When A Zhi was fifteen, she was sold to a broker. Xie Tingyun was the one who took her away. That night, he burned her contract and asked, “Where would you like to go now?”
She had nowhere else to go, so she followed him and learned medicine. They traveled from the snowstorms of the northern frontier to the deep spring of the capital. A Zhi grew into a woman and fell in love with the man who always told her she was free to leave, yet waited for her to come back every time. It wasn’t until they reached the capital that she learned Xie Tingyun was the emperor’s most beloved youngest son.
With the emperor gravely ill, an imperial edict arrived ordering Xie Tingyun to marry. He would rather die than obey and was confined to the palace. A Zhi waited for him in vain, only to be framed because of her Hu identity. By then, she was pregnant. To protect her child, she left the capital and opened a clinic on her own in the south.
Four years later, Xie Tingyun followed an outbreak of plague to Nancheng. At the clinic’s entrance, A Zhi was bent over taking a patient’s pulse. A young apprentice held her medicine box, and a child ran out from the courtyard, calling her Mother.
He had searched for her for four years and imagined countless things to say when they met again. A Zhi looked up at him and asked only, “Xie Tingyun, have you called off your engagement?”
Theme: Love means respecting each other’s choices and still being willing to walk side by side after years of separation.
