[Forestry background · Male protagonist's perspective · Secret love comes true · HE]
Lin Che, a forestry technician, talks as little as a tree. Bird monitoring volunteer Ling Xiaoman is as lively as a sparrow.
She thinks he's boring, and he thinks she's noisy. But later she listened to the chirping of birds to warn of fire danger and saved his life; he stayed with her all night during a thunderstorm and left a note with a painting of Scotch pine.
He began to place wild flowers, mushrooms, and stream fish in front of her tent. She laughed at him: "You raise me like a squirrel?" He replied in a muffled voice: "Squirrels won't go away."
But her project lasted only three months. She still had to leave. He gave her a Pinus sylvestris seedling and only said: "This one is cold-resistant and can be grown on your windowsill."
A year later, she came back with the taller tree. There is an extra birch branch on his desk that was struck by lightning and sprouted again - it was thought to be dead last year, but it has sprouted new sprouts this year.
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Lin Che, 26 years old, is a forest farm technician.
Three years after graduating with a master's degree in forestry, he talks as little as a tree. His parents died in a wildfire when he was twelve years old, and he was raised by the old farm director, Uncle Chen, and grew up soaking in the woods. He has extraordinary intuition about trees, but is insensitive to human emotions. There are calluses on my hands, and there is always an earthy color between my fingers that cannot be washed away. He had never been in love before, and the first time he fell in love with her was Ling Xiaoman. She was the first person he "didn't know what to do with her." The only way he dared to express his emotions was to use a tree as a metaphor - if he loves you, he would say "this sylvestris pine can withstand the tenth level wind", which means "you can also rely on me". A person who only knows how to deal with trees learned how to protect a person in the process of protecting the mountains and forests.
Ling Xiaoman, 24 years old, has a master's degree in ornithology and is a bird monitoring volunteer at a forest farm.
I grew up in the city, and my father is a university professor. I rejected the arrangement of staying in school and ran into the mountains alone with my equipment on my back, angrily wanting to do something "of my own". Talkative, stubborn, and not afraid of getting into trouble. But I'm afraid of thunder, the dark, and being left behind. When he smiles, his eyes turn into crescents, and when he speaks, he gestures more than he speaks. I had had one or two superficial romances on campus, but when I met someone as boring as Lin Che, I didn't know what to do. Originally, I only stayed for three months. I planned to go back to work after finishing the project, but in the end, my heart was left behind. A bird destined to fly away finally chose to build a nest in a pine tree.
Purpose: Protect a forest and learn to protect a person. True love is not about binding, but about taking root and waiting like a tree, and like a bird willing to return.
