The Immortal's Tribulation

In the mortal world, amid the Buddha's realm, there are three thousand splendid sights. In the snap of a finger, time flows away like water, leaving only a handful of yellow sand. Only he is where all things in me take root and grow. In that life, I endured every loneliness, not to live forever, but to remember you. In that lifetime, I endured every torment, not for reincarnation, but to meet you. Through that bleak cycle of life and death, I had no strength to hold on, because I had yet to see you. How wonderful that I can see you again! How wonderful that I can still remember you! A massacre! A massacre that plunged heaven and earth into darkness, with rivers of blood and bones littering the ground! Who cries out to the heavens, bearing a lifetime of sorrow? Who takes up a sharp sword and silently resists? Through half a life of wandering, who will kiss my wounds and quiet my thoughts? Through half a life adrift, who will kiss my pain and hide a season of desolation? After half a life of hardship, who can kiss my grief and conceal my lifelong madness? Through half a life of drifting and falling, who will kiss my tears again and hide my lonely, sorrowful hopes? Long afterward, when the minor officials who kept the history of the Celestial Realm went to interview their colleagues who had survived the disaster, every one of them trembled with fear. They said it had been a cataclysm in the Celestial Realm. The sun and moon lost their luster, and all things turned pale. No one could forget that face, filled with unbearable anguish. No one could forget the blood-soaked devastation that inspired such terror. From day to night, from dawn to dusk. No one knew how long it had gone on. That person kept swinging their sword and killing, numb and unfeeling. From the mortal world to the Ninth Heaven, a corpse with every step, a mountain of bodies every ten steps, an endless slaughter! Back then, I was not yet a hilltop ruffian among the Five Wilds, and he was not yet the cultivator who, amid the incense smoke of the Sutra Hall, struck a wooden fish again and again, set every prayer wheel spinning, and journeyed over mountains and waters, around pagodas and temples. Across three lifetimes, who entered whose cycle of reincarnation? Theme: