"Thousand Mountains Snow Dance, Plum Soul Transformed": Icebound Luofu, a beloved soul seemingly unchanged

How many springs had come and gone in the mortal world? Nowhere without flowers, nowhere without wind and rain. The weary girl washing silk beside the stream gathered her robes to greet him, then turned to steal a glance.

All along the road, spring sorrow would not cease; she had failed the flowers' tender hearts and shed tears to beg their pardon. Still she remembered those words spoken deep, deep in the night, a thousand pledges through life and death.

-"Butterflies in Love with Flowers"

The Daoist mountain, whose scenery had remained serene and radiant for centuries, now seemed a hell on earth.

Day had been overturned into night, the sky as black as though an iron cauldron had been lowered over it. Bitter winds howled, snowflakes whirled, and flourishing branches and leaves lay sealed in ice. Pools among the mountain streams churned as though boiling, their sediment, undisturbed for a thousand years, stirred up wholesale and hurled into the air, only to be frozen instantly by the monstrous dragons' icy breath and fall back into the water. Only two colors remained between heaven and earth: black and gray. Everywhere was murky and indistinct, light and shadow tangled together, with spectral figures seemingly flickering on every side. Amid that eerie gloom, only the mighty lightning occasionally unleashed in the struggle between men and gods could briefly illuminate heaven, earth, and those within them, revealing all their bizarre, shifting silhouettes at once.

Amid such violent chaos, the sudden shower of blossoms rising into the sky in a secluded corner more than a hundred li away, and the figure drifting down through it with the wind, seemed utterly insignificant, attracting no notice at all.

A moment later...

"Truly a religious order that has led the mortal world for a thousand years!"

Seeing