press, but it did have a tavern whose business was thriving. In the busy summer months they brewed rice wine; in the preserved-goods season of winter they made fruit wine. The wine had many impurities and a rough, coarse flavor, yet it was the easiest happiness to obtain in these mountains.

The tavern was small, but the customers were plentiful. There was only ever one person minding the shop at a time, so whoever worked there had to be especially quick and efficient.

When the villagers craved a drink, they had to carry their own bamboo flasks to this tavern — built from white stones at the village entrance — to have them filled.

The woman dispensing wine behind the counter had clearly been doing business here for a very long time. A row of bamboo flasks of various shapes and sizes, all waiting to be filled, sat on the counter in front of her. She needed only one glance at the appearance of a flask to know whose it was; she never called the wrong person’s name, and her hands never stopped moving for even a moment.

Yet this time, when she turned around, she could not help but pause.

This flask — she had certainly never seen it before.

She flicked her wrist and tossed the bamboo flask back without ceremony.

A nimble figure shot out, caught the discarded flask steadily, and took two or three strides to the counter. Her voice carried a note of confusion and indignation.

“Why did you throw my flask?”

The wine-dispensing woman glanced up at the young woman’s face and became all the more certain that it was indeed a face not seen in Baishi Village for a decade or more.

“I only sell wine to village folk.”

Xiao Nanhui pressed half her body up against the counter and craned her neck to peer into the wine jar.

“What wine is so precious? I’d like to see if it’s even better than the Yunye Xian at Xiao Fu Inn…”

The woman behind the counter was remarkably nimble. With one pull and one push she shielded the wine jar and blocked Xiao Nanhui out again. Clearly she was no stranger to driving away drunkards who had no money but a craving for wine.

“Not selling means not selling. Don’t block my business — the people behind you are still waiting.”

As she spoke, the old and young crowd lined up behind her, all gripping their flasks, immediately broke into a clamor of discontent. The Huozhou dialect mixed with Minzhou local speech made her head pound.

Xiao Nanhui had no choice but to step back for the moment, but she had no intention of giving up.

She had set out before dawn and walked a full ten-odd li of mountain road to get here. How could she return empty-handed?

Watching the stout middle-aged man who had been standing behind her leave perfectly satisfied with his filled flask, Xiao Nanhui quickened her pace, caught up with him, and turned her palm over to reveal half a silver ingot.

The man startled, eyes fixing on the silver.

“This much — for the wine in your hands. Sell it or not?”

The man was somewhat incredulous. His short, stubby fingers pinched the silver and examined it from every angle, confirming it was genuine.

“Selling.” The man, afraid she might change her mind, confirmed it several more times. “You named the price yourself — don’t go back on your word.”

Given her personality, spending half a silver ingot on wine worth a few copper coins, she really would have gone back on her word. But this was not her silver — it was Ding Weixiang’s. So why should she have any second thoughts?

Xiao Nanhui grinned, handed over the money and took the goods in the same moment.

“Absolutely not.”

The man, seeing her so agreeable, chuckled as well, revealing a row of yellow teeth with a missing front tooth. He became more talkative.

“Actually I wasn’t refusing to sell to you back there either. We brew our wine in a small place like this — we’re not too careful about the water. Before now, outsiders got sick to their stomachs and came looking for trouble.”

Xiao Nanhui looked at what was inside the wine flask. It was indeed somewhat cloudy.

But she didn’t care in the slightest. She had drunk worse than this rough brew before. She had confidence in her stomach.

“I’ve just arrived here, so buying some wine is a way of paying my respects to this land and its people.”

The man looked her up and down, taking in her and the rather casually worn ramie short tunic she had on.

“Where do you come from, miss? We don’t get outsiders here much.”

She hesitated a moment, then said vaguely:

“From the north.”

To her surprise, the man still seemed to sense something. He said in a startled tone:

“When you came, did you pass by that mountain?”

Xiao Nanhui shook her head.

She had not passed by that mountain — she had walked out of it earlier that morning.

“Good that you didn’t go near it. Don’t let the fact that the mountain doesn’t look tall or unusual fool you — whatever you do, don’t go close to it. The mountain gate marks the boundary; don’t ever set foot inside, not even half a step.”

The middle-aged man warned her with an earnest expression, as though urging her with the sincerest concern.

Her curiosity was piqued. The foot she had been about to move forward pulled back.

“Why?”

The man lowered his voice. His words came out slightly slurred as he clenched his jaw.

“Inside that mountain gate there lives a vicious and ferocious earth immortal with a brutal and savage temperament. Any ordinary person who goes near will surely be seized and put to forced labor, and will never hope to escape.”

Brutal and savage? Forced labor? Thinking of the old woman’s terrifying commanding presence when she directed Ding Weixiang to feed the chickens, Xiao Nanhui nodded sincerely.

“Indeed, indeed.”

The man had clearly gone many years without being able to pour out these “village secrets” to an outsider, and once he started he could not stop.

“Speaking of that earth immortal — we all think it’s some wronged soul that became a demon. You should know, in the old days people used to live on that piece of land too. But in the end, not a single one of them came to a good end. These days everyone thinks that place is cursed — nobody even dares mention the two characters ‘Zhongli’ anymore.”

