Pain. 

For the last three days, TaiFeng had experienced every type of pain. Physical and emotional. 

First when she was dragged to Nightless City as a captive and then had to go through being made into Wen Xu's concubine.

Second was when she was publicly shamed and disgraced in the courtyard and fighting through being whipped senseless. 

All she had were regrets and unrequited love, which seemed to be the story of her rather short life.

Her first life wasn't the greatest, but she had such high hopes for this one. She wanted to see what her future would be like, she wanted to get married, start a family and watch her husband with her children. She hoped and prayed that the person that she would spend the rest of her life with would be a certain Lan, but deep down she knew that would be impossible.

Even if she was a so-called Bodhisattva, what did it matter if the Lans would never accept her? At the end of the day, it was just an unobtainable, maladaptive pipe dream.

I mean, who was she kidding!? Even if Xichen cared for her, he saw her as a friend and a friend only. He deserved a perfect, well-mannered wife that came from a prominent cultivating family.

Not an unmannerly, problematic hellraiser with a dirty and tragic past! He deserved someone a thousand times better than her, and she knew it!

As long as she was here, she was destined to be forever alone.

FOREVER ALONE, FOREVER ALONE, FOREVER ALONE!!!

 It was practically her mantra, wasn't it?! 

 After all, the only people that wanted to marry her were crazed, psychoneurotics!

 But even then, it didn't matter, if she could just devote herself completely to her sect, surely that would numb the pain. Wouldn't it? Even if she couldn't be with Xichen, couldn't she just love him from afar?

Sometimes that's enough, to love someone from far away, even if she wasn't with him, surely if he was happy, she would be as well? 

Maybe that was her fate? To love from afar, to just help people with their own problems like a fairy godmother? 

Did she even really belong here? The only reason she was here is that she thought the ways things ended were unfair for too many people, but what happens after the war is won?

When Shijie gets married and raises her son. When Wei Ying and Lan Zhan find happiness without going through all the hardships, when Huaisang lives happily with his Da-ge and A'Yao finds peace and acceptance, AND EVERYTHING WORKS OUT JUST FINE FOR EVERYONE ELSE!

Where did that leave her? The by-product, the side effect of everyone's happiness, what was she supposed to do? Perhaps that would be the end of everything, perhaps she would just evaporate into thin air like she never even existed, maybe all of this wasn't even real. 

At the end of the day, she was literally living in a fantasy, her siblings, and friends were just characters in a drama.

Everything she had experienced was thought up by some  Chinese BL author who probably didn't even have a clue as to what was going on at the moment!

Possibly this was all some sort of twisted dream? Or maybe she was in a coma, and she was lying in a hospital bed being pumped full of drugs that have major hallucinatory side effects?

Either way, she wanted to wake up. What was the point of being stuck here if she couldn't even manage to change things like she so desperately wanted to?!

She was in the burial mounds, not Wei Ying. Demonic cultivation was the only reason the war was won, and because she majorly screwed with the timeline, they would lose. 

Everything she had come to care about would crumble, and in the end, it was entirely her fault.

 And then. Oh, then to top it all off! The grand finale! The spectacular conclusion!

 When she fell down, no, when she was brutally thrown into the Burial Mounds. 

But, wait. She wasn't the type to give up this easily, she had cheated death once, and she could do it again.

She had to see this through to the end, she just had to, she had to see her siblings live a good life, and she had to see her friends find happiness. 

And she had to exact revenge on those who had wronged her.

She could do this, she was a woman, for Christ's sake! She could just bottle up her emotions and deal with them some other time.

Getting even now, mental breakdown later.

But even though she had the spirit of a wild horse, her body was far too damaged. Truth be told, she couldn't feel anything, and half of her bones were broken. Her body was littered with wounds and deep gashes and soaked in blood, some of it from others, most of it hers.

Her limbs were twisted, and her head lay still, speared in the ground by her once beautiful hairpins that seemed to have sealed her fate. She looked up at the grim sky, the smoke, and the trees blocking her view of the outside world.

The air was rife and thick with resentful energy, as it slowly climbed its way into her pierced lungs she couldn't scream, she couldn't talk, and she could barely think anymore.

As she lay on the dead leaves and discarded skeletons, her heart beat slower and slower until there was nothing else to listen to.

As her face grew pale, and her blood started to drain, a voice rang out inside her head that was already decaying and crumbling down into nothingness. 

