The heart of the city throbbed heavily in the twilight. The glass walls of the skyscrapers reflected the last dark-red glow of the setting sun, while streams of traffic wove rivers of light across the crisscrossing overpasses. The modern metropolis breathed with mechanical regularity, like an enormous, finely tuned clock.
I stood before the floor-to-ceiling window on the thirty-seventh floor, holding a cup of green tea that had long since gone cold. Outside was the bustle; inside, silence. A face was reflected in the glass, both familiar and strange: cool, finely drawn features, skin so pale it was almost translucent, and eyes concealing a thousand years that even I could not understand. A thousand years. The words rolled across my tongue, bitter and worn with time. The lake outside, which I had guarded for twelve centuries, had long since been filled in, and the Central Business District had been built over it. Only deep underground did a faint thread of water remain, like a forgotten pulse struggling within a prison of reinforced concrete.
My name is Qinglian. I am a water spirit, a being who should not exist in this age.
In my first life, I met him in a prince’s residence at the end of the Qing dynasty. He was a prince wielding great power, and I was a lonely shadow on the lake. He said he would marry me, but court intrigue and the rules of his clan defeated him. On the day of his wedding, I sank to the bottom of the lake, believing that was what eternity meant.
In my second life, I found him amid the flames of war in the Republican era. He had become a scholar, gentle and refined, but he had forgotten me. He married a young lady from a family of equal standing, and I became a daffodil swaying outside his study window. Only when war consumed everything did he seize my hand among the ruins and ask, “Have we met before?”
Now, my third life.
