Your past illuminated your present; your shadow was yourself!
What immense sorrow. But who could understand it?
"Lord Jiang!" Yuzhen called softly, yet in the end, she did not let those emotions spill forth.
From White Bone Sect to Moon-Washing Nunnery to Three-Part Fragrance Pavilion, every step of this journey had left no room to stop, not a moment to relax.
In those lonely years, she had long grown accustomed to chewing over solitude.
Seated upon a meditation cushion, she looked up at Jiang Wang—golden-haired and gold-robed, so familiar yet so strange—and raised one hand. Her sleeve slipped back. That hand moved like a spirit serpent swimming beneath the surface, turning behind her. With two fingers held together like scissors, she made a gentle snip at the swaying lamp, cutting away a strand of wick that still bore flame.
She brought that lamp-trimming hand before herself. Her slender jade fingers blossomed like flowers, black silk amid snow. The candle flame danced upon the back of her hand, casting wondrous light and shadow that lay bound upon the ground like a dark captive bird, yearning to fly yet unable.
A moment later, the flame unfurled into the shape of a lotus.
The tiny lotus of light blooming on her finger had twelve petals. They opened in perfect balance, yet every petal was different, every one containing endless births and extinctions of light and shadow.
As the radiant light first bloomed and the lotus perched upon her finger, the dim shadow upon her face had already receded. Her strikingly vivid features gained a touch of sanctity. She parted her full lips softly. "I ask Lord Jiang: this lotus blooms with twelve petals, and no two are alike. They are born differently, grow differently, see differently, think differently. How does one distinguish what