The Female Painter and the Dog

When Yunhua Immortal Lord is banished to the mortal realm for drunkenly offending the Yaochi Immortal Maiden, the laws of Heaven carve a cruel curse into him: he must receive a human’s “pure love” within twelve years, or be condemned to the animal realm forever.

Reborn as a dog named Chouchou, he is adopted by Yue Li, a painter.

Over the seasons they spend together in her studio, the human and dog forge a special bond:

He burns his primordial spirit three times to protect her, from tearing up a scumbag’s love letter to shielding her in a fire. She deciphers the thousand years of loneliness in his eyes through paint color codes and the depth of his paw prints.

As the countdown to his tribulation draws near, Chouchou gradually begins coughing up blood flecked with gold. His spiritual power is running dry, and a conspiracy in Heaven comes to light: the drunken incident all those years ago was a trap set by the Yaochi Immortal Maiden. The Star Lord of Fate altered the difficulty of his tribulation out of jealousy because the Queen Mother of the West once favored the Immortal Lord. When Yue Li presses a bloody paw print onto her painting, “Symbiosis,” seven-colored lightning descends. But Chouchou chooses to shed his immortal status and become an ordinary dog.

At the end of twelve years, he stops breathing in his sleep. His ashes are incorporated into the peerless painting, “The Road to Heaven.” On the day of the exhibition, a young man wearing a bloodstained blue scarf around his neck bursts in...