Rain at the Ancient Temple

He ought to call her his cousin's daughter.

And she has never once called him her cousin-uncle.

Shen Nianyan is the youngest mural restoration specialist at her institute. At twenty-three, she specializes in paintings on the verge of peeling away in ancient tombs and temples. She doesn't say much, and her hands are steady. She can piece the powdered fragments of the past back together, one by one.

Mo Junyu is a key forestry technician, an expert at treating sick ancient trees and other protected trees. Silent and dependable, he can tell by touch which parts of a tree's roots are rotting and which are still alive. He's thirty, but his salary card has never held more than five figures.

He performs root surgery on a three-hundred-year-old bodhi tree at Jingci Temple.

She kneels in a side hall, cleaning a mural cracked by the tree roots.

Their work is bound together: if the tree can't be saved, the wall can't be restored.

He's a distant relative from her hometown, so distant they're barely related, yet close enough by family rank that she's supposed to call him her cousin-uncle. But she has never managed to say it.

When he hears she's going on a blind date, his father tells him to "look after" her. But he bluntly tells her that the rich second-generation guy she's meeting is only there to get a taste of temporary agency work at the institute and has no intention of taking it seriously, so he's not worth considering. He even deliberately suggests she wear her work clothes. Then he "happens to pass by" the teahouse, dressed more smartly than usual, every word and gesture making it obvious he's trying to interrupt the date.

After they have spent a long time together, she learns about his nickname, "Brother-Obsessed." One day, on a sudden impulse, she writes in her notebook: "You don't want to talk, so I won't ask. But I'll be here."

He has a younger brother to support, a mother to care for, and debts that have been piling up for over a decade.

She doesn't look down on him. The day his brother smashes a wall and leaves him bruised, she simply says, "If you can't hold on anymore, you can tell me."

Every day, his pickup truck waits downstairs right on time, along with the words, "I was passing by." Aside from taking meticulous care of her, he doesn't know how to express his feelings.

Until the day he asks her if she has nothing to talk about besides work. She rambles on to cover up her nerves, and he kisses her forcefully in the car, asking hoarsely, again and again, "Do you understand?"

On the day his clueless younger brother gets married, he stands below the stage and remembers how, when he was thirteen, his family was so poor they couldn't even afford meat. Under the table, she hooks her little finger around his. He looks down but says nothing. Yet he holds her hand tightly.

Mo Junyu, who has spent most of his life living for others, is finally caught by someone.

This is a story about restoration. He restores trees; she restores paintings. They are both good at piecing broken things back together.

Theme: Love yourself before loving someone else.