Dark Erosion, Part One: The Abyss in the Name of Love

At seventeen, Yu Yan was breathtakingly beautiful, like a pale water lily blooming in a shadowy marsh. Her adoption seemed like a stroke of luck, but in truth, day after day, her adoptive mother’s sharp words and stinging cane left their marks. The suffocating touch of her adoptive father as he crept into her room at night had long since turned her world into a desolate wasteland. Her only light came from Jiang Jinyan, her adoptive brother in name only: the boy who saw her as a pure white jasmine and always treated her with tenderness. But he would never know what unspeakable shadows lay behind the door he gently knocked upon. In the long darkness, Yu Yan’s heart slowly transformed into a cool, keen blade. She made top student Gao Chi willingly bow to her, using his intelligence to clear her path. She also turned Jiang Jinyan’s sincere love into a thread in her hands. With a touch that was sometimes near, sometimes distant, and whispers thick with ambiguity, she drew him into a web from which he could not escape. Shortly before turning eighteen, she approached the powerful Feng Shaoting and, through a carefully staged “accident,” buried her past once and for all. At the funeral, fine rain fell as she quietly laid bare the darkness in her adoptive father’s diary before Jiang Jinyan. As he gazed at her with shattered eyes, she smiled like a thin veil of mist.