"After seeing the vast sea, no water can compare;
Scattered from the peak of Mount Wu, there are no other clouds;
Many times I’ve passed through the flowers, yet I spare them no glance;
For half my fate is in cultivation, and the other half, in you."
Ache of Separation is the poem Hua Cheng, or San Lang, cherishes most. It encapsulates the undying love he feels for Xie Lian.
After meeting His Highness, he could find none better.
After admiring the view from Mount Wu, no other landscape could compare.
He could be surrounded by countless beauties, yet none could entice him but his prince.
And at the end of the poem, the very last word that leaves his lips is “you.”
For 800 long years, Hua Cheng waited for Xie Lian. For 800 long years, he watched him suffer, powerless to intervene.
"Watching your beloved be trampled and ridiculed with your own eyes and being unable to do a thing about it. You understand that you are nothing, that you can do nothing. That’s the worst suffering in the world."
He saw him at his lowest: falling into the abyss, betrayed by his companions, crushed by the selfishness of humankind, and even driven to the brink of ending his own life. For 800 years, even in death, he sought to protect him. With this conviction, he tore out his own right eye, rejected the heavens, and “ascended as a Ghost King.”
But no matter what he witnessed, he never stopped cherishing him:
"The one basking in infinite glory is you; the one fallen from grace is also you. What matters is you, not the state of you. No matter what happened in the past, I will never leave you."
Xie Lian is the person who changed his fate, the one who saved Hua Cheng from that wall when everyone else blamed him. He is the one who defied the gods to save the life of a boy born under an ill-fated star.
So no matter how far he has fallen, Xie Lian is still Xie Lian. Hua Cheng loves him completely: his flaws, his glory. He loves the prince who gave him the chance to live, who gave him a reason to live, who fell from grace to save his people, who sank into misery, lower than the earth, who lost faith in humankind—and yet rose again. Finally, the man who held out his hand to him, dressed in his red wedding robes, beneath the Crimson Rain Sought Flower.
"Your Highness, I understand your everything. Your courage, your despair. Your kindness, your pain. Your resentment, your hate. Your wisdom, your foolishness. If I could, I would have you use me as your stepping stone, the bridge you take apart after crossing, the bones you need to trample on your climb, the sinner who endures the agony of a million knives. But I know you won’t allow it." Finally, what greater proof of love could there be than entrusting his own life to his beloved? Despite the risk of betrayal, Hua Cheng never once believed Xie Lian capable of such a thing. In Xie Lian's hands, it is "the safest place in the world."
Such is the true and eternal love presented in Tian Guan Ci Fu.
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