But fate wasn't done with her just yet.

All that rage had triggered a response from the one thing she didn't account for, the one outcome that she didn't foresee.

If a weapon that converts resentful energy into spiritual gets thrown into the Burial Mounds, what happens?

Also, what if said weapon, just so happens to gorily pierce the skull of the master of the weapon, what would the outcome be? Who also happens to have the capacity to store monumental amounts of energy, then what happens?

All those sounded like extremely specific, for the most part unfathomable, hypotheticals to TaiFeng. But that was before the Burial Mounds. 

All that pain and resentment coursed through her veins, in more ways than one.  If she thought that falling from fifty feet into hell on earth was the most painful thing she had ever been through, she was wrong. 

"I can give you one more chance. The pain that you're going to feel will be like nothing you've ever felt before. After this, we part ways forever."

"So be it."

Meanwhile, in Gusu, thunder and lightning tore across the dark and gloomy sky, sending Cloud Recesses into darkness.

None of them had ever witnessed a storm such as this. It made their bones shake and they all felt uneasy.

As a certain Lan looked out from his window out the raging storm, he was reminded of a certain somebody.

While everyone else stayed far away from all the windows, he looked out with fondness and familiarity.

It's always the oddest of things that remind us of the people we hold dear.
Be it a stop sign on a memorable street, or a statue in a town square.

It's not always physical things either. The smell of freshly cooked dumplings, the sound of an ink stick  being ground, a particular shade of green in a garden that always seems to make memories start flooding back.

But to him, she was both none and all of those things.

To him, she was a bolt of yellow lightning in the pouring rain, tearing its way across the grey, cloud-filled sky.

That was it. TaiFeng was just like a lightning storm. The more he thought about it, the more it fit.

She was strong and powerful, and she would occasionally lash out, but it was soon gone in a flash.

She always seemed to know exactly where she was going, unbeknownst to everyone else. She was almost impossible to predict.

She was fast too, so fast that if you blinked you just might miss her, in more ways than one.

In the beginning, she seemed like she was five steps ahead of everyone else.

While they were having fun, she was preparing for war.

While they were busy playing cards, she was having a game of three-dimensional chess with Wen Rouhan.

But even after Xichen found out about her clairvoyance, he still had the same amount of respect for her.

It didn't matter if you knew that something was going to happen if you can't devise a plan to counteract it.

Seeing into the future wasn't as easy of a gift to have as most people might think.

But he knew that if anyone was deserving of it, it was TaiFeng.

She was probably the only person in the world who could handle it the way she did.

She was stronger than her peers, despite not coming from a cultivator's family, and yet she stayed modest.

It came across as though she could carry the whole world on her back, and still brush it off and say that it was effortless.

But that wasn't really the case. He saw it, and so did her siblings.

It was actually pretty astonishing just how similar she was to her adoptive siblings.

She was thoughtful and considerate like Yanli, but fierce and prideful like Jiang Cheng.

She was innovative and resourceful like Wuxian but seemed to inherit his habit of brushing off pain like it was an insignificant issue.

It was almost comical in a way. She had known them for just over a year, and yet they acted like they had all known each other from birth.

But, the best things in life don't seem to last as long as we want them to.

As the storm died down and the rain discontinued,  Xichen ventured out and roamed Cloud Recesses, letting his feet guide him.

As he walked through pagodas and pavilions, he stopped when he reached the library.

Opening the doors, his eyes wandered over to a desk on the right, and memories of TaiFeng played in his mind.

She constantly used to come here, and she would always sit in the exact same spot.

For hours she would engross herself in books, and soak up the history.

Reminiscing, he flipped through the books on the desk but stopped when a crumpled-up piece of paper caught his eyes.

Clustered away in the corner anyone else would have overlooked it.

Taking the parchment and gently unfolding it, he found an exquisite painting of the scene just outside the window.

The magnolia trees were captured in perfect likeness. The shadow was etched out to perfection, as the sun was high in the sky. Every brush stroke was elegant and the artist seemed to have put their heart and soul into it.

Glancing to the top left corner, his heart ached when he saw the familiar sharp and precise calligraphy. Even more so when he read the words.

"Light is always effortless to love. So I'll just wait for someone who enjoys the shade."

Brushing his hands over the familiar penmanship, he sighed a heavy sigh.

As tears freely flowed down his face, he remembered the woman who stole his heart.