When Lu Chen awoke in an ancient pool on Mount Cangwu, only one name remained in his memory: “Qing Ci.” Barefoot, he pushed open the wooden gate of a deserted village courtyard. Inside, a young woman was crouched in front of a medicine stove, brewing herbs. When she looked up and saw him, the ladle fell from her hand.
She had waited for him for one hundred and eighty days and spent seven days and nights sewing mourning clothes, convinced he was dead.
He was not dead. He had simply forgotten: forgotten that five hundred years ago, he had sealed the Demon Lord with his own body as the reincarnation of the Human Emperor; forgotten that the shattered Xu Tian Seal at his waist had once suppressed heaven and earth. The only thing he remembered was her name.
From Mount Cangwu to the depths of the Demon Abyss, he gathered the Xu Tian Seal fragments scattered across the Nine Regions, while she used the runes of her life-bound formation to save him from one deadly crisis after another. In a bamboo hut in the Gu Valley, she cut off her white hair and tied it to his stone seal, saying, “Let my hair stand in place of my vow.” Outside the Divine Capital, he shielded her from a bolt of heavenly lightning and said, “You won’t die.”
Until the day the seal was activated, when the law of shared life burned their bond to ashes. Once it was gone, she remembered shielding someone from a demon wolf when she was seven, but not why. He remembered that someone in the Gu Valley had cut off her white hair and tied it to his stone seal, but not who she was. The person they had loved most deeply became the stranger they knew best.
But they did not part. He carved hundreds of green bamboo walking sticks on Mount Cangwu, while she planted black wheat and grew silverleaf grass by the courtyard wall. Through the most ordinary routines, they built a new bond together.
