Farewell, Immortal Sword: May We Meet Again as We Did at First

He waited for her for three thousand years.

At last, in Suzhou in 1910, down a narrow lane washed by spring rain, he saw that face again. She was holding an umbrella, crouching to hand a hot bun to a beggar. Her eyes and brows were still Zhao Ling'er's, but she looked at him with nothing more than the politeness due a stranger.

Her name was Su Nianzhen, the clever, stubborn daughter of a declining family of traditional doctors. She remembered nothing of her past life.

He dared not acknowledge her, and could not. The power of the Immortal Sword had long since been sealed away, inch by inch, in his sea of consciousness. He feared the will of Heaven, and feared even more that stirring those memories might shorten her already brief life. So he dropped the character “Xiao” from his name and went by “Li Yao.” He became her helper, her confidant in medicine, and the trusted “Big Brother Li” in her life: a friend, one who would never reveal the truth.

From the rain-soaked alleys of the late Qing to the gunfire of the Xinhai Revolution, from the May Fourth Movement and the Northern Expedition to eight years of war, the land was shattered inch by inch, then reborn inch by inch. She grew from a sheltered young woman into a battlefield doctor. He stayed by her side, watching her grow up and grow old, swallowing the words “Ling'er, we've met far more times than you know” again and again.