I Picked Up a Black Spade Blossom on the Road Through Tribulations

She first met him on a battlefield strewn with corpses. Blood stained every inch of ground, the cold wind howled past, and the air was thick with the stench of blood. Freshly dead, she looked at him and asked, “Are you Black Impermanence?” “No.” “Then are you White Impermanence?” “No.” “Then you must be taking me to the underworld to be reborn.” The newly appointed Ghost King was at a loss for words. He had actually meant to say that things were not as she understood them, but he could find no way to argue his case. She had been banished to the mortal realm to endure countless tribulations. Once, she had been a divine official in the heavens, one whom everyone had to address as “Your Excellency.” Now so fallen from grace, she could never escape the fate of dying for no reason in every life. The Meng Po soup had never erased her memories of past and present lives. She was the heart of a plant, and had long since come to see life, death, and reincarnation as trivial. But he always remembered her. He remembered that she had once been his benefactor, someone he owed a debt of gratitude. Even after her memories were finally gone, and her fate was marked by the baleful energy destined for her, he still followed her, searching for her soul in the mortal world. Even when his powers were gone, his place among the mighty had been taken from him, and he had sunk to the status of a nobody, becoming the sort of powerless person he had once found intolerable, he was willing to stay by her side, to die and live for her. At a word from her, he would defy fate itself to seize a glimpse of heavenly secrets for her. Love, hate, anger, and obsession all drifted away on the wind. In the end, she understood, too.