There is a divide between immortals and mortals.
The human world and the world beyond the heavens had been separated for many years. Cultivators, immortals, and divine beings had long since become legends to mortals, nothing more than fantastical tales of spirits and monsters for people to imagine as they pleased.
Huang Huaixia was born with an immortal body, yet she had been trapped for three hundred years in a thousand-year-old locust tree that was nearly dead.
She slept for two hundred years and had been awake for a hundred. Most of her memories were blurred. She couldn't recall her childhood, but she still remembered that what she wanted most was freedom, and that a demon lay hidden inside her heart.
For reasons she didn't understand, she had become a bound spirit, unable to go beyond the reach of the locust tree's branches.
Then a mortal arrived, and everything began to change.
*
Yin Mo had grown up in the capital, Kyoto. He was remarkably talented and was hailed as a future top scholar.
He was aloof and proud, yet unfailingly courteous. The women of Kyoto considered him an ideal husband. But those close to him knew that he was naturally cold and emotionally detached, unable to offer the sort of affection people expected.
In an accident that could hardly be called one, Yin Mo lost all his family and was driven out of Kyoto. With nowhere to go, he had only his father's final words to guide him back to the ancestral home.
On the night he met Huang Huaixia, Yin Mo was on the brink of life and death. The young man, who had always kept himself in check and followed every rule of propriety, shed his pretenses for the first time and reached out to ask her to save him.
When he learned that Huang Huaixia was a ghost, Yin Mo's thoughts churned, but he concealed the turmoil inside him with silence.
He could hardly have imagined that after Huang Huaixia forced herself on him, day after day spent together would leave him consumed by longing and deeply in love.
After all, she was a girl who seemed to smile sweetly, but was actually just like him, cold-hearted and unfeeling.
Huang Huaixia: Immortals and mortals belong to different worlds. You shouldn't feel that way about me.
Yin Mo: And what if I insist?
Theme: Other people's judgments don't determine whether your life is good or bad
