Burying the White Bones

Archived blurb, March 1, 2026. Anything besides the story outline may change before the novel officially begins. Still debating the point of view.

[Dies and comes back to life · domineering · sharp-tongued · tough on the outside, soft on the inside · fatherly gong × Ah, the world is rotten · might as well destroy it · I’m a widower, just cut me some slack · melancholic, mute beauty shou]

Tentative blurb:

A yellow bird settles by the stream, but the stream no longer flows east.

An old owl laughs on the long slope, where even ghosts lose their nerve.

In the mass grave, white bones lie light; the people’s blood and fat become golden robes for the powerful.

-

The world had been in chaos for over a hundred years. Ling Xian could not bear to see the people suffer, so he practiced medicine and treated the sick, but the one he loved died young and without fanfare.

After Ling Xian died, a forbidden curse bound him to a new form: a mute skeleton living in a mass grave, waiting day and night for the reincarnation of his beloved to return to his side.

The good news: he found him.

The bad news: the man he found ignored him, despised him for not having a body, and turned around to fall in love with someone else.

The worse news: after Ling Xian waited on him for a very long time and swallowed his frustration in silence, he discovered he had found the wrong person.

And his true beloved had been pushed off a cliff by him not long ago, with no one knowing whether he was alive or dead.

Ling Xian: .

Oh no, that fake led me astray.

-

Everyone in the mass grave said Ling Xian was a beauty who once had a good husband, though he died young and no one had ever seen him.

Later, her husband was reborn, but when she found him, his personality had changed completely. What a pity.

A pile of bones obviously couldn’t look like a beauty, but since scoundrels deserved to die, Wu Yue decided to help this skeletal beauty escape her misery.

He never expected the beauty to be ruthless enough to chase him for ten miles that very night.

-

When they met again, Ling Xian’s beloved had already set off in pursuit of wealth and glory, leaving him in the mass grave for a long time.

The skeleton sat beneath a tree, quietly brewing medicine. He really did look like a merciful bodhisattva, nothing like the person who had chased Wu Yue down earlier.

Wu Yue approached with a cold laugh and grabbed the feather-light skeletal beauty. He wanted to mock him for his hopeless devotion and demand to know whether he regretted mistaking a well-meaning person for an enemy. His feelings were a tangled mess.

Just as he came to his senses and was about to speak, a pair of arms wrapped around him first.

The skeleton’s head rested against his shoulder and rubbed against it.

Begging for forgiveness, all sweet and clingy.

Wu Yue: ...?

-

Much later, Wu Yue discovered a secret.

The "husband" Ling Xian had often called out to silently was him. The person Ling Xian made offerings to every full moon was him. And the person he waited for, lantern in hand, at a crossroads on the night of the Ghost Festival was also him.

As for that scoundrel

Ha... What scoundrel? He was just a despicable, lying freeloader.

-

There are fools who study medical prescriptions for three years and then declare that every illness in the world can be cured. After practicing medicine for three years, they realize there is no prescription in the world that can cure everything.

A few tips:

1. 1v1, happy ending, plenty of personal worldbuilding.

2. An explicit love story (nods). What you see is what you get.

3. Still leans serious, with both angst and sweetness, and an old-fashioned flavor. Not suited to readers with strong character preferences.

4. The final paragraph is quoted from Qian Jin Fang.

Theme: Dare to make the sun and moon shine anew