So it was that before their first meeting in He Xi in this life—in another lifetime that seemed a dream yet felt undeniably real—they had already met once before.

In that lifetime, the first thread of fate between them began at his grandmother’s birthday celebration.

That year, he was summoned back to the capital from the Western Sea.

Imprisoned in the Wuyou Palace at sixteen, three years keeping vigil at the mausoleum, then two years guarding the border—when he stepped into the capital again, it was a place transformed, and he was no longer the carefree Fourth Prince of Qin who had once strolled the pleasure quarters in his youth. He had grown still and reticent. And though he was already of age, because of his past experiences, the matter of marriage had naturally been delayed and put off.

His imperial elder brother—the Xiaochang Emperor at the time—doted on his younger sibling, and seized upon the auspicious occasion of the Grand Empress Dowager’s birthday and the selection of a consort for the Crown Prince to set about arranging a consort for him as well.

That day, the Court Astronomer sought him out, bringing with him seven or eight small portraits of suitable young noblewomen of the capital.

He knew perfectly well—no noblewomen and their families behind them would want to be entangled with him.

His elder brother’s gesture was only for show—to put on a performance for their imperial grandmother in Penglai Palace.

Everyone wore a mask, like players on a stage, including the Court Astronomer before him who only appeared deferential. Why would he go and puncture the lie of brotherly affection and family harmony?

He let a faint smile rest on his lips, and watched idly as the Court Astronomer unfurled the scrolls bearing the small portraits one by one, introducing the subject of each—without truly paying attention—until the last portrait was unrolled.

As that scroll slowly opened, his gaze swept over it casually—and then caught, just slightly, and stopped.

The young woman in the portrait had elegant brows and a delicate face, bright almond-shaped eyes and a slender nose, her image as vivid as a flower reflected in still water. It was not only her beauty: the air of artless charm in her expression captured his attention at once.

For the other women, the Court Astronomer had been quite brief. But when he came to this young woman, he was notably more eager—saying this was a lady of the Pu family, granddaughter of Pu Youzhi, who had been unjustly sent to the frontier for many years but had since been vindicated; the Emperor held the young lady in great favor, and the Pu family’s glorious days lay just ahead.

He felt a small surprise. He thought of that little girl he had happened to meet all those years ago when he went to congratulate Pu Youzhi on his birthday—he remembered she had been only seven or eight years old. How unexpected that in the blink of an eye she was already of marriageable age.

Thinking of the old matters of Pu Youzhi and the Captain of the Left, he looked once more at the young woman’s portrait.

The Court Astronomer, perceiving his particular reaction to Pu Youzhi’s granddaughter, immediately began his persuasions—saying her actual appearance far surpassed her portrait, that she and the Prince of Qin were a match made in heaven, perfectly suited for each other.

He heard the intent in the Court Astronomer’s urging and smiled to himself—he understood perfectly well. The other families must have already been quietly priming the Court Astronomer beforehand, afraid he might happen to select their daughters. Only this granddaughter of the Pu family, having just arrived in the capital from He Xi, alone with no one to rely on, naive and unsuspecting, had been pushed forward—and become the one the Court Astronomer was so desperate for him to choose.

He saw through it, but said nothing.

He was regarded with suspicion and had no desire to start a family, to avoid involving innocent people later. How could he casually point to someone and harm her for life?

At the time, he closed the scroll, found a pretext, and deflected the matter.

After that occasion, he quickly forgot her; she left no ripple of any kind in his heart.

Two strangers on separate roads—what connection could there be?

Yet he had not anticipated that a few days later, he would encounter her.

In that lifetime, the second thread of fate between them was at Penglai Palace.

During those days back in the capital, he often went to Penglai Palace to accompany his imperial grandmother, making up for all the years of filial devotion he had been unable to show.

