He came every summer and drank only the tea she brewed.
Su Wan ran an old teahouse in Liuxi Town. Every summer, a man in blue robes would arrive as promised. He never said where he came from or where he was going. He simply drank a cup of Biluochun in silence and left behind a gardenia.
For ten years, Su Wan never asked why.
Until the tenth year, when he said it would be his last visit.
The day after he left, a strange woman came to see Su Wan and told her that the man in blue was a mountain spirit. To keep his promise to spend ten years in the human world, he had given up all his cultivation. When he returned, he would endure ten years of punishment and forget everything about the human world.
Including Su Wan.
But she decided to wait for him.
One year, two years, three... The gardenias bloomed and faded, faded and bloomed again. The tea in the teahouse went cold, was topped up, and went cold once more.
On a summer day in the sixth year, footsteps long unheard came from beside the old well.
He stood at the door, his gaze bewildered, yet he instinctively said:
“You look lovely wearing a white flower.”
Some things cannot be taken away, not even by forgetting.
