Yu Ling was frail and sickly, and could not escape the fortune-teller's prediction. She died at sixteen.
Yet, after cultivating in the Underworld for three years, she was unexpectedly reborn in the mortal realm.
She endured every hardship for one person alone.
When the entire immortal sect descended the mountain for a martial arts competition, only she and a cat were left behind on Lin Mountain.
After her senior sister, a peerless prodigy, claimed first place, the first thing she did was ride her sword back to the sect and bring Yu Ling candied hawthorns and a little pinwheel.
Yu Ling remembered that brief moment for the rest of her life.
But when, full of joy, she presented herself to her senior sister, she saw the woman holding a celestial sword to her neck.
In her arms was a woman who looked seven-tenths like Yu Ling.
"Don't you dare hurt her."
Yu Ling: "...?"
Yu Ling, the dead original beloved, was dumbfounded.
Her hopes of three years collapsed in that moment.
Yu Ling refused to be outdone. Right in front of her, she burned the wooden talisman she'd carved for her, then left without looking back.
-
While undergoing tribulations in the mortal realm, Yu Ling found a woman who looked exactly like her senior sister. They both had peerlessly beautiful faces, but their personalities were very different.
Her senior sister was proud and unyielding, but this woman would do anything for Yu Ling.
Her senior sister was utterly cold, but this woman clung to her every moment.
Only when she saw the plum-blossom mark below the woman's nape did Yu Ling finally realize that she was her senior sister, who had lost her memories.
Yu Ling: "You want me to take you in? I don't have any money."
Yan Qingnian: "I'll do anything."
She did everything, from washing clothes to cooking.
So Yu Ling kept this unpaid laborer around.
She could think of it as repaying a debt on behalf of her former self.
But as time passed...
Yan Qingnian: "Can I sleep with you?"
Yu Ling refused outright. "No. I hate that face of yours."
Unexpectedly, that very night, Yan Qingnian faced a bronze mirror and began cutting her cheek with a knife.
Yu Ling was horrified and stopped her, then asked why.
Yan Qingnian lowered her head, tears glimmering in her cool eyes. She looked just like a kitten abandoned by its owner. "Because you don't like it."
A single tear fell.
From that moment on, Yu Ling never dared tell her she hated her again.
-
One night, in the midst of their passionate embrace, a broken wooden talisman fell to the ground. It was the very one Yu Ling had burned with her own hands.
Yu Ling picked it up and looked at the burn that had always remained on the back of Yan Qingnian's hand.
"You...!"
Before she could finish her accusation, Yan Qingnian wrapped both arms around her waist from behind and refused to let go. Her eyes were red.
"Senior sister was wrong."
"I was wrong."
"Ling'er, don't leave again. I'm begging you."
"..."
Theme: Together, day after day, love at first sight that lasts a thousand years