One day at Penglai Palace, having a free moment, he thought of the goldfish pond he had kept as a child. On a whim, he went strolling toward the pond. Nearing it, across the curved bridge, he saw Li Hui’er and a young woman in an apricot-colored robe standing with several maidservants around the edge of the pond, watching the fish. Lotus flowers were half in bloom; the water rippled and shimmered. The young woman had dark hair and snowy skin, a jade-like complexion. He did not recognize her, yet he felt she seemed somewhat familiar. Involuntarily he looked again, and then he remembered—she looked like the young woman from the portrait the Court Astronomer had shown him that day, the granddaughter of the Pu family.

She must have come to Penglai Palace to pay her respects to his imperial grandmother, and Li Hui’er was keeping her entertained. On the wind, the young woman’s bright voice drifted toward him. He heard Li Hui’er tell her that all these plump goldfish in the pond had been raised by her Fourth Imperial Uncle when he was young.

Not wishing to disturb them, and equally unfit to remain here, he turned and slipped quietly away.

That afternoon, he slept a long sleep in the Changsheng Hall—the palace where he had lived as a child. When he woke, the sun had already tilted westward. He went to see his imperial grandmother, and halfway there, encountered Li Hui’er and the Pu family’s granddaughter walking together, the two of them heading toward the palace gates. It seemed she was leaving the palace, with Li Hui’er escorting her out.

He stepped aside into a corner of the palace corridor, intending to wait until the two of them had passed before coming out. While waiting, he watched a handkerchief slide from her sleeve and fall onto the corridor floor. She did not notice, and kept walking toward the exit.

He hesitated a moment, then told Luo Bao to go out.

Luo Bao retrieved the handkerchief and ran after her to return it. During their exchange—presumably his name was mentioned—he watched her turn back, glancing in the direction of where he stood. Her eyes shifted, her expression curious.

He never revealed himself; he remained concealed in the corner until she took back the handkerchief and departed, her figure disappearing at the far end of the corridor.

After that day, he never saw her again—until the day he left.

On that day, he bid farewell to his imperial grandmother and set out from the capital.

He led his horse, traveling along the Changan road, when he encountered a magnificent imperial carriage coming toward the palace. The wind blew, lifting a corner of the embroidered curtain, revealing half the face of the young woman inside—lovely and vivid.

Though only a fleeting glimpse, he recognized her at once.

Such a coincidence—it was indeed the Pu family’s granddaughter.

He had already heard the news: days before, she had been designated as the Crown Prince’s consort, and now she must be entering the palace.

The woman in the carriage had not noticed him, nor could she possibly have recognized him—even if she had seen him, she would not have known who he was.

Just a traveler on the dusty road, about to leave the capital.

He stood at the roadside, watching the imperial carriage bearing the young woman race toward the palace, and for no reason he could name, felt a faint, quiet melancholy rise in his heart.

But this melancholy quickly dissipated.

As the granddaughter of Pu Youzhi and daughter of the Captain of the Left, she was entirely deserving of such a station and such honor.

Fate, though usually unjust, had this time shown its merciful face to her—that flower-bright, gentle young woman. It had returned everything it had owed her, and more—had given back double.

For this he felt a sense of gladness.

He sent his distant blessing to this young woman of a loyal minister, whom he had briefly, secretly crossed paths with: may she live a life of ease and peace, free from care and worry.

And so he turned away, stepped beyond the capital’s gates, and waited for the final destination that his own fate would bring.

After turning sixteen, he already knew—the road ahead held no level ground.

Yet later still, he came to know that he had in fact underestimated how cold and merciless fate could be toward him.

He once again hurried back to the capital—and encountered her once more.

The fourth meeting.

Yet it was at his imperial grandmother’s funeral.

In the moment he rushed into the mourning hall, amid the white mourning banners filling the sky and the crowd of people in mourning attire, he could not have said why—but he saw her at once, at a single glance.

She wore mourning whites, standing at the side of his nephew the Crown Prince Li Chengyu, her eyes swollen and red from weeping, and she seemed to be gazing back at him.

A brief, fleeting eye contact across the crowd of people.

She lowered her gaze; he withdrew his.

