Lu Ting-Pin and Yellow Peony’s Secret Marriage and Punishment is the remembered history of an immortal’s forbidden marriage to a mortal, the judgment that followed, and the family wound that outlasted his sentence. Lu Ting-Pin’s confession turns on a painful reversal: what he had treated as love and protection became concealment and confinement, while the shame of their relationship fell not only on Yellow Peony but on their innocent daughter.

Love, secrecy, and the lake

Lu Ting-Pin says he fell in love with Yellow Peony at a glance. He recalls her beauty through the image of the flower that gave her name, but it was the light in her eyes that held him: when she smiled, he saw innocence and hope. The intimacy of that memory contrasts with the rule he violated. Both knew the relationship was wrong, but only Lu Ting-Pin knew that it was forbidden to him as one of the Eight Immortals. His feelings did not keep him from breaking their strict moral code.

The two married in secret, and Lu Ting-Pin used his powers to conceal their relationship from anyone who might discover it. His deception became harder to sustain as his fellow immortals grew suspicious. He had offered so many implausible explanations for his absences—claiming to be with someone else or in other places—that his accounts no longer persuaded them. The secrecy that had protected the marriage also made its eventual exposure more likely.

His decisive mistake was the lake he conjured around the home he had made with Yellow Peony. Lu Ting-Pin remembers jade-green water and orange fish flickering through gentle waves, but the lake’s purpose was not simply beauty. It barred others from reaching their home. He meant to keep Yellow Peony hidden from the world, in a house surrounded by water that only he could cross by flying. In retrospect, he names this impulse as naïve and wrong: he had treated her as a treasure to keep rather than a person whose life extended beyond his desire to possess and protect her.

Discovery and judgment

A new body of water was conspicuous to the Eight Immortals. During one of Lu Ting-Pin’s questionable disappearances, his seven fellow immortals searched for him, saw the lake from the air, and went to investigate. Because the water had appeared where none had been before, the barrier he had created to hide his marriage instead exposed it. The lake that separated the couple from the world became the evidence that brought Lu Ting-Pin’s deceptions to light.

The Eight Immortals were outraged, but Lu Ting-Pin remembers their disappointment as the force that truly overcame him. Their judgment was swift and painful. They encircled him and raised their powerful talismans; lightning flashed from them and seized him, leaving him helpless in the air. They painfully extracted many of his powers, named his penance, and forbade him ever again to see Yellow Peony or interfere with her life. The punishment therefore imposed more than a loss of power: it severed his access to the woman he had secretly married and placed her future beyond his control.

Yellow Peony and their daughter

Lu Ting-Pin calls the prohibition against seeing Yellow Peony agonizing, yet he also accepts that he had no right to keep intervening in her mortal life. He recognizes the contradiction in his earlier conduct: he had hidden her away as if she were a flower or a pet, although she was a woman with thoughts and a destiny of her own. His remorse is directed not only at the rule he broke but at the damage done by trying to arrange her life around his attachment.

Over time, Lu Ting-Pin heard fragments of what happened after the separation. Yellow Peony gave birth to their daughter, and the marriage brought disgrace; others were aghast at the union. Soon after the child’s birth, the Eight Immortals arranged for Yellow Peony to move to another town and adopt a different identity. They dissolved the marriage, and Yellow Peony was able to remarry and begin a new family and life. These changes offered her a way forward, but they did not erase the consequences of the secret relationship.

Yellow Peony could not bear the sight of her eldest daughter, who constantly reminded her of the betrayal, the shame of the marriage, and the dishonor it had brought. The child endured her mother’s anger and resentment, though Lu Ting-Pin believes that anger should have been directed at him. Their daughter became known as the Unwanted Girl, a name that makes the unequal distribution of the adults’ shame unmistakable: Lu Ting-Pin committed the transgression, but the child bore its daily cost.

Remorse and the event’s consequences

Lu Ting-Pin identifies the harm to his daughter as his most terrible transgression. He remains ashamed, and he doubts that completing his penance could ever make up for the pain caused to a child who was rejected for circumstances she did not choose. His account thus measures the punishment against its limits: the immortals could take his powers and forbid contact, but neither the sentence nor its completion could undo the daughter’s experience of rejection.

As a recalled event, the marriage and punishment also reshape the meaning of Lu Ting-Pin’s past for the listener. The initial image of love, grounded in Yellow Peony’s eyes and smile, gives way to the lake’s isolating function, the public discovery, and the lasting harm to their child. The account does not present separation as the only consequence of forbidden love. It traces how secrecy and possessive protection helped produce a family history in which the most vulnerable person—their daughter—suffered for the choices of her parents.