No Coincidence, No Story

On the fifteenth, beneath a full moon, moonlight flowed like water and night shone bright as day. The scenery beside Yellow Crane Bluff, one of the Eighteen Sceneries of Cloud Cave Blessed Land, was magnificent, especially tonight. In a viewing pavilion built on a stone cliff, a white-robed young man stuck out his backside and leaned over the railing to look down at the river. Its broad surface lay calm beneath a windless sky.

Beyond Yellow Crane Bluff flowed a river called Immortal-Detaining Grotto, formed where three rivers and eighteen streams converged, among them Lotus Pond River and Ancient Inkstone Creek. After passing Jinshan Temple upstream, its current suddenly gentled and came quietly to meet Yellow Crane Bluff, like a woman married from the countryside into a wealthy household, obliged to become mild and virtuous.

An ancient Sword Immortal had once drunk himself senseless in this pavilion. The tale of how he had slain mosquitoes above the river still circulated.

The white-robed young man lowered his head and murmured, "All because the human heart resembles running water, I make the moon in the water my boat."

Jiang Shangzhen sat with his boots off, leaning against a pavilion pillar. In his hand was a white porcelain cup filled with Immortal Brew called Moonlight Wine, its contents white as snow. He gently swirled it and smiled. "Dongshan, those words deserve to be called the speech of an immortal."

The white-robed young man was Cui Dongshan. The moment he sensed the strange phenomenon of the sword offering at Taiping Mountain, he had set out from the former site of Southern Peak and driven himself desperately across the continents. For an Immortal to end up dazed and drained of spiritual energy merely from traveling was rare even across the whole Vast Heaven and Earth.