[Author’s note: A nonsensical little prologue. If you’d like a bit of a heads-up going in, read closely; if you’d rather keep more of the mystery, feel free to skip it.]

Jinghua University, the most prestigious institution in the nation of Huaxia, sits just north of the heart of Jinghua City. Centuries of trials and weathering had steeped it in a deep reserve of history and culture, earning it a weighty place among the great universities of the world. To be admitted to Jinghua was the dream and the pride of nearly every student in Huaxia.

The campus carried both the grand bearing of an imperial garden and the delicate charm of the southern watercountry. Ancient trees towered overhead, casting green shade everywhere; the garden views shifted with every step, more than the eye could take in. Pavilions and terraces stood in classical elegance, ringed by hills and water, threaded through with causeways and little islets.

The summer sun blazed down, and the ceaseless flow of people lent the already sweltering air an extra edge of fervor. Today was the day another class of freshmen arrived at Jinghua. The stream of cars and bodies ran on without end, yet stayed perfectly orderly, never once tipping into chaos. Nine out of ten new students showed up with parents or family in tow — but he came alone.

He looked seventeen or eighteen, with a sharply cut face. Tall and lean, he walked at an unhurried pace, chin tilted slightly up toward the glaring sun, a stray lock of hair falling carelessly across his forehead, brows dark as if painted on. Behind his heels, a modestly sized suitcase rolled lazily along in his wake. There was a strange magnetism to him — especially that offhand smile at the corner of his mouth and the flicker of something wickedly playful that sparked now and then in his eyes, giving him an appeal that was hard to put into words.

Unlike the other new arrivals, he wasn’t drinking in the campus’s enchanting scenery with wide-eyed excitement. Not a ripple of feeling crossed his face — only that faint, barely-there smile lingering there. He lowered his slightly lifted head, leveled his gaze forward, and the corner of his mouth curved up quietly… So. He’d finally made it here too.

“Um… excuse me, you look like an upperclassman — could you point me to Dorm Building 39…? Huh? Wait, you’re a freshman too?”

Turning toward the voice, he found a lean-faced, bookish-looking young man. The guy wasn’t short by any means, but he still stood half a head below him — though the suitcase he dragged was easily twice the size of his own, and he had a big pale-colored backpack slung over his shoulders on top of it. Clearly, the moment the lean young man spotted the suitcase, he’d realized he’d just asked directions from a fellow freshman.

“I’m looking for Building 39 too. Want to go together?” he answered with a casual smile.

That breezy, easy smile was infectious. The lean young man nodded quickly and hurried a few steps closer. “Yeah, sure… Oh, right — I’m Liu Hua. Virtual Electronics department.”

“Ye Tianxie. Same department.” His reply stayed just as offhand.

Ye Tianxie? What a weird name. Liu Hua muttered inwardly, then said, brightening: “Whoa! Talk about fate — maybe we’ll even end up in the same room…”

The Jinghua campus was enormous. They strolled under the blazing sun for a good while, crossing nearly half of it before they finally reached the area where the dorms stood. Liu Hua kept scrounging up things to talk about the whole way, and while Ye Tianxie answered every question put to him, he never once started a conversation himself. His gaze stayed calm and fixed ahead, as if searching for something — or perhaps that was simply his nature.

“Excuse me, you look like an upperclassman — could you tell me how to get to Dorm Building 39?” Liu Hua flagged down a bespectacled guy who was clearly older, asking politely.

“Oh — go around Chengze Lake over there, then past two more buildings… actually, forget it, let me just take you. The layout here is a maze; it takes ages to learn. Follow me.” The bespectacled guy pushed the frames up his nose and led the way.

“Thanks a lot, then.”

“Don’t mention it. We’ve all been freshmen once.”

Chengze Lake was one of the sixteen shallow lakes scattered across the Jinghua campus. Even in the depths of summer a cool breeze drifted off it, and the refreshing air from the shore could be felt far away. Emerald willow branches swayed in the gentle wind, and every so often a leaf would drift down to the surface, rippling softly back and forth with the wavelets. When a breeze stirred, the water shimmered all at once with scales of light, shifting reflections playing off one another in endless variation — a beauty almost too much to take in.

And yet this scenery, which by all rights should have been breathtaking, was thrown utterly into shadow by another sight set against it.

Liu Hua’s feet stopped without his willing it, his whole body going rigid. His hand loosened on the suitcase without his noticing, letting the heavy thing topple over at his feet — and he never registered it at all.