He did not know what she thought in that moment.

For him, the last trace of warmth within the imperial family had departed with his grandmother’s passing.

That sorrow and pain—not a single person in this world could understand it.

If a person’s whole life was to be so utterly alone until death, what difference was there from being a walking corpse?

He nearly wept blood, kneeling before the spirit tablet, unable to rise through the whole night.

All these years, in those sleepless hours of deep night, he would often mock himself—it must be that before he turned sixteen he had been too heedlessly carefree, squandering all the blessings of a lifetime, which was why, after sixteen, his life consisted only of repaying debts.

This thought seemed to be confirmed yet again.

He had not yet recovered from the grief of losing his grandmother before being compelled to assassinate his imperial elder brother, the Xiaochang Emperor.

He was hunted. Fortunately he had taken precautions beforehand and managed to escape through the net cast for him, temporarily taking refuge in the relative safety of the Western Garden. But he had lost too much blood from his injuries, and could not hold on. He finally collapsed deep in the undergrowth. Just as his consciousness was about to sink into unconsciousness, he bit through the tip of his tongue, using the sharp pain to force himself to remain alert, waiting for his rescuers to find him so he could leave as soon as possible.

He could not fall unconscious now. If he did, he might never wake again.

He could not die yet—he could not abandon his responsibility to his mother’s clan.

Just as he was keeping his consciousness forcibly clear—something happened to him that he later could never quite explain.

She appeared before him, and found him.

At first she seemed uncertain and unsure, as if not daring to trust what she saw.

Then she must have recognized him, for in that instant, the shock and terror that flooded her eyes made his heart hammer and race.

He feigned unconsciousness and observed her covertly. He watched as she slowly approached, and finally stopped a few steps away from him in the undergrowth.

In that moment, the first thought that rose in his mind was to kill her before she could cry out and call people over.

Even wounded and half dead, killing a woman like her would not be difficult.

In an instant, malice erupted. Just as he was gathering his strength, steeling himself to act—he stopped.

Her manner baffled him.

She did not spin around immediately to call for help, nor did she flee at once. She stood where she was, her small face pale with anxiety, as if in a war within herself, hesitating and undecided.

In the end, she looked at him, then slowly retreated, stepping back several paces—and then suddenly turned and walked quickly away.

“My lady, it is a little lonely here—perhaps we should go back…”

“Let us go!”

The wind carried to his ears what she and her attendant said.

Soon, with the sound of hooves gradually fading into the distance, the surroundings grew quiet.

He lay on the ground, slowly unclenching his fisted palm. In that moment, a feeling he could not put into words surged through him.

She had clearly recognized him. Given her position, in the end she had released him.

Why?

Between him and her, apart from the so-called relationship of seniority that existed because of his nephew Li Chengyu, there had never been any rapport to speak of.

Even counting the small portrait, they had only met a mere five times in all.

They had not even exchanged a single word.

Yet today, with such an opportunity before her, she had let him go.

However he thought about it, he could not make sense of it. And that day, he could not have known—that encounter would be the last time they would see each other in that whole lifetime.

He left the capital then, later moved west, to the Western Regions. Shifting sands and snow-capped mountains, seas transformed into mulberry fields. In those long, nearly ten years, he gradually forgot her—forgot the young woman who had perhaps, if he had nodded at her portrait back then, become his wife.

The next time she forced her way back into his life, awakening memories of those old days, was in the second year of Tianshou.

That year, eight years had passed since he left the pass as a man condemned for treason.

She had already been Empress for two years.

And all the peace was shattered by a treacherous minister’s rebellion.

That day, he led his army toward the capital.

Horses and dust filled the road. Idly glancing to the side, he saw a young woman among the refugees fleeing by the roadside, and for some reason suddenly thought of the woman who had long ago seemed to share a thread of fate with him, and yet no fate at all.

His nephew had been killed by a treacherous minister. He did not know what had become of her.

Was she dead, or imprisoned?

