When the soldiers found Li Buping, he was trimming flowers in the backyard of the Drunken Immortal Pavilion.
Before he could even lower the scissors in his hand, he was surrounded by the Golden Guard who had burst in.
"Li Buping?" the leading officer asked coldly.
"The one and only," Li Buping replied. He set down the scissors, brushed non-existent dust from his robes, and wore a somewhat vacant smile on his face. "May I ask what business you gentlemen have with me?"
The officer sneered, "I'm here to arrest you by imperial decree!"
Before the words had fully faded, two soldiers had already stepped forward, roughly pinning Li Buping's arms behind his back.
The madam of the Drunken Immortal Pavilion hurried over at the commotion and was shocked by the scene. "What's going on, officers?"
"Shut your mouth!" the officer barked harshly. "This man has committed the grave crime of deceiving the emperor. If any of you dare speak another word, you will be punished along with him!"
Li Buping was roughly dragged out of the Drunken Immortal Pavilion, drawing a crowd of onlookers along the way.
He maintained a vacant smile throughout, even nodding to an acquaintance as he passed by, as calm as if he were merely heading to a banquet.
In the damp and gloomy prison, Li Buping was thrown into a small cell.
The iron door slammed shut behind him with a heavy, muffled sound.
He brushed his sleeves, surveyed his surroundings, and finally chose a relatively dry corner to sit down.
"Deceiving the emperor?" he murmured to himself, a meaningful smile playing on his lips.
Meanwhile, the decree from Heaven had already been issued. A golden light tore through the clouds and descended directly upon the Purple Cloud Palace.
Wu Zetian knelt to receive the imperial edict as the Heavenly Official read aloud:
"Empress Wu Zetian has shown disrespect to the Heavenly Dao, forcibly altering the four seasons and commanding a hundred flowers to bloom in winter, which is a grave taboo. Though the Peony Immortal broke heavenly laws by bringing rain on her own accord, she acted out of necessity. She is hereby stripped of her position as a flower immortal and demoted to mortal status. The Empress has lost virtue, and as a minor punishment, the hundred flowers shall not bloom for three years."
Wu Zetian knelt on the floor, her nails digging deep into her palms. She suppressed her rage and kowtowed to accept the decree.
After the Heavenly Official departed, Wu Zetian shot to her feet, hurling the imperial decree to the ground.
Her chest heaved violently, and her eyes burned with flames of anger.
"Your Majesty..." Shangguan Wan'er said softly.
"Go!" Wu Zetian turned, her voice as cold as ice. "Take that Li Buping directly to the Wumen Gate and behead him!"
Shangguan Wan'er's heart lurched. "But the Heavenly Emperor just issued a decree..."
"The Heavenly Emperor only said to punish the Peony Immortal. He didn't say I couldn't kill this madman!" Wu Zetian declared fiercely. "He publicly humiliated me. He deserves to die ten thousand times over!"
At high noon, the sun blazed in the sky.
When Li Buping was escorted to the execution ground, a crowd of curious onlookers had already gathered. He was still dressed in his silk robe, though now it was dirty and tattered.
Strangely, his expression remained calm, even tinged with anticipation.
As the executioner raised the gleaming executioner's blade, Li Buping suddenly looked up at the sky, a strange smile on his lips.
"The time has come!" the supervising officer commanded.
The blade flashed, and blood sprayed. The onlookers gasped; some covered their eyes, others craned their necks for a better view.
But at that moment, something bizarre happened—Li Buping's body, right before everyone's eyes, turned into a wisp of green smoke and vanished!
"A... a monster!" someone screamed.
The supervising officer turned deathly pale and scrambled to report to Wu Zetian.
The Empress flew into a rage upon hearing the news, overturning her desk. "Useless fools! You couldn't even kill one man!"
Unknown to her, in a dilapidated temple outside the city, Ji Hongli was leisurely brushing dust from his sleeves.
Lin Wan leaned against a nearby pillar and asked, eyebrow arched, "Why did you save him?"
"Because he couldn't die," Ji Hongli explained. "Though what he did was indeed worthy of death, the Peony Immortal's predetermined fate has already changed. Therefore, it's best to minimize other changes."
"And what about him?"
"He's already been sent away," Ji Hongli said, gazing into the distance.
Lin Wan nodded, then seemed to remember something, breaking into a sly grin. "Speaking of which, you played the part of Li Buping quite well."
Ji Hongli glanced at her. "What, are you jealous?"
"Hmph," Lin Wan turned away her face.
Meanwhile, back in Luoyang City, Wu Zetian was in a towering rage, ordering a city-wide search for the "demon." The punishment of having no flowers bloom for three years had also cast an unprecedentedly grim atmosphere over the entire city.
No one noticed that starting from a small room in the Dream Immortal Pavilion—
The sunlight filtering through the carved windowpanes suddenly grew sluggish, and the dust motes in the air froze in place.
The two guests who had been drinking wine froze mid-toast, their smiles hardening into bizarre masks. Their wine glasses gradually lost their luster, the amber liquor turning cloudy before finally fading into grayish-white.
This eerie stillness spread like ripples on water.
A maid in the hallway with a tray of fruit was frozen mid-step, unable to move her foot forward; the musician downstairs had his fingers frozen on the strings, the music abruptly cut off; even a sparrow on a windowsill, about to take flight, became a gray, motionless silhouette.
The entire brothel fell into a deathly silence. Color was fading from every corner.
The vermilion pillars turned dark brown, the emerald hangings became pallid, and even the girls' brightly colored dresses became monochrome gray shadows.
This fading spread like a plague to the streets.
The street vendor with his wares open-mouthed could not make a sound; children playing chase remained in their poses but couldn't move an inch. The Luo River stopped flowing, and the reflections of the buildings on its surface gradually blurred as if erased by an invisible hand.
Deep in the palace, Wu Zetian was reviewing memorials.
Her vermilion brush suddenly paused, a single red drop of ink hanging from the tip, refusing to fall. The Empress looked up in confusion, discovering the entire hall had fallen into an eerie stillness.
The curtains no longer swayed, the candle flames no longer flickered, and even her personal maids had become frozen statues.
"Someone!" she cried out sharply, but couldn't hear her own voice.
Fear crept into the heart of this iron-fisted empress for the first time.
She tried to rise but found her body would not obey. The golden threads on her dragon robe lost their luster one by one, the memorials on her desk turned to grayish-white paper. Finally, even the pearls on her phoenix crown dimmed and lost their light.
All of Luoyang was becoming a fading ancient painting.
Streets, palaces, trees, pedestrians—all were frozen in their final moments, gradually losing all color until only varying shades of gray remained.
Even the sky began to change.
The originally azure sky, as if washed with water, slowly turned white.
The clouds stood motionless, birds frozen mid-flight.
Even the sun lost its heat and light, becoming a pale disk hanging in the sky.
Lin Wan closed her eyes, sensing everything around her, then turned to Ji Hongli, who was looking at the sky with eager anticipation.
"Are you confident?"
"Not particularly. It's my first time facing something like this!"
"What about that girl, Baili?"
"Sent to the Spirit Realm with her handmaiden!"
"Good."
The two watched the bizarre changes in the sky—
"It's coming!"
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