The girl in the plain white dress looked at Ding Songyan with a mixture of anticipation and concern.
"If you are unwell, perhaps you should go home and rest first. I... I am in no hurry."
Her voice was soft and sweet, very pleasant to hear.
Ding Songyan laughed.
"It’s nothing serious. I have already been wandering outside Dangkang Temple for over two hours. It is only that I’m a bit slow with some brain fog. If I stumble over my words or lose the thread later on, I hope you will forgive me."
He was laying the groundwork in advance. He had never told a story in public before and had no idea how it would go.
As he said it, a quiet wistfulness came over him.
Back in his school days, he had looked down on all of it: the social maneuvering, the careful networking of useful connections. He had believed that intelligence and a thorough grasp of things could solve any problem and earn any success on their own. Then reality had knocked him down, and he had put himself back together piece by piece, and now reading people, befriending the right ones, and keeping those relationships alive had bee instinct.
In the last year or two, with his business successful and his ambitions provisionally satisfied, he had increasingly found himself tired in body and spirit. He was not cut out for business. He had sometimes thought he would rather go back to the quiet of an academic life, researching something he genuinely loved with no scheming involved, spending his free time drinking and talking nonsense and playing games with a handful of close friends. What a life that would be.
He also knew this was self-indulgence. Without a sizable fortune already behind him, research done for love rather than profit would have left him constantly anxious, unable to enjoy any of it.
In the middle of these thoughts, Ding Songyan arrived at the empty pitch that was his. No chair, no stool, no props of any kind.
He gathered his thoughts and began to consider which story to tell.
His gaze passed over the girl in the white dress and her maidservant in the green skirt, and an idea formed.
He smiled slightly.
"Dear listeners, the story I bring you today is The Legend of the White Snake."
Even as the words left his mouth, he was watching the girl, her maidservant, and the plaster-seller nearby for any flicker of recognition at the title, to judge whether a similar story already existed in this world.
Not that it mattered much either way. He had already laid the groundwork. This was a legend he had only recently learned, not one he had written himself.
If anyone claimed it resembled something else, that would simply be a matter of creative adaptation.
Beyond the inspiration he had drawn from the two women’s clothing colors, he had chosen The Legend of the White Snake for a practical reason: the television serial had been on constantly during his childhood, and he had sat through it many times with his family. As an adult, he had watched every adaptation. He knew the story’s skeleton well and could still recall the key turning points. Improvising the detailed scenes and dialogue on the spot was roughly the same level of difficulty as painting a grand vision in front of investors with PowerPoint slides in hand.
This was also one reason he was not particularly worried about anyone accusing him of "borrowing" someone else’s material. Apart from the key plot points, everything else would have to be invented on the spot. No two versions could e out the same.
Seeing the small audience around him register curious expressions, Ding Songyan exhaled quietly.
At the very least, The Legend of the White Snake did not exist in Dingjiang Prefecture.
When he had listened to romances and heroic sagas earlier, there had only been stories of celestial maidens descending to the mortal world and falling in love with men, not love and grievance between yao and humans.
The open ground here was relatively quiet. No gong-and-drum performers nearby, no martial demonstrators calling out for a crowd. This was by design. The market had arranged things so that the quieter, literary trade occupied one section, the loud and physical trade another, with a buffer of middle-ground sellers in between, so neither disturbed the other.
Standing in the open space, Ding Songyan felt very little of what might be called nerves. It felt, in a strange and disorienting way, exactly like bringing up a projector and opening his slides in front of investors.
The familiar posure settled over him, as though he were in another life—one that had been for some time now.
Having identified the girl with the upturned eyes and pointed chin as his most promising potential "investor," Ding Songyan began slowly.
"In ancient times, in the southwestern lands, at the foot of Qingcheng Mountain, there lived a small white snake..."
He set the tale in ancient times from the first line, to spare himself any awkward questions later about where Qingcheng Mountain or West Lake, or Jinshan Temple was.
I genuinely don’t know. It’s all from ancient times.
He opened with the story of Xu Xian’s first incarnation saving the little white snake’s life. To fill out the details, having long since forgotten how the television drama had handled it, he stitched in a scene of his own invention. The near-frozen snake had been tucked inside Xu Xian’s clothing and warmed with body heat.
From there, the white snake cultivated in her cave for a thousand years, finally achieved enlightenment, and took human form. Guided by a bodhisattva, she set out with Xiaoqing to find the reincarnated Xu Xian to repay the kindness, so that the karmic debt between them might be settled.
As he spoke, Ding Songyan kept an eye on the girl in the white dress. She was listening with absolute attention. Even her breathing had gone soft and quiet, her dark eyes bright and luminous without a hint of tears, yet somehow full of them.
Good reception so far... The potential "investor" is engaged... Ding Songyan grew more confident.
He felt that the shift from the Lady Bai seeking Xu Xian merely to repay a kindness to something deeper needed proper scenes to bridge it in order to outline the emotional shift. But he could not remember enough detail, so he quietly folded in a few episodes from his own romantic history. He reworked things he had done for an ex-girlfriend that had genuinely moved her and wove it into the story.
First, a chance meeting at West Lake where they sheltered from rain in the same boat. An umbrella was offered and a name exchanged in parting. Then, Lady Bai claimed she had e to Lin’an to copy Buddhist sutras at a temple in fulfillment of a vow, but, being afraid of actually going herself, she could only excuse herself as unwell. Xu Xian, pitying her "frailty," went to the temple himself and spent many days copying the sutras on her behalf. And then, after much had passed between them. The two of them, one human and one yao, both having developed feelings, went to pray at a great tree said to be powerful for matters of the heart. They found each other’s eyes at exactly the same moment they looked up.
At this point Ding Songyan decided to leave things there. If the goal was to build a connection with the girl over time, the worst thing he could do was finish too quickly. Why wrap it up in a day? A week would be the minimum, two weeks better still. Seeing each other every day until they became familiar faces to one another.
And then, if something came up and she had the means to help, she would be far more likely to help someone she knew than a stranger. The answer to that was obvious.
For the closing, Ding Songyan felt the day’s telling had gone a little too smoothly. The story had not offered enough twists and turns yet. He had already drawn several dozen listeners, but mostly through the novelty of his style and the freshness of the human-yao romance as a subject. If he let Xu Xian and Lady Bai sail into marriage without incident today, the audience would have no particular reason to return tomorrow.
With this in mind, and especially with the aim of giving the girl in the white dress a reason to return, Ding Songyan changed course. Before the wedding could take place, he brought Fahai into the fold, the monk pausing outside the inn where Lady Bai and Xiaoqing had once stayed, muttering to himself that he sensed yao energy.
He watched the concern spread simultaneously across the faces of his listeners and ended right there.
"As the saying goes, West Lake is lovely in March. Spring rain is like wine, the willows like smoke. Fated ones meet from afar. Unfated ones cannot hold hands even face to
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