His strange reaction brought Ye Tianxie to a halt as well. Following the line of his gaze, Ye Tianxie’s eyes — calm as still water until now — suddenly caught a flicker of stirred, uncommon light. Softly, inwardly, he murmured: No wonder…

By the shore of Chengze Lake stood a dreamlike woman, still and silent. She wore a pale blue dress that flowed with a lustrous sheen, draping lightly over the graceful curves of her figure. The hem was overlaid with a near-transparent gauze of silver, sheer as ice-silk, hanging about her skirts like a wisp of mist — dancing in the breeze, drifting at her side in patterns that rippled like water. A cascade of thick hair spilled past her waist, and the light off the lake played over a face of jade and snow so serenely, unearthly elegant that it made the picture-perfect lakeside itself seem drab by comparison. From where they stood they could see only her profile — yet whoever laid eyes on her, even for the first time, felt as though a great stone had dropped into the lake of their heart, sending out endless spreading ripples.

Her beauty was nothing like that of ordinary lovely women. It was ethereal, transcendent — noble and holy, an illusory perfection, like an immortal banished from the heavens. Standing there by the water, she might have been a lake goddess who had suddenly manifested at its edge. To look at her was to feel, quite naturally, a dreamlike sense of unreality — the certainty that though she had appeared in the mortal world, she surely did not belong in this dust and dross of a place, unworthy as it was of her. From a distance her skin looked lustrous as ice and snow, catching the glittering play of light off the water, more dazzling even than frost gleaming under a winter sun. Eyes like the bright moon, lips like pink cherries… Her fine crescent-moon brows, her clear luminous eyes bright as rippling water, her smooth jade cheeks whiter than snow, her soft petal-like lips — any one of these features, granted to an ordinary woman, would have set her apart from the crowd. Here they were all gathered, flawlessly, on a single face too beautiful to belong to this world.

A fairy. That was the word that leapt into everyone’s mind the first time they saw her. Looking at her, one could believe that in this world so crowded with heavy paint and powder, real fairies truly did exist. All of heaven and earth seemed wrapped, because of her, in layer upon layer of rich, fragrant, otherworldly haze — a mist no one could walk out of, and no one wished to leave. This extraordinary, breath-stopping beauty had no business belonging to a mortal world so stained by all things worldly.

Her gaze brushed lightly over the water, indifferent to any eyes fixed upon her. Her black hair, pouring down like a lovely waterfall, swayed faintly in the breeze — smooth as satin, bright enough to mirror a face, glowing with a hazy sheen against her cool, snow-bright skin. Together with the irresistible, dreamlike aura that radiated from her, it drained all the color from everything around her.

“A fairy… she’s a fairy…” Liu Hua’s soul had already flown off to who-knows-where. His eyes were wide, staring dead ahead, and in his gaze there was room for nothing but that dreamlike figure. In all his life he had never been so utterly lost to himself.

The bespectacled guy’s gaze went blank for a moment too, then he snapped it back like a bolt of lightning, grabbed Liu Hua and hauled him around, and thumped him on the arm. “Snap out of it. Let’s go — your dorm’s right over there.”

“Uh… huh?” Liu Hua came to as if surfacing from a dream. He grabbed hold of the bespectacled guy, babbling. “S-senior — that fairy… no, I mean, that girl, she… who is she? What’s her name?”

The bespectacled guy wore an I-knew-it look, but only shook his head and said calmly, “Her… it’s enough that you’ve seen her. You’re better off not knowing her name — and better still not entertaining any ideas about her. She’s not someone people like us can dare to hope for. Of course, if you’ve made your peace with dying, then by all means, go ahead and try.”

“This… don’t tell me she’s got a boyfriend — and one with serious connections?” Liu Hua asked uneasily, even as a hollow ache of loss welled up in him. A mortal fairy who could steal a man’s soul with a single glance — anyone would want to keep her for himself, and even knowing full well such a dream could never come true, the thought that a woman like this might already be spoken for pressed down on the heart with an almost painful weight. He forced himself not to turn and look at her again, afraid he’d lose himself once more and be unable to tear his eyes away.

“Nope.” The bespectacled guy shook his head briskly, pushing up his glasses out of habit. “Her very first day at Jinghua, she set off a huge commotion. Guys wanting to court her — too many to count, plenty of them with impressive pedigrees, naturally. But before long, there wasn’t a single suitor left… Take a look at that guy over there.”

