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The legend of the White Serpent

BY LYNN

A long long time ago, a small boy saved a little wound snake in the woods. The snake became a fairy after one thousand years of nurturing. The snake was goodhearted and she wanted to pay for the help of that little boy, who had reincarnated as an intellectual named Xu Xian. So the snake turned herself into a very beautiful maid and went to the human beings' world with her little sister-a green snake fairy. The sisters forged a coincidence of meeting Xu Xian by magic and they met each other on the Broken Bridge. They fell in love at the first sight and later they got married and lived a happy life together.

But a monk, called Fa Hai, whose duty was to destroy the evil creatures in the world of the humans, always fought with the snake wife. However, he failed every time because the wife was more powerful. He devised a cunning plan. He caught the husband instead and kept him in the Jinshan Temple. In order to save her husband, the snake had to flood the temple by the magic, which caused much death. It was so terrible that the God helped Fa Hai to bury the snake under the Leifeng tower(the most famous tower in Hangzhou) as a punishment. As a result she couldn't come out until the tower would collapse. (It did collapsed years ago and we were all very happy about that, but it is rebuilt by the government now, for the tourism)

You can imagine the grief of the husband and he became a monk in the Jinshan Temple at last and accompanied his wife although they could not be together in flesh. They left a son, who was born before the wife was buried, at a home with his aunt's family. Twenty years later, the son had grown up. Being very clever, he excelled at the imperial examination. In ancient China, the one, who got high marks in the exams, can work for the government as an official. Such was the son's destiny. After he learned all about the story of his parents, he kneeled down before the temple and pleaded with the God to release his mother. The son had gathered much influence and managed to persuade God to release the snake (his mother) at last. With the family reunited, the wife, husband and son lived happily ever after.

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