She forgot the oath under the sweet-scented osmanthus tree. He remembered it for fourteen years.
Shen Wantang traveled from a modern show to become the youngest daughter of the Shen family of the imperial businessman. When she woke up, she only remembered one thing: how to hold a needle.
She made Nishangge the most popular new brand name in the capital. Her peers were jealous, dandies found fault, and ladies made things difficult for her. She worked on it one by one, modified it one by one, and never bowed her head.
Then the general came back.
Lu Beichen, her childhood sweetheart and a distinguished general in Zhenbei. He walked in wearing a dusty Xuan robe, holding in his arms the sweet-scented osmanthus sachet she had given him eight years ago.
She doesn't remember.
He said: "Then let's get to know each other again."
He came every day and sat by the window watching her draw pictures and change clothes, day after day. She asked him why and he said, "Because you are here."
She thought her life could go on like this.
Until there was an imperial edict granting marriage and the sentence "I only treat you as my sister", a mouthful of blood dyed the skirt of her clothes red. The imperial doctor diagnosed the poison - a chronic poison that had corroded the whole body. She contracted it when she saved him from being shot by an arrow.
On the night of the general's wedding, she got into a carriage and left the capital.
A year later, he and Li resigned and rode south, where they found an osmanthus courtyard in a small town in the south of the Yangtze River and an unnamed grave under the tree.
There was only one line in the letter: "Beichen, it's snowing in the south of the Yangtze River. No need to come."
He guarded that grave all his life.
Every winter when it snowed in the south of the Yangtze River, he would whisper, "Wantang, it's snowing again in the south of the Yangtze River."
A story of forgetting and remembering, missing and watching. Some people forget it forever. Some people are remembered for a lifetime.