If she were still alive—once the city was taken, he would need to quickly send people to find her and ensure her safety…

He must have gotten lost in thought, for as he urged his horse forward, he faintly heard a voice behind him at the roadside calling out to him—yet he paid it no attention. Until a moment later, when the persistent voice finally reached him clearly enough that he made out what seemed to be a call for the Prince of Qin.

He turned his head.

Behind him, soldiers and horses charging along the road, dust and smoke rolling in clouds. The roadside was packed with refugees, a sea of faces—and no one in it was visible.

He hesitated a moment and asked Luo Bao, who was riding nearby carrying a flag, whether he had just heard someone calling his name.

Luo Bao, spirits high, shook his head emphatically: “Your servant heard nothing, Your Highness! Even if there was, it must have been the common people cheering for Your Highness!”

He smiled in spite of himself, let it go, and continued forward.

On the first day he took the capital, the city was in chaos, and the Changan Palace was a sea of fire.

Upon entering the city, the very first thing he did was order Luo Bao to go immediately and find her.

Yet she was already gone—her beauty faded, her soul unable to return.

Luo Bao later reported back to him in detail. After Li Chengyu died, she had moved to the Wanshou Pavilion, dwelling there in seclusion. It was said that when the city fell, Shen Yang had forcibly carried her off. She refused to submit, and fell from the horse’s back, breaking her neck and dying. A few attendants who had stayed with her until the end had hastily buried her in the wild ground of the imperial mausoleum.

He was silent for a long time, and then ordered that she be reinterred with full imperial honors as Empress.

It turned out that all those years before—that day in the Western Garden—the fifth encounter, with her—had been the final time he and she would ever meet in this lifetime.

That night, though he did not personally go to the imperial mausoleum, his heart was filled with melancholy, and he could not sleep.

Later still, the situation in the capital gradually settled.

Ten years of patient endurance—and it had come to this day. He had turned the tide, restored order from chaos. To ascend the throne—to him it seemed the natural and inevitable course of things.

Everyone expected as much, including his mother’s clan, the Que people.

But he refused—without hesitation.

He had no wish to ascend the throne, not the slightest such thought.

He passed the imperial seat to a young man from the clan, with Prince Duan overseeing the realm as regent. He himself removed his golden crown, took off his prince’s robes, tied his hair in a Taoist knot, put on the old Taoist robe he had worn as a young man, bound his feet in straw sandals, and left the capital.

His responsibilities had ended.

In this life, he no longer owed anyone anything. All that had needed repaying had been repaid. All that had needed doing had been done.

Carefree and without burden, seeking immortals and questioning the Tao, wandering the northern seas in the morning, resting in the dark forests of the south at night.

His remaining years would bring liberation.

So he told himself.

On the last night before he left the capital, he slipped quietly to the imperial mausoleum.

He did not know why he went there.

Perhaps to say one final farewell to his younger self—the one who had once kept vigil here for three years. Or perhaps also to see once more the place where she had finally died, and to light three sticks of incense for her.

After all, once she had spared him.

He went to her tomb, paid his respects, then came out. Just as he was about to drift away, he encountered an elderly palace attendant who had been keeping vigil for her.

The attendant recognized him, and seeing him now dressed in Taoist robes, wept and sobbed.

It was then that he learned—that in the days before the city fell, she had sent someone to seek his help. But he had ridden past at full gallop, and even though he had once looked back, had still not stopped his horse for her.

It was also then that he learned—on her last night, she had climbed alone to the ancient plain, sitting beside that great stone, weeping through the night. The following day, she was seized by Shen Yang, and died beneath the horse.

He was stunned. When he came back to himself, a pain like a blade twisting in his heart seized him, and tears rolled down unbidden.

He sat in vigil before her tomb for three nights. At last he knelt, bowed his head in a deep, solemn kowtow, then rose, left the mausoleum, and from that day on—the light of a single lamp, yellowed scrolls, white stones in the wind and rain—he wandered all under heaven, cultivating his mind in the Tao.

