Waiting for Your Return Through Wind and Snow

[Derivative work | "Never Fail You in This Life," Xu Tingyi's standalone story]

Everyone knows that Xu Tingyi, the princess's intended, eventually ended up exiled to Hanzhou.

He had always known that Princess Zhaoyuan loved someone else. Their engagement was a futile arrangement whose ending had been clear from the start.

As he traveled through the snow, gravely ill and close to death, memories from two lifetimes surged through him in a fever.

In his previous life, he accidentally learned that his birth mother, whom he'd been told since childhood had been sent to a separate residence in Hanzhou, had died on the way there long ago. With nowhere to appeal and utterly despairing, he hanged himself in front of the Grand Tutor's residence.

In this life, he studied hard, passed the imperial examinations, and still couldn't escape fate's web. Step by step, he headed toward the bitterly cold land where his mother lay buried.

The sorrows of two lifetimes weighed upon him as one. The road ahead had long since been buried beneath the snow.

And in this frozen wasteland, where not a blade of grass grew and snowstorms raged all year round, he, who had endured the cold of two lifetimes and believed only lonely wandering awaited him, unexpectedly encountered the brightest ray of light in the mountains.

She knew nothing of books and poetry, understood nothing of courtly intrigues, and had never seen the splendor of the capital. Her heart was warm and open, her spirit bright and pure.

He was a fallen nobleman, burdened by sorrow after enduring two lifetimes of hardship.

She was a lively, passionate ray of warmth rooted in Hanzhou.

It turned out that fate had trapped him in two lifetimes of wandering not to wear away his spirit, but to carry him through a futile romance and a tumultuous journey, so that at the end of the coldest snowstorm, he could meet the tender love of someone truly meant for him.