Ashen Snow, Unfrosted

The cruelest thing in this world is that I had to kill you a million times with my own hands before I finally understood the words in your eyes: “I love you.”

She was the coldest blade in the celestial realm; he was frost, willingly fallen into demonhood. She believed that mercilessness was the way of Heaven, but in a kiss on the Execution Immortals’ Terrace, he made her drink his blood. “Does it hurt? This is proof that I love you.”

By the time you learned to feel pain, I had already died for you a thousand times.

He restarted time a thousand times, planting the “frost marrow” back into her heart with his own hands again and again. Not to make her heartless, but so she could go on living after he died. Only when she bit through his lip in an ice cave in the Frostless Realm did she discover the truth: every beat of her heart was an echo of the fragments of his soul.

The twin Demon Venerables forced her to choose, while the frost calamity threatening the Six Realms awaited her end.

But the truth was this: she had to reunite the two versions of him inside herself, binding them with a kiss and using blood as the medium, as they burned together in frost and flame. “Xue Jin, live well. Feel the pain for me.” Those were his final words of love.

A thousand years later, snow fell on plum blossoms, and the wind carried a soft laugh:

Shuang'er, this time, I'll wait for you.