> I am the lowliest mortal in the immortal realm. For ten years, I stood in for the fairy Yunyi.
> The Immortal Lord always complained that I couldn’t imitate her well enough, yet he held me in his arms every night.
> The day Yunyi came back to life, he left me coughing blood and rushed to the celebration.
> As I lay dying, I bit my finger and wrote in blood on the pillow: “I would rather be a mortal’s concubine than an Immortal Lord’s wife.”
> By the time the Immortal Venerable returned, my body had gone cold.
> He frantically tried to summon my soul, unaware that his beloved had already crushed it.
> “Why can’t I call you back…” he murmured, kneeling before the words in blood.
> Then he noticed the jade bracelet beneath the layers of bandages on my wrist, the betrothal gift he had given Yunyi a hundred years ago.
Su Ci counted the drops from the water clock.
Water seeped from the mouth of a bronze beast, gathering into a round droplet that trembled, hanging there as if it could neither fall nor remain. In the deathly silent bedchamber, the faint sound grew impossibly loud, thudding in her ears as though muffled by a thousand mountains and ten thousand rivers. Every drop seemed to wrench away the last spark of life from her broken body.
Outside the window, a very different clamor pierced layer upon layer of immortal wards and barged in.
The clear notes of strings and flutes soared toward the clouds. The fairy maidens’ jade pendants chimed brightly, and the crowd’s roar surged like waves, each swell louder than the last. In the distance, toward the Jade Terrace palaces at the highest point of the Ninth Heaven, radiant light blazed into the sky. Countless auspicious clouds stained the heavy night as bright as glazed daylight. The ethereal music drifted through the air, every note dancing with supreme joy and holiness. It was a hymn of welcome for the return of a true deity.
The fairy Yunyi had returned.
Su Ci dug her fingertips into the brocade quilt until her knuckles turned bluish white----
Although the emotional description is delicate, it is a bit repetitive. I feel that the writing can be more concise and the descriptions like wheels can be reduced. I am still looking forward to the follow-up story. The author will give it a big boost (*¯¯*)