Looked Up To

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A sunny, resilient heroine × a brooding, scheming, calculating hero

From the time Lin Jinshu could remember, when she was four, she had never once had a full meal. She survived in a corner of a ramshackle house until she was eight.

At eight, she stopped going hungry and was put to work in the fields, but her back became covered with countless bloody lash marks. Her parents had sold her to a wealthy family as a maid.

She had only one bowl of wild-vegetable porridge a day, but Lin Jinshu ate it with relish. She wore the same patched-up clothes until she was eight, and she was delighted with them.

But she had been sold.

Lin Jinshu thought, I hate them.

Using every means at her disposal, Lin Jinshu escaped from that estate where people were killed without a second thought, then slipped into a pile of corpses.

She lived off the things she scavenged from the bodies, raising herself until she was sixteen.

At sixteen, she found a corpse in the pile. It was still warm.

Lin Jinshu paused, then carried the person back to her home, which barely qualified as a house.

She went to every length to save him. When she saw his eyes open, Lin Jinshu was pleased. Now there was one more person who could go on living. How wonderful.

But the first thing Pei Xing said when he opened his eyes was, “Don’t save me. Let me die.”

Lin Jinshu kicked him without hesitation.

“You’re still breathing, aren’t you? What are you talking about, dying?”

*

The Pei family, a line of loyal heroes, had fallen on the battlefield. Pei Xing was the only one left, pulled from the pile of corpses by Lin Jinshu and brought back from the brink of death.

The battle had been devastating, and the emperor was enraged. He stripped the Pei family of their title, and their bodies were wrapped in thin cloth and hastily buried.

Pei Xing knew there was far more to what had happened than met the eye. He hated them. He clenched his fist, but his palm felt weightless, as though he couldn’t feel any pain.

His body couldn’t even muster the strength to move. Pei Xing wanted to die.

Whenever he said those words, he heard a voice above him say, “You’re doing just fine. Why do you keep talking about dying?”

Pei Xing glanced up at the ramshackle house behind Lin Jinshu, which looked ready to collapse at any moment. He couldn’t understand how she could live like this and still cheerfully tell him not to die every day.

He thought about it, then asked her.

Lin Jinshu just smiled at him. “Well, I’m not dead yet, am I?”

Isn’t being alive something worth celebrating?

So, though he was gravely wounded and had nothing left, he still had to claw his way up from the abyss, grit his teeth, protect her, and make it through life by her side.

May we use half a lifetime of suffering as kindling to light each other’s way home, and keep you safe year after year, untouched by the pain of being cast adrift.

Reading guide:

1. A historical setting, no fantasy elements. The heroine isn’t a pushover. She’s brave and resourceful, though she’s poor at first, so she can seem rather down on her luck.

2. A sweet story of mutual healing. The romance develops slowly, and both leads are each other’s first and only.

3. The author is a beginner, so the pacing and prose may be rough. Please don’t be harsh if it’s not to your taste.

Moral: There is no joy without pain, no sweetness without hardship