After My Love Letter Was Delivered to the Wrong Person

Fourteen-year-old junior cultivator Jiang Zhizi has recently awakened to love and fallen for a sixteen-year-old junior cultivator from her sect. The young cultivator is both gifted and handsome. Jiang Zhizi lacks confidence in herself, so all she can do is slip a love letter through his door every day in secret. Then something major happens in the sect: their senior brother Xu Qinghe has returned. Xu Qinghe has been gone for twenty years, and no one knows what happened to him. Once the sect's darling, he has now returned with both legs disabled, failing eyesight, and a deadly poison in his body. He is practically a cripple. The renowned doctor they summoned declares that Xu Qinghe has no more than ten days to live. On the very first day Xu Qinghe returns, someone slips a letter through his door. The writing is tiny, and Xu Qinghe can't make it out. He can't be bothered to look any closer, so he flicks his brush and writes back, "Make the writing bigger." Sure enough, the next day's writing is larger. At a glance, Xu Qinghe can read the opening: "Senior Brother! I like you!" Xu Qinghe: ... I've only got ten days left to live, and you're telling me you like me? The letter is full of a young girl's private thoughts. Xu Qinghe reads half of it, then tosses it into a drawer. He doesn't write back at all. He's going to die soon anyway, Xu Qinghe thinks. It makes no difference whether he replies. And so another letter arrives on the third day, then the fourth, then the fifth... Perhaps the letters smell lovely, because Xu Qinghe brings each one back inside every day. On the tenth day, torrential rain pours down outside. Xu Qinghe suddenly wonders whether she'll come to deliver a letter today. He lies in bed coughing up blood all day, keeping his eyes open by force. He's afraid that if he closes them, he'll never learn the answer. Late at night, a damp letter slips through the crack beneath the door: "Another day of liking Senior Brother." Waiting for the letters, reading them, and staring blankly at them become the only things Xu Qinghe does each day. When he can finally wheel himself out of his cave dwelling, take the girl who has been writing to him every day back to his room, pin her against the wall, and kiss her deeply, she looks as if she's about to cry. "But you're not the one I like..." Xu Qinghe no longer cares whether Jiang Zhizi likes him. He knows that in this life, there is nothing he, Xu Qinghe, wants that he cannot have. # Blurb written on June 24, 2022 Theme: Love should be sincere