The snow still hadn’t stopped on the twenty-second day of the third month.
Jinguan City was nothing like the northern lands. In any ordinary year, spring would have arrived long ago by now, everything stirring back to life in a riot of competing colors. This year, however, the goose-feather snow had been drifting down from the heavens for nearly four months.
“Strange.”
Beside a teahouse packed with people, a customer turned a tea bowl over in his hands and shook his head.
He looked out the window. They said the scenery of Jinguan City changed beautifully with the seasons, that even the spring hills ought to be dripping green. But all he could see now was the endless twilight snow.
“Truly strange,” the customer said.
“What’s so strange about it?” The storyteller took a sip of tea, entirely at his ease. “Isn’t today the death rite for that so-and-so… ahem, for that certain someone?”
The customer blinked. “Which certain someone?”
“Luo Jiao.” The storyteller lowered his voice. “Come now, you’ve never heard of Luo Jiao?”
At the neighboring table, another guest smacked his lips. “Never heard the name in my life.”
The storyteller frowned. “Tch. So you don’t know Luo Jiao. Fine. Then surely you’ve heard of the Bujue Sword. ‘Unaware the clear day shines so fair, how could one know Immortality grows old.’ You must know that at least? The Bujue Sword, and the Changsheng Sword…”
The Changsheng Sword’s name thundered in every ear, and its master made grown cultivators go weak in the knees just hearing it.
At those words, the earlier skeptics smacked their foreheads and jumped up at once. “Ah! Ye Qingzhou! Ye Qingzhou of the Changsheng Sword, of course we know her!”
“Right.” The storyteller smiled, unhurried. “And the Bujue Sword belongs to Luo Jiao, her Senior Sister from the same sect.”
Settling into the rolling cadence of his trade, the storyteller went on. “Now, speaking of Luo Jiao… her life, one might say, was broad and stormy as a river in flood.
“Luo Jiao was born poor. She scrambled through the streets and markets as a child, snatching food straight from the jaws of feral dogs, never once tasting a bowl of warm porridge. Passing through the Thousand-Li Slope, it was that grim, vicious fire in her eyes that caught the notice of Daoist Sanqing. The Sanqing Sword Art: one stroke soaring, one sweeping; one yin, one yang…”
“I’ve heard that Ye Qingzhou followed the yin, the soaring path,” someone cut in. “So Luo Jiao would be the yang and the sweep?”
“Exactly.” The storyteller nodded. “Luo Jiao studied under Daoist Sanqing, mastered the Sanqing Sword Art, and at the age of eighteen, took her leave of her master.
“From there she wandered south along the Thousand-Li Slope and north to Mojiang City, one sword cold as frost, her name resounding through the nine provinces.”
Here the storyteller seemed to sigh. “…And yet at twenty-seven, she perished on the Thousand-Li Slope.
“Luo Bujue’s life began there, and ended there. Brief as morning dew, yet in the end, everything found its place.”
“I hear it was also a twenty-second day of the third month, a hundred years ago, when the spring willow-fuzz filled the air and Luo Jiao died on that slope. They say when Dou E cried out her grievance, snow fell in the sixth month. Well, look at all this white above us…”
The storyteller sighed, and when he raised his eyes again there was something wistful in his expression, laced unmistakably with mischief. “Who’s to say whether this Luo Jiao didn’t have a grievance of her own, hm?”
The words had barely left his mouth when a wind swept through.
His hand jerked as he raised his cup, and scalding tea spilled across his sleeve, going cold as ice in an instant.
He glanced toward the draft, catching the faintest glimpse of a figure outside. He didn’t think much of it at first, but when he turned back, he found a room full of eyes growing more terrified by the second.
“…What’s wrong?”
Everyone around him had frozen mid-motion. They were staring at the storyteller in perfect unison, gazes locked, pupils sunk in black, faces dull and numb, like souls ripped clean from their bodies.
The storyteller drew a sharp breath. “You… what’s the matter with all of you?”
Not a single person answered. In that instant, the teahouse fell into a dead silence. Beyond the broken window, only the wind rustled.
Perhaps it was his imagination, but the whole teahouse seemed to seep cold air, as if they had tumbled into an ice cellar.
Almost without thinking, the storyteller looked to the window. Instinct told him these strange happenings had something to do with that figure outside.
The moment he turned back, the blizzard stopped dead.
He saw the figure walking toward him.
A woman. White hair, white robes, a white sword rimmed in frost, untouched by worldly dust. A white gauze veil hid her brows and eyes, making her features impossible to read.
And riding in together with that glacial aura came an endless tide of killing intent.
The storyteller saw only a flash of cold light sweep past his face.
The next instant, the sword’s edge lunged at him!
“CRASH!!”
The sword Qi hurled the storyteller from his seat, table, chair and all, slamming him to the floor.
The blade halted a hair’s breadth from his abruptly dilated pupils.
He lay staring up, trembling all over, unable to force out a word.
Cold sweat dripped from his brow and slid into his eye.
The woman in white stood over him, sword pointed at his throat.
“Do you not remember? I’m certain I told you.”
Her voice was ethereal, stripped of all feeling. No anger, no annoyance. No sorrow, no joy. “Mention ‘Luo Jiao’ again in these gambling dens you call teahouses, these sideshows for idle gossip…”
“And what happens then?”
The pale blade reflected in her glass-colored eyes. The young woman’s face was lovely, yet she looked like some vengeful fiend stepped straight out of a nightmare.
On a desolate mountain slope some thirty miles from the teahouse, the woman in white stood at the crest of the hill.
She pulled off the gauze veil, revealing a pair of glass-colored pupils. “Deeds in life, name after death…”
“Nothing but passing smoke.”
She sighed, murmuring on. “And still, in the end, it all gets pounded to paste, scooped into tea, and served up for other people’s amusement.”
The woman took the tea bowl she had smashed earlier, ground the shards to fine powder between her fingers, closed her hand around it, then raised it.
A gust of wind passed, and the powder scattered on the air.
Her movements were solemn, as solemn as if she were pouring a pot of clear sake before someone’s grave.
And so those scattered fragments of talk drifted away with it.
“Elder Sister,” she called softly, almost a whisper.
“You were right about everything.”
Volume One · Luo Bujue · Three Thousand Moons
***
[T/N]:
Sword Names & Poem:
The line quoted by the storyteller (“Unaware the clear day shines so fair, how could one know Immortality grows old”) hides a literary wordplay featuring the names of both legendary swords:
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Bujue (不觉): Means “unaware” or “without noticing”. It is also an intentional homophone for 不绝 (bùjué), meaning “unceasing” or “endless”.
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Changsheng (长生): Means “immortality” or “longevity”.
Luo Jiao vs. Luo Bujue:
Luo Jiao is her birth/given name, while Luo Bujue is her martial/Daoist name, which shares its moniker with her weapon, the Bujue Sword.
The “Dou E” Reference:
The storyteller mentions Dou E crying out her grievance. This references The Injustice to Dou E, a famous Yuan Dynasty drama where a wrongfully accused woman’s grievance causes snow to fall in the sixth month (mid-summer).