A grain of mustard seed contains Mount Sumeru; the snap of a finger spans ten thousand years.

It was only an instant. Yet Li Xuandu felt with perfect clarity that he had lived an entire lifetime—the long lifetime of a man who had been himself, and yet had not.

In the memories that lifetime had left behind, the final scene was this: many years later, one day, alone—in Taoist robes and straw sandals, just as when he had set out—he returned to the place where he had begun.

He was no longer young; his hair was white, his face lined with age. Yet just as he had been when still a young man, he climbed the ancient plain, and at last sat upon the stone, facing in the direction of her tomb, and sat quietly through one full night.

The following day, the mausoleum warden discovered that he—the man who had been given the title of Grand Duke of the Way—had passed away peacefully, departing this world with ease.

The setting sun sank lower and lower. Around him, homing birds and dark crows swirled and swooped, their cries growing more and more clamorous.

Li Xuandu finally understood completely.

So the dream she had told him about that night, on the cliff behind the Shuang clan’s manor—it had been true.

She had always remembered everything that had happened in that lifetime.

He also understood now why, at the very beginning, she would rather have returned to being Crown Princess Consort than approach him.

In her heart, he was someone who had abandoned her in her most helpless and desperate moment, a man without feeling.

He recalled too what she had said—that in the dream, in the end, she had waited for him to come save her. Everything had been perfect.

Yet the truth was that she had always been concealing it from him, never letting him know that she was the reason he had been able to survive—and that when she had waited in despair, stretching out a hand to him for help, he had not taken it.

He looked at her figure sitting beside the stone at the crest of the slope, and seemed to see the woman from a past life—the one who waited for him to come, but who waited until death without ever seeing him arrive.

For a moment his heart ached as though sliced by a blade; he could not draw breath. Seeing her still smiling at him like that, reaching her hand toward him, he could no longer hold back. He strode to stand before her, reached out, and clasped her hand, fingers interlaced with hers. Then he pulled her into his arms in one swift motion and held her tight.

Pu Zhu had no idea what had passed through his mind in that moment just now. She only thought that he had received the news here and come over, and was still at this moment worried about her.

She tilted her head back slightly, her beautiful eyes looking up at him, and said gently to reassure him: “Don’t worry—everything has been resolved. I am perfectly fine. I’ve troubled you with worrying over me for nothing again…”

Li Xuandu shook his head, cutting off her words.

“Zhuzhu—you really are too kind beyond measure…”

He loosened his hold slightly, eyes reddening, and looked down at her with emotion in his voice: “I know now. That night, behind Shuang clan’s manor, the so-called dream you told me—it was real. And you lied to me, telling me that I had come to save you…”

“I, Li Xuandu, am truly not worthy of you treating me like this…”

Pu Zhu was startled at first. Then, as if suddenly realizing something—

Hearing the tone of his voice, could it be that he had remembered?

He had finally remembered?

Her heart gave a sudden leap. She looked at him, a hundred feelings surging at once, and for a moment did not know how to respond.

“You did not only deceive me—you also misread me.”

He continued.

“You misread me. Truly, you were quite wrong. Later, I did not ascend the throne, and I never married Li Tanfang. I became a Taoist priest and wandered all under heaven—I tried to forget you. Yet in the end, before my death, I returned to the place where you and I stand now.”

He looked at her deeply and steadily.

“Practicing cultivation for half a lifetime, that Taoist priest called Li Xuandu—in the end he could not forget a woman with whom he had shared only five meetings in an entire life. As his end drew near, he did not wish to become an immortal. His sole wish was that her soul might live on in perpetuity—that if they met again in another life, he might be permitted to repay her.”

Pu Zhu’s eyes went wide, fixed on him without blinking. Suddenly she let out a small sob and threw herself into his arms, and tears ran freely down her face.

She wept and wept, the tears endless and unstoppable.

He bowed his head, tenderly kissing the teardrops on her cheeks—and then kissed her lips, deeply, for a long, long time.