The Tale of the Wood Star Night

Xi Men Xiaobing went to the United States for treatment, only to be ambushed by her enemies at the airport.

A masked man with golden hair and emerald eyes pulled her out of the line of fire. His face was exactly like that of the person who had died before her eyes ten years ago.

But that person was definitely dead.

She chased those ghostfire-colored eyes from New York to a cemetery, from a flower shop to the walls outside a prison, from a night spent plunging into a deep ravine to the shadowy corridors of an octagonal tower. The closer she got, the more confused she became.

The face was a perfect match, but the temperament was different. The voice was identical, but his methods were not.

That person was Dongfang Yachen. He was her older friend, her only friend, and the answer she kept hidden in her heart, too afraid to say aloud. He died in an explosion, right before her eyes, before she had even had a chance to grow up.

She pored over his sketchbook, investigated the naming conventions of a transnational drug cartel, used the empathy he had taught her to understand another person's ruthlessness, and applied her unfailingly accurate talent to make sense of one bizarre encounter after another.

She had no martial arts skills. All she could rely on was her mind.

And that man might be a grim reaper, a machine, a weapon, a god, a demon, a ghost, or an immortal.

He just didn't seem much like a human being.

"Correct. Your reward is a whipping."

Each time she guessed correctly, she came an inch closer to the answer, and the truth grew a little more cruel.

But she had never been wrong.

The entire course of treatment became a journey of growth for them both. He risked his life to save her, and she risked hers to save him.

What she couldn't guess was how her own story would end.

The prequel explains the main story, and the main story echoes the prequel. Two intertwined parallel storylines, classic wuxia, no fantasy elements.

Read it all, and you'll discover that the answer was hidden in the title from the very beginning.