Back Before My Brooding Senior Brother Died for Love

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[Incredibly oblivious, wooden beauty junior sister x motherly big brother in public, gloomy obsessive in private]

*

Ning Xi is an orphan who has nowhere to call home. She is taken in by the Qingyun Sword Sect and becomes an insignificant outer disciple in the vast sect.

In the midst of her endless, day-to-day menial chores, she sometimes catches sight of a streak of immortal-white sword light flashing across the sky. It is Pei Buchen, the sect leader’s personal disciple, returning from his travels.

Senior Brother Pei Buchen was born into a prestigious family and possessed extraordinary talent.

At sixteen, he won first place in the Immortal Palace trials. At seventeen, he entered the Sword Repository Cave and drew ten thousand swords into a contest to choose their master. At eighteen, he slew an ancient demonic wyrm all by himself. Countless lives have been saved by his sword.

Ning Xi can only gaze from afar at the young man, bright and graceful as the moon, gentle as bamboo, across a sea of people during the annual Lantern Festival ancestral rites. She thinks to herself:

The senior brother who is the center of everyone’s attention surely has no idea he has an ordinary little junior sister like me.

And yet this very senior brother, with whom she shares a distant relationship and rarely exchanges more than three words, fights to reclaim her body when the sect is destroyed and Ning Xi is betrayed by her fiancé, left lying in a pool of blood with several swords in her body.

In the end, he embraces her memorial tablet and throws himself into the raging sea.

*

After breathing her last, Ning Xi opens her eyes again and finds herself back on the night the sect was destroyed. Her master died long ago, her mistress is dead, the mourning hall is hastily put together, and the night wind is bleak.

The surviving Ning Xi looks at her senior brother, whose hair has turned prematurely white as he keeps watch before the coffin. After hesitating for a long while, she finally plucks up the courage to take hold of his sleeve.

“From now on, I’ll stay by your side forever, Senior Brother.”

*

With their sect destroyed, only the brother and sister remain to roam the martial world.

Ning Xi keeps her promise and stays by her senior brother’s side.

Just as she remembers, Pei Buchen gives her whatever she wants and is the kindest, gentlest brother imaginable... except that sometimes he says some rather strange things.

“Senior Brother, you tied my hair too tightly!”

“Hmm... But who was that person talking to you just now? Didn’t I warn you not to chat with strangers? Why won’t you listen to me? Why do you talk to everyone every day instead of coming to see me? Is it because they’re more interesting than I am? Do you know how miserable it is to wait for you to come see me every day?”

“Senior Brother, Fellow Daoist He gave me a bag of pine-nut candies. Have some!”

“Sure... But who is Fellow Daoist He? A man or a woman? Are you close? How did you meet? When did you meet? Do you talk often now? Do you talk more than you do with me? When you’re not with me, are you with him? Who else is there besides him?”

And whenever Ning Xi wakes in the middle of the night, she sees her senior brother sitting beside her bed. What is that dark, damp, moss-like look in his eyes?

[Reading Guide]

* One-on-one romance, happy ending.

* Also known as “The Heroine Thinks She’s in a Healing and Redemption Story, While Her Brother Crawls Around in the Shadows.”

* Romance is the main focus. The pure brother-and-sister bond gradually turns into something else. Slow burn, melodramatic, with a touch of dark obsession. Later there is a misunderstanding involving a pseudo-incest plotline. This is not a wish-fulfillment story, not a strong heroine story, and not a female-led power fantasy. None of the characters are perfect.

[Blurb dated August 9, 2024]

Theme: Those who save others save themselves.