He was born into a military family, yet wanted to be a poet.
She came from a family of researchers and only wanted to live life on her own terms.
They were separated by the flames of war, then reunited amid the ruins.
This time, he would not let her leave alone.
Blurb
Eight hundred years ago, their ancestor, General Xia Zhige, pacified a chaotic age with a halberd named "Zhige" and established the Xia family motto: "End war through war."
Eight hundred years later, Xia Yuan, the eighteenth-generation descendant of the Xia family and the republic's youngest general, signed a ceasefire agreement amid the artillery fire of a coalition war. He became a hero revered by the entire nation. But he never got to see the person he had truly wanted to protect.
Xia Qingchuan was Xia Yuan's son. He grew up in the shadow of his father's silence, never understanding why the iron-blooded general seemed to endure something even when he looked at him. When he was seventeen, he opened the memoir his father had locked in a drawer and discovered the truth:
His father did love him. He just didn't dare to love him.
An Wei was the daughter of microbiologist An Zhihan. A sudden epidemic took her mother and older brother from her. She grew up deep in Yunping Mountain, where her father forbade her to study biology, afraid she would meet the same fate. But she secretly searched through an old storeroom filled with her father's books and glimpsed another possibility.
When she was eleven, she met a boy from the capital in front of the White House. He brought a book of poetry, told her stories of three summers, and then vanished from her world for nine whole years.
Three years of war. Nine years apart.
When he found her again, she could barely recognize him.
He saw her in the military district's interrogation room, covered in blood, her right leg slashed open by shrapnel, yet stubbornly refusing to sit down. She looked at him as if trying to identify someone she had thought would never appear again.
He took off his military jacket and draped it over her shoulders.
"Wait here for me a moment."
Then he picked her up and walked out of the interrogation room without looking back.
Behind him, the soldiers exchanged bewildered glances. Since when did Chief of Staff Xia have a fiancee?
Tags: War · Biochemical weapons · HE · Childhood sweethearts · Reunion after a long separation · Love for country and family · Strong leads
The mountain rises high, its ridges vast and green.
The Xia family began with Zhige.
She was the rose he planted, and it took nine years to bloom.
He was a sleeping white tiger who only truly came to life when her first petal opened.
Updated weekly, three chapters every Sunday.
Theme: The meaning of science, war, love, hate, and separation.