Xiao Nanhui froze.

“What did you say? This place was formerly named Zhongli?”

The man suddenly realized he had spoken inauspicious words. He spat several times in quick succession, then grumbled a few words somewhat despondently.

“You might not believe it even if I told you. When my maternal grandfather was still alive he told me: many years ago there was a prolonged drought in this area of Zhongli. Most of the village people had already fled. Then suddenly a group of outsiders arrived — nobody knew what method they used — and they called down a great rain…”

“Outsiders?” Xiao Nanhui’s heart began to pound. An inexplicable guess was rapidly taking shape in her mind. “How many people? Where did they come from?”

“About a hundred or so, I’d say. They said they came from the Huozhou direction. Well, outsiders are rare here to begin with; a group of a hundred or more coming at once was even rarer.”

“Those outsiders you mentioned — where did they go afterward?”

The middle-aged man gave her a slightly curious look.

“Why, they met with disaster, of course. Otherwise, what do you think made everyone decide the place was cursed and change the name?”

Xiao Nanhui was stunned. The flask in her hand nearly toppled.

“My grandfather also said that the great drought wasn’t without cause — perhaps this land was destined to be ill-fated. Zhongli, final departure… it is a place of parting…”

The man who had bought the wine muttered on as he hunched away into the distance. She remained standing where she was. A long while passed before she picked up that heavy flask and headed toward the mountain to the northeast.

The country road was nothing like the official roads, but it was earth packed hard, step by step, by countless farmers carrying poles on their shoulders. It was easy on the feet — one only needed to watch out for the toads and frogs that occasionally leaped out from the fields.

After walking a few li on such a road, even the narrow path no wider than a field ridge disappeared. She could only keep her eyes on the gap in the distant mountain’s silhouette and forge a trail through the wild grass and scattered rocks.

For Xiao Nanhui this was no great hardship, because one hour ago she had found her way out of here in the dark by the very same method.

After ten li, she finally passed through the mountain gate.

The sun was slowly rising. Golden light moved from the mountaintop down gradually to the mountain’s middle, dividing the entire mountain into one cold half and one warm half. Inside the mountain gate was a patch of muddy ground where not a blade of grass grew. In the muddy earth there was a hidden little path paved with white stones; as long as one stepped on the stones, one’s shoes and boots stayed clean.

Passing through the desolate muddy ground and rounding several sharp bends in the mountain valley, the scene ahead changed dramatically.

Tender yellow-green fine grass blanketed the entire valley. Strange pines and peculiar cypresses grew out of the exposed white-stone cliff face. From between the rock walls a hot spring welled up, and beside the spring mouth was a grove of pear trees shrouded in mist. The trees were thick with white blossoms in full bloom, like snow falling in the first month of the year.

How strange — it was already the seventh month, yet pear blossoms were still flowering here.

She was thinking exactly that when, in the next instant, she looked up and caught sight of that person’s figure.

He was still wearing the inner robe he had on when she left — the thin, translucent fabric tracing his form in the breeze like a banner draped over a temple idol.

She was momentarily taken aback, then very happily raised her right hand and waved at him. She lifted her other hand as well and shook the wine flask in it.

He heard her voice, turned around to look toward her, and suddenly quickened his pace.

A gust of wind swept through, parting the lingering mist for an instant. Fallen pear blossoms flew up like a blizzard of snow. She could not look away. She stood there transfixed, and by the time she came to her senses, he was already before her.

“You’ve finally woken up. Why are you even barefoot—”

Her words had only half left her mouth when she was pulled into his embrace.

He wore very little. Her ramie short tunic was also thin and light. Scorching warmth passed rapidly from his arms to her skin — like a mountain wildfire, impossible to contain once started.

“I thought you had left.”

She blinked. She did not know what to say. After a long moment she finally raised her hand and gently patted him on the back.

“As you can see, I came back.”

She had only patted him a few times when his arms tightened around her.

“Don’t try to put me off. I’m not a child anymore.”

Such words — and from someone who was clearly acting exactly like a child.

She felt rather at a loss, somewhere between the urge to laugh and the urge to cry, and she gently drew back a little from him.

He kept his head lowered the whole time. His loosely falling hair concealed part of his expression. What remained visible flickered in the half-light, half-shadow — impossible to tell whether it was desolation or helplessness.

She must have been seeing things. How could an expression like that appear on his face?

Xiao Nanhui reached out and brushed the disheveled hair back from his face a little.

“I didn’t leave. I promised you.”

He said nothing. His gently trembling lashes swept lightly across her fingertips, carrying a barely perceptible fragility.

She had walked with him all this way. She would continue walking the road ahead with him too. She would not leave him. But how — how could she make him believe that?

She thought for a moment, then wrapped her arms around his neck and drew slowly closer.

The tip of her nose touched his lightly. Softness met softness. At last she saw, just as she had hoped, the last trace of shadow disperse from those eyes.

Even if parting was the destiny of this place, she was willing to believe that shattering a destiny often required nothing more than a single gentle kiss.