Sang Luo, the Dragon Maiden - Chapter 1

My husband had been acting strangely lately.

The metropolitan examination was approaching, but he didn’t seem the least bit worried, despite being a candidate.

Sanya’s husband in town never put his books down, studying by lamplight late into every night. Mine went out visiting friends from dawn till dusk, then came home, ate, and went straight to bed.

I was beginning to think he must be certain of passing when I woke late one night to find him coming in from outside, trailing the cold. When I asked, he said he hadn’t been able to sleep and had gone to sit in the courtyard.

Afraid he had worked himself into some sort of unhealthy fixation, I started paying closer attention. That was how I discovered he often went out at night.

That evening, I had barely fallen asleep when he called my name several times. Only after getting no response did he quietly dress and slip outside.

Worried something had happened to him, and curious besides, I followed.

As I approached the door, an unfamiliar man’s voice reached me from the courtyard.

“A brilliant plan, Your Highness. You not only found the legendary Dragon Maiden whose blood can cure any illness, but won her trust as well. Commandery Princess Mingyue can finally be saved.”

“But without her heart’s blood, the Dragon Maiden may not have long to live. After all, you and she have—”

On the other side of the door, my husband Chen Jun’s voice was utterly cold.

“It doesn’t matter. She’s merely a creature. Saving Yue’er would be an honor for her.

“If it weren’t for Yue’er, why would a prince like me spare a second glance for such a coarse woman?”

A chill swept through my whole body. I might have been standing in a world of ice and snow.

Their voices seemed suddenly very, very far away, so distant that they blurred into something unreal.

I wiped the tears from my face and returned numbly to bed. The covers were still warm, but I felt so cold that I curled up with my back to the door.

A little later, the door creaked open. Chen Jun stepped softly inside.

“Luo’er… Luo’er…” He called my name as tenderly as ever. When I didn’t respond, he breathed a sigh of relief and lay down again.

I lay facing away from him, my eyes open, for a long, long time.

It was said that there was a Lake Yuexiu on South Mountain, and that a Dragon Maiden lived within it. Her heart’s blood could cure every disease. Kindhearted by nature, she often took human form to help travelers passing through.

Of course, the Dragon Maiden of the legends wasn’t actually a dragon. She was a koi whose scales gleamed crimson gold, like those of a golden dragon.

Golden koi were exceedingly rare, favored by heaven and earth. They could transform into dragons more easily than other fish, which was why they were called Dragon Maidens.

I was the only golden koi in Lake Yuexiu to have awakened to awareness in a thousand years.

I also had a friend named A-Chi, a red koi renowned for her good luck.

The two of us were the only creatures in the lake to have become spirits in all those thousand years.

Lively and bold, A-Chi loved roaming the mountain forests.

She often helped children lost in the mountains, travelers who had collapsed nearby, and villagers whose lives had become so desperate that they wanted to end them.

In time, people began to suspect something. Once, someone nearly exploited her kindness to catch her and make her into soup. After that, she left to travel far afield and seldom showed herself to humans again.

I learned from her experience and became even more cautious. Most days, I scarcely left Lake Yuexiu.

But Uncle Tree said that experiencing all the flavors of human life would help me overcome a bottleneck in my cultivation.

To understand its mysteries, I took the form of a girl who gathered medicinal herbs at the foot of South Mountain, and settled in Dahe Village.

The villagers were simple, honest people. They took good care of me, an orphan girl from elsewhere, so whenever anyone had a headache or a fever, I charged only a token few copper coins for the medicine.

Most of my income came from gathering herbs on South Mountain and selling them to the apothecaries. As a fish born and raised there, I knew the mountain inside out. Finding herbs was a little easier for me than for most people.

But that was as far as it went. With A-Chi’s example before me, I didn’t dare use the slightest magic. To the people of Dahe Village, I was an entirely ordinary girl who happened to be rather nimble.

So I couldn’t understand how Chen Jun had discovered what I was.

My relationship with him had begun with his gentleness, his patience, and his relentless pursuit of me.

In my third year in Dahe Village, a sickly scholar collapsed outside my courtyard gate.

He said he had caught a chill on his way to the examination. In his hurry, he had bought medicine without resting properly. His illness had worsened, and though he had spent all his travel money, nothing helped. Taking the examination was now out of the question.

Chen Jun was a truly gifted actor.

He had looked barely alive, his eyes devoid of hope, like a man whose future was ruined and who no longer wanted to live. So I let him stay.

As he slowly recovered, he insisted his conscience wouldn’t allow him to leave without repaying his medicine by doing odd jobs. I told him it didn’t matter, that he could repay me whenever he had the money, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

The neighbors even called him a fine young man who knew how to repay kindness.

Chen Jun wasn’t very talkative, but he always had a smile on his lips. Whenever a villager came for treatment, he would immediately put down his book and go to greet them, addressing everyone warmly as Auntie or Uncle. There wasn’t a trace of a scholar’s arrogance about him.

He was clever, too. After some initial fumbling, he quickly learned to distinguish the common herbs and could help while I treated patients.

However late I came home from gathering herbs, an oil lamp would be burning in the courtyard. The moment I pushed open the gate, Chen Jun would come out to take my herb basket and serve the food he had kept warm in the pot.

Everything that followed had seemed so natural. A year later, with the villagers playing matchmaker, we married.

Back then, I thought that even spending a whole lifetime beside him in this little mountain village might be rather interesting.

I never imagined that just one year later, all that fragile happiness would burst at a touch, like a brightly colored bubble.