The Five-Colored Lotus Heart

Some scraps left over from Nuwa patching the sky were casually abandoned by her atop Mount Wuji. As the stars shifted and the sun and moon rose and set, one stone gradually gained consciousness. By chance, an eagle befriended this stone, which possessed nothing but a mind of its own. One day, the eagle told the stone it was going to the mortal world to undergo tribulations. The stone said that when it missed the eagle, it would go find it in the human world. After wandering the human world for many years, the stone, longing for the eagle, spotted a child on Changning Street, where the bustle of everyday life was at its liveliest. The child had the same fierce look in his eyes as the eagle. The stone diligently absorbed the essence of the sun and moon every day, all so it could transform into a human and stay by the eagle’s side. But the eagle had once said that humans were scheming creatures, their thoughts unpredictable, and sometimes even more frightening than monsters. The stone thought that how other people behaved was their own business. It was enough that this person was the eagle. In this life, the eagle was reborn as a human named Yun Qi. He had a beloved whom he cherished above all else, Zeng Rushi. Her heart had been weak since she was in the womb. When Yun Qi knelt before the stone, grief-stricken, and begged, “Lianxin, save Rushi. I’ll repay you in my next life.” The stone had asked Yun Qi to give her a name, and he had called her Lianxin. Looking at Yun Qi kneeling before her and pleading, she began to understand: Lianxin meant “joined hearts”! So that was it. He had planned this from the very beginning. All that talk of love and not being able to live without her had just been to trick her into willingly giving up her heart to save Zeng Rushi! Lianxin remembered how, back on Mount Wuji, the eagle always gave in to her whenever they argued. He was always the first to apologize. This time, she would be the one to give in. She let out a soft laugh, tears welling in her eyes. “Eagle, I loved you so much that I didn’t even realize I’d lost myself.”