Following the small gesture he made, they looked toward a stone bench a dozen-odd meters from the woman, where a burly man — burly and unmistakably fat with it — stood leaning against a willow, eyes half-lidded, staring at the tips of his own shoes. He wasn’t just fat and thick-built; his height was just as startling, easily pushing two meters at a rough glance.

“That big fat guy?” Liu Hua asked, puzzled.

The bespectacled guy’s eyes went wide and he hurriedly dropped his voice. “…He hates being called fat more than anything. If he’d heard what you just called him, believe me — you’d be going straight into Chengze Lake!”

“Does he… have big connections?” Liu Hua shrank his neck in a little.

“His temper’s famously violent. In all of Jinghua, not one person dares provoke him lightly. As for his connections…” The bespectacled guy’s voice dropped even lower. “Oh, nothing much… he’s only the sole son of the supreme leader of our nation of Huaxia.”

“W-what?!” Liu Hua’s eyes shot wide open.

“Rumor has it he courted her too and got turned down all the same. He didn’t throw his weight around to force the issue — but anything he can’t have, he won’t let anyone else touch either. So forget making a move on her; the moment any man dares exchange more than a word or two with her, he’ll make sure the guy regrets it for the rest of his life… Anyway. Let’s go. Even if I hadn’t told you all this, you’d have figured it out soon enough. With this new batch of freshmen, who knows how many fools who don’t know their own limits will end up suffering on her account.” The bespectacled guy let out a light sigh.

Liu Hua fell silent. In Huaxia, who could outrank the supreme leader… and who would dare cross the supreme leader’s son?

Ye Tianxie, who hadn’t said a word this whole time, suddenly started forward, dragging his suitcase — heading, of all directions, straight toward the fairy-like woman.

“Hey — Tianxie!” Liu Hua reached out on reflex to pull him back, but suddenly his vision blurred strangely, and the hand that should have caught Ye Tianxie in an instant closed on empty air. His body went stiff; the sensation was like throwing a wound-up punch at a wall, only for the wall to vanish, an unpleasant jolt surging through him. In the brief moment he stood there dazed, Ye Tianxie had already reached the woman’s side.

“Hey there, beautiful — think you could show me the way to Dorm 39?” Ye Tianxie waggled his eyebrows, admiring that dreamlike, celestial face up close.

Liu Hua and the bespectacled guy both felt a sudden urge to bang their heads against a wall. That lazy posture, that flippant look in his eyes, that painfully corny pickup line… They could already picture what came next: the fairy would shoot him one cold, dismissive glance, and that fat guy lurking like a tiger over its prey would come charging over to punch him straight into Chengze Lake.

But not one bit of what they’d braced for came to pass. Under their conflicted stares, the woman — that immortal exiled to the mortal dust — gently turned her exquisite, jade-carved neck, her celestial face lifting toward Ye Tianxie and his thoroughly punchable expression. Her glistening eyes rippled with an uncanny light that stole the very soul. And slowly, the corners of her lips pressed into a lovely, delicate curve…

In that instant the whole campus fell as silent as a ghost realm, nothing but the soft rustle of wind through the willows. The light smile she revealed was like a shaft of sunlight breaking through a deep, secluded valley to spill across the earth — so beautiful no one could look away. Slowly she extended a hand and, before countless disbelieving eyes, laid it upon Ye Tianxie’s. Her fair wrist was pale nearly to translucence, each exquisitely wrought jade finger crystalline and delicate, the skin from wrist to fingertip tender as first snow — one could only imagine the utterly silken softness of her touch.

“I’ll take you there.” She took his hand and turned with elegant grace. Ye Tianxie gave a light smile, closed his own hand around hers instead, and stepped out half a pace ahead of her.

Her voice was faint and ethereal, as if drifting in from the edge of the sky. The heavens, until now veiled by a thin haze of cloud, seemed all at once to clear. Bathed in the warm radiance of the sun, the sight of her retreating, slender figure was such that even “peerless in ravishing grace” could scarcely capture a fraction of her splendor. Liu Hua and the bespectacled guy stared blankly after the two departing figures, thoroughly undone in the gentle breeze, and it was a long, long while before either of them came back to himself.

And the big fat guy — at some point no one had noticed — had already turned away, gazing off at the scenery of Chengze Lake without a care in the world, as if he hadn’t seen a single thing of what just happened.

(End of Prologue)