Nội dung text Lord Seventh.docx
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3 Glorious Springtime Does Not For the Youth Remain 1: Seven Lifetimes of Ephemeral Lives The first lifetime, a stone appeared, turning into the burial mound of a hero, feelings unable to be broken. The second lifetime, a boulder split, ferrying a predestined love across the Bridge, a pair of mandarin ducks flying off together. The third lifetime, a jadeite burned, vowing to abide by an invaluable oath, eternally following each other in life and death. Flowers bloomed all across the opposite shore, blood-like. The River of Forgetfulness’s 1 waters trickled quietly, going three-thousand years to the East, three-thousand years to the West. Wandering souls came and went, treading on the endless Yellow Spring Road to come up the Bridge of Helplessness, pour a bowl of yellow soup down into their bellies, and thus have the entirety of their assorted previous lives go away. A crowd of beings passed the edge of the Three-Life Rock 2 to and fro, but none spared a glance towards the place. It was evident as to how reincarnation was little more than a trance. Beside the Rock sat a person. It was a man. Upon drawing closer, one could see he was wearing a wide-sleeved green robe with a crude bamboo flute stuck into its waistband, and also that he was between twenty to thirty years of age even though his head was full of silver hair, unbound and scattered about randomly. The man had his back turned to the souls on Yellow Spring Road, his front facing that smooth Three-Life Rock. All he did was sit there silently, eyes closed. It was unknown whether he was asleep or awake, and he was seemingly completely unaware that someone had been watching him for a very long time now. Hu Jia was a newly-appointed Ghost Messenger, and had traveled amidst the Yellow Springs for no more than forty years. From the very start of his memory, this white-haired man had always been sitting there, unmoving. Whenever Hu Jia came back and finished giving a report after handling an assignment at the human realm, he would regularly go and stand at that spot, staring at the man’s rearview figure for a time. The yin realm was a world of demons. The yang realm was inundated with light, yet did not have any fewer demons than the yin realm did. Hu Jia’s state of mind would sometimes get beyond gloomy; gazing at that back that was as motionless as a mountain would, for a moment, calm him down in a strange way. Suddenly, a deathly pale hand was placed upon Hu Jia’s shoulder. Despite being a Ghost Messenger, he inevitably felt a wave of coldness attack him from it, which caused his senses to viciously sharpen a tad. He swiveled his head around, only to have Bai Wuchang’s papier- 1 An extremely pared down version of the the cycle of reincarnation in Chinese mythology: dead souls travel to the Yellow Springs (the underworld), receive punishment in the Ten Courts, then cross the Bridge of Helplessness over the River of Forgetfulness afterwards, where they then drink Meng Po’s soup, forget their life, and move on to their next reincarnation. Related in-depth articles for reading: The Ten Courts of Hell (TW violence, torture, and gore, if cartoony), Diyu Wiki Article 2 The Three-Life Rock (三生石) — also referred to as the Fated Love Stone, at least for the IRL version at Lingyin Temple — is purportedly located near the Bridge of Forgetfulness in the underworld, and engraved upon it is fated relationships. It’s named after the concept of ‘three lives’ in Buddhism; the past life, the present life, and the next life. When one commits to hundred years of marriage in a relationship, and they die before their partner, they are to wait at the Three-Life Rock until their partner joins them in death. That way, they face oblivion together. Furthermore, despite the wiping of one’s memories, getting deja vu in one’s present life when falling in love with someone is said to be a sign of having been together in the last life, and when people fall in love, they hope that they will continue to be so in the next one, hence the connotations of the ‘three lives’ with marriage and fate.