The White Fox: A Dance Across a Thousand Years

The white fox A Li has cultivated for nine hundred years and needs only to survive one final tribulation.

The Heavenly Book is clear: the third trial will test her heart.

The fated ordeal comes quickly. On a snowy night, in a ruined temple, the impoverished scholar Gu Changfeng, who earns his living writing letters for others, shares half a flatbread he begged for with the white fox behind the stove. He does not know she understands him, nor that his offhand remark, "You must be cold too," has touched a heart that has not stirred in a thousand years.

To buy him a lifetime of peace, she kneels at the Southern Heavenly Gate and scatters five treasures of her elixir. Bloodied with every step, she climbs all nine hundred jade steps.

A thousand years of cultivation in exchange for one human lifetime. From then on, she is Hu Li: learning to eat hot porridge, to feel pain, to feel hunger, and to ask him, "Was it worth it?"

His life is far too short. So short that before she has learned what it means to grow old, she must first learn how to bury him.

Fortunately, there is a saying among mortals: the people you wait for always come back. The old peach tree in Peach Blossom Hollow blooms first every year. The villagers say that at midnight on the fifteenth day of the eighth month, a red shape twirls in the peach grove behind the village. Anyone who sees it will have good luck for a year.