Longing for You: A Love That Came Too Late

Her name is Wen Xiaoliu, an itinerant doctor at Huichun Hall in Qingshui Town who squats on the doorstep to drink mutton soup.

She has a carefree nature, a sharp tongue but a soft heart, and a knack for making potent poisons.

His name is Xiang Liu, the white-haired strategist of the Chenrong Army, a nine-headed demon who has killed countless people.

When they first met, he said, “Be my poison doctor for a day, and I’ll protect you for a day.”

She took him at his word.

For four years, she went into the mountains each month to bring him medicine, and he waited for her at the edge of a cliff. He gave her a silver bell he had carved badly and said, “It was meant for you all along.” She tied it at her waist and wore it for four years.

He didn’t know that the inside of the bell was engraved with the character “Bei.”

She didn’t know it had been entrusted to him by someone else for four hundred years.

Later, she discovered that he knew everything: that she was the daughter of Xiling Heng, that she was waiting for someone, and that between them lay a gulf they could never cross, divided by the fate of their nations and a blood feud, with nine lives not enough to bridge it.

But he said nothing.

He only came out of the pine forest on the night her fever spiked and said, “I was afraid you’d die.”

When she planted the love insect, he let its glimmering light burrow into his heart, so that from then on she could hear his heartbeat.

When she turned and walked toward the lights, he stood in the shadows, waiting for her to finish what she had to do and return to Qingshui Town.

Back to Huichun Hall.

Back to his side.

She waited three hundred years, and at last found someone who made her feel she had a place to go.

He waited four hundred years, and at last found someone who asked him, “How long have you been waiting for me?”

This is a story about waiting and coming home.