Since that day, I often had a strange dream.

In the dream, I became Xu Xian, and Bai Suzhen was the pink snake.

We strolled by the lake, borrowed an umbrella, and opened a medical clinic together.

Everything should have been beautiful.

But I turned around and went to Jinshan Temple, colluding with the monk Fahai.

I smiled and asked Fahai,

"If I offer a thousand-year-old snake demon, could Buddha grant me immortality?"

Monk Fahai clasped his hands together and chanted,

"Amitabha."

Then, he stared at me intently and slowly spoke:

"Buddha can certainly grant you immortality, allowing you to ascend to the blissful Western Paradise."

After bidding farewell to Monk Fahai, I returned to the medical clinic.

On the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, I sprinkled a lot of realgar powder into the wine.

Bai Suzhen looked at me and asked word by word,

"Sir, are you trying to take my life?"

I nodded but said a bunch of disgusting words even to myself:

"You and I are destined to follow different paths as humans and demons. By drinking this wine, I will have the master perform a ritual to release you.

"In the next life, when you are reincarnated as a human, we can be together peacefully.

"Whether it takes eighteen years or thirty-six years, even if it exhausts my entire life, I will wait for you."

Bai Suzhen looked at me with tear-filled eyes and then drank the wine in the bowl.

However, she didn't know that after getting drunk, she was suppressed by Fahai using his supreme powers.

I personally peeled her skin and made it into an oil-paper umbrella, which I inserted into Leifeng Pagoda.

That was my offering to the Buddha, and the Buddha granted me eternal life.

In the hazy state, I caught a glimpse of the true face of the Buddha.

Countless tentacles emerged from the mist, resembling countless strands of hemp rope.

Each tentacle's end was either a giant single eye or a gaping mouth.

A half-face appeared at the top, with blurry flesh and blood, the most terrifying thing in the world.

The gray mist began to envelop me, and time and space intertwined within me.

When the mist entered my body, eternal solitude and despair surged within me.

The Buddha granted me immortality but also bestowed eternal loneliness upon me.

I drifted in the boundless expanse of time.

It was the most desperate state in the human world.

I exerted all my strength to call out to someone who could remember my name.

But this world gave me no response.

Finally, I uttered a powerless sentence:

"Bai Suzhen."

A faint light appeared in the gray river of time.

The light pulled me back to a colorful world, and the most conspicuous thing was a touch of paleness.

The oil-paper umbrella with a pink surface had turned pale under the erosion of time.

When I woke up, I realized that a long time had passed.

Bai Suzhen said I had been asleep for three days and kept calling her name in my dream.

I didn't tell her this story, fearing it would frighten her.

But her next words frightened me.

She murmured,

"Why is it that when you call my name, I feel like I've heard it somewhere?

"As if I've crossed thousands of years, my name should really be Bai Suzhen."

I looked towards the horizon, where a gray fog lingered.

And the oil-paper umbrella in Leifeng Pagoda was nowhere to be found...