Born blind, she nevertheless cultivates the Art of True Words: hands that can glimpse the Mandate of Heaven, and a mouth that can pronounce life and death.
Before her master left, he gave her one last warning: “If you meet someone dressed in white, do not sing for him, do not divine his fortune, and do not fall in love with him.”
In the snowy wilderness of Mount Cangwu, she found a man whose body was ice-cold. His name was Xie Buyu, and his voice was like a spring in the depths of winter, cool and clear with a hidden tenderness. He could sing. None of his songs had names, yet every one found its way into the heart she could not see.
She cast a hexagram for him.
The crack of the tortoiseshell sounded like a sigh from behind a towering wall.
She recognized that fissure. A thousand years ago, the Immortal Lord of the Mirror was framed, stripped of his immortal bones, and banished to the mortal realm, doomed to meet an ill end in every life. The celestial official who escorted him down the heavenly stairs was her in a past life.
In this life, she is the “Judge” who carries out the sentence.
His fate is sealed: it will end at her hands.
But she refuses to accept it. She means to change his fate with her True Words, but he covers her mouth and says, “Sing with too much longing, and your song becomes a verdict. Once spoken, a verdict will inevitably come true.”
“Heaven Official's Blessing, may all taboos be cast aside. But do you know what blessing the Heaven Official gives? No choice at all.”
On a snowy night, at the edge of a cliff, she listened to him sing for the entire night. Every word was like a verdict carved into a stone stele. “The Han is so wide, no thought of swimming across it. The river is so long, no thought of crossing it by raft.”
Dawn broke, and he was gone.
From then on, she descended the mountain. She no longer cast fortunes for the living, but only guided lonely spirits on their way. Sometimes she took a detour to the bottom of the Nine Abysses. The wind there was bitterly cold, yet she always felt that something was warm.
As if, somewhere far away, someone were tapping the ground with a bone
