Joy in the Spring Light

The print edition is available now at various retailers.

1.

Song Xi grew up in a country clinic. When she was a sophomore in high school, the grandfather who raised her passed away, and she was taken in by her father’s new family, with nowhere else to go.

There, she met Liang Jinqing for the first time.

In the sweltering summer heat, nearly forty degrees, the boy looked like a favored child of heaven, dressed in black, his face so pale it was almost translucent, his expression proud and languid.

The scent of Chinese medicine on him was just like the one that lingered on her fingertips all year round.

At that first glance, the spring grass in her heart began to grow wildly.

She took the initiative to approach him, using everything she’d learned to help him improve his health. In the end, all she got was, "Thank you, Doctor Song."

Later, Song Xi received a gift of thanks:

A bookmark decorated with a leaf-vein painting.

On the bodhi leaf, she was shown stooping over her medicine pot as usual, the fine strands of hair across her forehead so detailed you could make out each one.

In the lower right corner of the bookmark, elegant, slender calligraphy read:

For Xixi

After breaking up with Liang Jinqing, Song Xi tucked the bookmark into the deepest corner of her bookshelf.

2.

Liang Jinqing, the next-generation head of the Liang family, has another little-known identity: he is an inheritor of the art of leaf-vein painting.

On a perfect spring day, he held his first solo exhibition. It was themed around landscapes and titled "Joy."

At the press conference, someone asked why he’d chosen that name and whether it held any special meaning.

Liang Jinqing replied, "Because everything I love is here."

A bodhi leaf has two sides. One is painted with a landscape, the other with her.

The landscape changes with time and place, but there has only ever been one girl.

She is sitting or standing, laughing or making a fuss, practicing medicine or bent over her desk...

There are only three things I’ve loved in this life: joy, mountains, and rivers.

Bonus scene:

For his seventeenth birthday, Liang Jinqing received a very special gift: a newly hatched little rooster that could barely walk.

It was from Song Xi.

According to her, she’d racked her brains for over half a month to come up with the idea.

At first, the chick was adorable, pecking at millet with its tiny beak. Liang Jinqing made it a nest on his bedroom windowsill and kept it company while it ate, drank, and played every day.

Three months later, the little rooster had become a big one.

Every morning at exactly four, it crowed in his ear.

Liang Jinqing wanted to scold the chicken, but he’d raised it grain by grain.

He couldn’t bear to.

So he could only blame someone else.

But Song Xi was completely unapologetic. "Senior year is coming. If you keep sleeping through the morning and skipping early study sessions, you’ll be stuck getting 60 on your Chinese exams forever!"

Liang Jinqing: ...

[My next book is "I Don’t Want Spring". Please add it to your reading lists!]

Blurb:

Down-and-out heiress × small-town delinquent. Small-town story about finding redemption.

After her father dies in an accident, she and her mother are thrown out by his wife.

They move to Yinyu Alley, where her mother prays and eats vegetarian meals every day, saying she’s doing it to beg the Bodhisattva for forgiveness.

Li Qinglin doesn’t know what she did wrong, but she chooses to do as her mother says.

Later, her mother ignores her pleas and insists on becoming a nun. On that freezing winter night, after going two days without food, Li Qinglin finally cries herself unconscious at the temple gate.

The one who finds her is the delinquent next door, a good-for-nothing who never takes anything seriously.

He says, "Don’t be afraid. I’ll stay with you from now on."

He says, "I’ll cook for you and put you through college."

But before the next spring arrives,

he leaves her too.

Theme: Work hard and make your dreams come true.