She had felt like a part of her had been torn from her, and she was sent crashing down on the floor of the boat. Memories wallowed inside her, and this time, the vision was crystal-clear.
"What's your name?" she had asked a young man, appearing to be the mortal Fang Yiqi.
"I don't want to tell you," the man laughed, and ran. She followed. He climbed on top of a stack of wood, munching on a straw.
"What about you?"
"I don't want to tell you either," she grumbled. "You're so immature that I don't think I want to talk to you right now." With that, she walked away.
"Wait, don't go!" the man hopped down the wood stack and called after her, causing her to turn back. She had turned around so abruptly, that she failed to notice their proximity, and her lips met with that of the mortal's.
"What is the meaning of this?" she demanded. "How could you behave so immorally?"
"It was you who kissed me," the man poked back at her. "By the laws of this world, you kissed me, so you need to take responsibility and offer yourself to me in marriage!"
She was stunned by his straightforwardness, and then he kissed her again to prove his point. From that day onwards, they became an item, and she witnessed vividly, the audacity of their actions, and how they had passionately come together as one. The deed had been done secretively in a secluded hut during the heat of summer.
Qiwan could not remember why she was in the mortal realm, but she was embarrassed by her past with the mortal. How could she even face Yingshang, now that she had discovered her body which she had thought to be pure and chaste, had been corrupted with sin?
The memories continued with the disappearance of the mortal, and after a number of weeks, she had sought the courage to hunt him down. To her shock, he appeared to be incapable of recognizing her. "I don't know you."
He had said those words with such contempt.
"Fang Yiqi, it's me, Wen Qiwan!" she tried to convince him, but he just pushed her away.
"I said, I don't know you. I don't know any Wen Qiwan."
Her heart shattered. She felt she had lost her spirit, and she wandered around the forest aimlessly, deeply traumatised for a few months. The last of her memories had been the pain of a sharp object pricking into her, and then she lost consciousness.
These were the only memories that were clear to her, while some of the other images she could see were fuzzy. The Immortal Physician had explained to her that since she had encountered an emotional ordeal of some kind, and in addition, she had been sleeping for two thousand years, and hence it would take some time for her to recover her memories.
She opened her eyes to a concerned-looking Yingshang fanning and shaking her, beckoning for her to wake up. If this had happened earlier, she would have been delighted to see that Yingshang was worried about her. But now with the actualization that she had sinned from carnal desire with another, she felt unworthy of Yingshang's love.
"I'm fine," she muttered and turned her visage away from him.
"You were out cold for some time, Wan'er," he said. "Are you sure that you are okay?"
"I am," she stated. "What was that flash of lightning about?"
Yingshang then told her, "It appears that a celestial being has been reborn in the mortal realm. I believe this being has a connection to you, and this was why you collapsed."
She stared at him coldly. "How could I have a connection with this being?"
"Wan'er, have you forgotten your innate power?" He sighed. She shrugged and asked him in return, "Did you know me before, God of Mischief? Do you know what powers I have?"
"You can harness power from non-living things to create life," he said. "You can also give rise to objects, conjure out of the air and perform many things regular immortals are incapable of."
"Remind me how we first met," she demanded. "You seem to know too much of me for your own good."
He paused, and watched the now-empty skies, articulately pronouncing each word. "It was at the imperial library. You were assisting your father then, managing the sacred library and I sneaked in to read your father's secret collection. Needless to say, you found me and told me to get out. You were only 10,000 years old then. I remembered how strict you looked when you ordered me to leave the library."
"I do remember this vaguely," she said. "But you didn't look the same as now. What happened after that?"
He stared at her playfully. "I snatched your handkerchief and kept it as a collective item for myself. I apologize, but it has accompanied me all these years."
She gazed at him doubtfully, and then he retrieved a small piece of silk with embroidered corners containing the character 'Wan'.
"You should keep it then," she told him. "It has high sentimental value to you, and I no longer like that design."
He reached to pull her to him, but she turned around and introduced some distance between them. "No, Brother Shang," she said firmly. "I'm not the person you should be looking for." It broke her when she rejected him, but she remembered how she had sinned, and she was rather clueless as to her relationship with Fang Yiqi. Why had he had a relationship with her, then appeared to not know her at all?
"But before this..." Yingshang argued, "You were a willing subject of my kisses."
"People change," she said. "Let me go, God of Mischief. A better woman will come your way. Forget about me."
He teleported in front of her, barring her from making any movement away from him. "Is it because of that mortal? He passed away long ago and has reborn into another world far from us."
She remained speechless, and he stared at her so intensely that she felt he was staring right through her soul. "Yingshang, send me back. Let's forget it all. I was wrong. We don't complement each other, and walking down this unfated path with me is just going to generate pain for both of us."
"Who said I'm giving up, and who said I care about the past?" he shouted at her. "I don't care what happened between you and the dead man in the past because I will be your present and future!"
His statement was so positive and powerful that she was taken aback. She wasn't pure any longer, and what good could it be for him, a royal prince to be with her?
"There won't be any good outcome to this," she told him sadly. "Everything is in the hands of fate, and we can only obey."
"I don't care about fate," he told her and hugged her with all his might. "I will fight the whole world if that is what is needed for me to have you. I, Yingshang, the God of Mischief, and the son of the Jade Emperor, fears no one. I will not stop even if it means destroying the heavens just to be with you. You stole my heart, Wan'er. I won't ever forgive you for that."
She gasped as he rained kisses all over her, moving downwards erotically from her lips to her neck and collarbone, before coming to a stop seeing her bare chest. Her robe had flown open from the gust of wind in the area, revealing an unsightly scar from a likely stab wound on her chest.
"Wan'er, what happened?"