Cutting Snow, Stitching Mountains

[Completed! Thank you for reading!]

[The author's similar novel, For Medicine, is currently updating. If you're interested, visit the author's page to bookmark it. A deep bow.]

Blurb

[Plot]

The Shen family organizes Yucheng's annual Lantern Festival.

It had gone off without a hitch every year, but this year, after the festival ended, several lanterns were missing. They were lanterns modeled after mythical beasts from the Classic of Mountains and Seas.

After reviewing the security footage, the Shen family caught an elderly man well into his eighties.

But the old man seemed senile, repeating the same garbled words. Translated, they meant:

The missing lanterns had been given eyes with drops of blood, and then they all flew away.

They couldn't get anything else out of him.

With no other options, the younger members went to the Shen family patriarch, who had long since withdrawn from worldly affairs.

After hearing them out, Old Master Shen finished an entire pack of cigarettes, his eyes bloodshot.

“Get the car ready. Take me to Qingshan. I'll personally invite someone down.”

Qiao Xi had lived on Qingshan since she was little, sharing a home with an old man: her grandfather.

Since childhood, the old man had taught Qiao Xi all sorts of strange things. He also made her copy the talismans in a thick book, sometimes for an entire day.

When Qiao Xi grew exhausted, she'd cry and insist on going down the mountain to see her mother.

The stubborn old man would glare at her and say, “They're all dead, all of them. You're the only one left.”

Qiao Xi would kick and punch as she cried, “My mom's right down the mountain, and she's perfectly fine! Let me go home!”

Later, Qiao Xi tried sneaking down the mountain more than once, but each time it was like she'd run into a ghost wall, and she'd end up back at the huge house on the mountain.

As time passed, Qiao Xi began to think she'd never get off this wretched mountain in her life.

Then one day, a black car drove up the mountain, and an old man got out.

After the two old men talked for a long time inside, her own grandfather came out and told Qiao Xi, “Go on. Down the mountain.”

[Romance]

The young master of the Shen family was ordered by his grandfather to look after a girl who'd come from the mountains. He waited on her hand and foot, and seemed to enjoy every moment.

His spoiled friends teased him, saying he'd been bewitched by her beauty and fallen for the girl from the mountain.

But Young Master Shen lit a cigarette and glanced at the person beside him before denying it. “She's practically the revered ancestress of the Shen family. I'm just showing respect to my elders!”

Later, Young Master Shen followed the ancestress he spoke of everywhere, from the mountains to the sea. No matter how much she scolded him, he wouldn't leave.

At last, the girl from the mountain lost her patience and asked what he wanted.

Young Master Shen's lips curved into a smile. “Ancestress, I don't want you to be a guest of the Shen family anymore. I want you to be the lady of the Shen family.”

-- Upcoming Novel --

Liang Yi spent the first twenty years of his life carefree and unrestrained.

Maybe he had enjoyed himself too much, because on his twentieth birthday, fate dealt him a devastating blow.

It should have been a day for the family to reunite.

When Liang Yi opened the door, he saw blood covering the floor and his parents' bodies lying in a pool of it.

That early autumn, a family was massacred in the small city of Liangzhou.

Walk down any street, and you'd hear people gossiping.

“I heard the child's car was late, so they escaped the tragedy. Otherwise, not a single soul in the Liang family would have survived.”

“If you ask me, that child would've been better off dying with them. Now they're alive, but they owe someone a life...”

As it turned out, there had been a little girl in that small home that day.

She was the daughter of Liang Yi's maternal aunt, visiting her aunt's family in Liangzhou for the first time.

But no matter how the police searched the surveillance footage, they couldn't find the girl.

It was as if she had vanished into thin air.

From that point on, Liang Yi had only two things left in life.

First, find the murderer who killed his parents. Second, find the little girl who disappeared.

According to legend, a small boat sometimes appears on the Lancang River.

No one knows when it will appear, but when it does, you can board it and ask for one thing.

Liang Yi thought he must be crazy to believe the rumor.

Until one night, the covered boat appeared on the Lancang River.

Inside the pleasure boat sat a woman with a cool, aloof beauty.

Liang Yi hadn't even asked a question when the woman looked at him and said, her lips barely moving, “Someone tricked you into coming here as a scapegoat.”

The woman was the boat's owner.

“I ferry people to life, and I ferry them to death,” she said calmly. “You can't have children in this life, so I can't ferry you to a new life. That leaves death.”

Liang Yi's life should have ended on his twentieth birthday.

But the woman on the boat appeared and lit a lamp in the endless darkness of his life, letting him see the dawn of another day.

Theme: Learning the meaning of responsibility and love as we grow.