Waiting for the Moonlight: Qingyue Protects Zhaozhao

When I was six, I fell through the ice. He lay on the cracked ice and pulled me back into the world with his hands, red from the cold.

Back then, he was the only light in my dark childhood. Later, I fought tooth and nail to climb higher, just to get a little closer to him. I hid all my talents and married him in the name of “repaying a debt,” becoming Mrs. Xie for three years. But he forgot.

He forgot who I was and remembered only every cough from his moonlight, Wen Rang. He took my gentleness for a pretense and my silence for guilt. He mistreated me, betrayed me, and neglected me. He casually gave Wen Rang the ancestral safety pendant I had spent three months carving, saying it would “calm her nerves.” Yet as he left for Switzerland, he tossed out one last sentence without looking back: “Ruan Zhaozhao, you're free.”

He didn't know that what he thought was “repaying a debt” was really my carefully concealed “admiration” for him. He also didn't know that during those long years of cold treatment, he had already fallen in love with me. But that love was ensnared by misunderstandings and exploited by Wen Rang, becoming the deepest blade he drove into me.

Only after he had lost everything in Switzerland and watched Wen Rang drop her disguise did he realize what he had lost. The person he thought of during his sleepless nights was me. The inexplicable ache in his heart whenever he saw jade dust on my fingertips was love.

But he realized it too late.

He returned to China to find me, only to see me outside Liuli Pavilion wearing a jade bracelet carved by someone else, with Jin Xuanzhi beside me, the man who had guarded me for ten whole years.

The way that man looked at me was full of a cherishing devotion he had never shown. Jin Xuanzhi shielded me from every storm and caught my shattered heart.