Under the Locust Tree’s Shadow: A Five-Hundred-Year Pact

Deep in the forest, she makes a pact with a thousand-year-old snake demon.

She asks for no riches or immortality, only good health, beauty, and a peaceful life.

He gives her beauty, wealth, eternal life, and all his affection.

She warms his thousand years of loneliness, obsession, and inner demons.

She thinks she is a substitute, a vessel.

Only he knows that she is the one and only love and home he has found in all his long years.

Beneath the locust tree’s shade, old grudges fade away.

From then on, one demon and one human share their meals and seasons, staying together year after year.