When I was eight, an avalanche in the Alps buried everything.
My parents, his father, and the twenty years of devotion his mother had poured into someone she loved: they all perished in that white hell.
When he dug me out of the snow, I had been without a breath for three minutes. He gave me CPR until his hands were raw and bloody, and finally wrested me from the clutches of death.
In my previous life, I spent twenty years unable to understand why he was so cruel to me, or why, as he lay dying, he held my hand and said, “In our next life, let me be the one you save.”
I return to the age of eight. The avalanche hasn’t happened yet, and the cable car is still climbing.
At last, I see the look in everyone’s eyes inside the car:
Lu Xiuyuan’s obsession with my mother, my mother looking away from him, my father smiling, completely oblivious. Lu Linyuan’s hand clasped around my wrist, and the pure, snowlike tenderness of his younger brother, Lu Xianyu, as he looks at me.
And then there is the woman everyone forgot: Bai Zhi, Lu Linyuan’s birth mother, who spent her whole life loving a man who did not love her and died in the coldest winter.
So this disaster was born of an obsession with something unattainable, dragging everyone down with it.
And my task is not only to protect him, but to break this cycle:
To put out the flames, let the snowy mountains endure, and give the boy who died for me and the woman who was betrayed the peace they never had in another world.
