The Zombie Bride

At eighteen, Chen Siyan's sect was wiped out, but she escaped the slaughter.

When she returned to the sect, which was strewn with bodies, she spent ages digging through the mountain of corpses and uncovered a newlywed bride she'd never seen before, still barely alive.

She carried the woman, limping, to a rest stop at the foot of the mountain. Only then did Chen Siyan realize the bride was already dead.

Her face was pale and ashen, and she had no breath going out.

She was a living corpse.

Someone once read the fate of Miss Xue, the illegitimate daughter of the Xue family. They said she had a resilient constitution and a long life, that she brought misfortune to her relatives but good fortune to her husband.

Once this became known, more than half the young masters of Chang'an who had sought her hand for her beauty withdrew their proposals.

Not long afterward, word spread that the Liu family wanted Miss Xue to marry their sickly eldest son and bring him good fortune.

On the wedding day, snow fell thickly in September, and the suona's wail echoed from the north of the city to the south.

The wedding banquet lasted until midnight.

After that, the young master of the Liu family grew healthier by the day, but the newlywed young mistress of the Liu family was never seen again.

After escaping the Liu family, Xue Ling thought she would soon die from blood loss. So, unwilling to let anyone else benefit from her, she buried herself in a pile of corpses.

But in her fading consciousness, she felt as if someone was digging her out from among all those bodies, digging until their fingers bled, yet refusing to stop.

The road down the mountain that day was long, as long as all the countless days and nights they would spend relying on each other from then on.

Over and over, she breathed one word into the other's ear: "Go..."

Go? Where to?

She repeated that one word hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times along the way, and Chen Siyan was forced to hear it just as many times.

It was only much, much later that Chen Siyan finally understood what Xue Ling had wanted to say that day.

She'd meant that she wanted to escape.

As far away from that "home" as possible.

*A story about two unfortunate girls finding warmth and comfort in each other amid the mortal world.

Beautiful, kind-hearted, talkative young doctor x adorable, dazed zombie bride

Note from 2023.9.13: blurb to be revised.

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