In the seventh year of the Chongzhen reign, a severe drought struck Jiangnan. With nowhere else to turn, impoverished scholar Liu Yansheng took shelter in Lotus Breeze Garden, a derelict place everyone shunned.
Beneath the moonlight, he met a cool, refined woman in white. Elegant and ethereal, she carried the fragrance of lotus and lived alone in the ruined garden, apart from the mortal world.
She was a thousand-year-old white lotus transformed into human form, bound by the laws of heaven. She warned him that humans and demons belonged to different worlds, and that drawing close would bring heavenly punishment. She urged him to stay away.
But he refused to believe in fate. Unafraid of demons or the will of heaven, he would endure the upheavals of a troubled age just to stay by her side, reading by lamplight and sharing every day with her.
He didn't know that the gentle lotus demon before him was the reincarnation of an ancient purifying lotus goddess, or that he, a poor scholar, was the reincarnation of a celestial deity who kept the books of heaven.
Three lifetimes of love, two tragic deaths, a forbidden romance between immortal and demon, rejected by the laws of heaven.
In their first life, they stood by each other in the divine palace, but were framed and banished together.
In their second life, they fell in love in the mortal world, only to be separated by a fallen kingdom, a ruined family, and death. In this life, they met again in the ruined garden, bound together once more by fate. Even as the laws of heaven oppressed them, the world scorned them, and the Three Realms rejected them, he still stood hand in hand with her.
“I don't care if you're a demon or a goddess, or what fate the heavens have decreed. All I know is that I will protect you.”
He defied the heavens for her, shattered their laws, and stormed the celestial realm. She gave up a thousand years of cultivation for him, withstood heavenly punishment, and never left his side.
Their bond could not be severed by the Three-Lifetimes Stone. Her one lotus heart belonged only to the scholar.
In this life, they would defy fate and change their destinies, never betray each other, and make the Three Realms bless the union of a human and a demon. May lotuses bloom year after year, and may they stay together until their hair turns white.
