Ye Luoli: A Thousand Years of Devotion

Wang Mo, a high school junior, went every week to the old art studio at the end of the alley to learn to paint. The owner, Shui Qingli, had eyes like the deep sea. He didn’t teach her technique, but the language of water: how to hear rain weep, see a lake’s loneliness, and bring a drop of water to life on paper. Gradually, she realized that the water in her paintings could breathe. The lake in her pictures glowed with a deep blue light at night, as if waiting for something. Her dreams always showed the same Pure Water Lake and the same figure with long silver-blue hair, who had stood there for a thousand years. “The person he’s waiting for is called Ling Xi,” the painting told her. When Wang Mo finally learned to make water truly “come alive,” Shui Qingli looked at the brushstrokes that matched hers from a thousand years ago, his voice barely audible: “You’ve finally come back.” But Wang Mo was just Wang Mo, an ordinary high school student, a girl who wanted to become an artist. Until one rainy night, when she looked in the mirror and saw the same faint blue glow in her eyes as in the lake in her paintings. And in her palm, the drop of water he had given her, from the Pure Water Lake, softly echoed the promise made a thousand years ago: “Pinky swear, cross my heart, in a thousand years… it will still hold true.”