Matchmaker Zhao picked an auspicious day and happily made her way to Old Lin's home, hoping to arrange a marriage for his third daughter. After a torrent of extravagant praise, everyone envied the match: "This is the sort of good fortune you couldn't find even with a lantern!"
"Where's Third Daughter? Has she gone somewhere to secretly rejoice?"
"I'm not marrying," said the third Lin daughter, who was perched in an apricot tree picking fruit to eat. Without a second thought, she flatly refused.
"Oh, come now! He's the only son of Scholar Jia, and he'll become an official one day!"
"I'm still not marrying," Lin Qingsui said, spitting out a piece of fruit peel. "Whoever wants him can marry him."
After living another life, was she supposed to make wedding clothes for someone else again? Dream on!
New historical romance: Notes on the Sweet Affairs of Common Folk
That winter, heavy snow blanketed the mountaintops.
They said that Jiang Zhi, the third daughter of the Jiang family, had gone into the old forest to gather ginseng and never come back out.
Her widowed mother cried until she went blind and insisted on entering the mountains, but the clanspeople held her back.
"The girl is likely doomed. Why throw an old woman away for nothing too?"
When Chen Zhichun, the oil peddler, heard the news, he couldn't sleep all night.
At daybreak, he took the savings he'd set aside to marry a wife, bought a thick sable coat, and went alone into the snow-covered mountains.
Outside the cave, the snowstorm raged. Inside, a campfire burned.
The sable coat was roomy enough to wrap them both in warmth. With only a thin layer of clothing between them, they held each other tightly.
In the warm orange glow of the fire, the young woman lay with her eyes closed, her whole body frozen stiff.
Chen Zhichun pressed his face against hers inch by inch, breathing warm air onto her and slowly feeding her warm water mouth to mouth.
He wished he could give her every bit of warmth in his body.
Through the wind and snow, I've come to take you home.
Theme: Sow a grain of millet in spring, reap ten thousand in autumn.
