Three hundred years shared in a dream, then at Chongshan's Bright Palace, Ling Tong was seen.
Chu Lingtong was born with an unusual fate: she was said to bring misfortune to husbands and children. A fortune-teller claimed that if a living man married her, he would die, and if a dead man married her, his grave would be dug up.
For the first half of her life, Chu Lingtong was miserable and frustrated over this wretched fate.
Then, when she was nineteen, the once-glorious Dahu Dynasty began to teeter under the demons' onslaught. The age of chaos had arrived. Chu Lingtong fled south with her older sister, but after demons abducted her sister, Chu Lingtong was left in the countryside, living off her skills as an herb gatherer.
One day, a group of cultivators set out for the Sevenfold Mountain to seek treasure in an ancient tomb. They dragged Chu Lingtong, who knew how to treat corpse poison, along with them to raid the tomb. They unearthed the tomb of Prince Dai, where they found a green sandalwood coffin containing a handsome young man.
While the cultivators fought over the treasure, the young man awoke and swept away the evil spirits with a single stroke of his sword, saving her life.
The young man called himself "A Tan." He was going to seek revenge on the Holy Spider, a demon god feared throughout the demon realm.
"Miss Chu, you want to go to the demon realm to find your sister, and I want to kill the Holy Spider. Since we're headed the same way, why not travel together?"
And so the two became companions, embarking on a journey of growth where they would slay demons and gods alike.
At the time, Chu Lingtong didn't know that she had once read about A Tan in the history books.
Three hundred years earlier, in the Dahu Dynasty's golden age, he and his elder brother, Li Yunzhao, had ridden west of Yangguan and slain countless demons. Li Yunzhong was one of Emperor Yuanzhen's two brilliant generals, undefeated in battle. He was made the Marquis of Ziyang at eighteen, then died young of a parasitic poison at nineteen. A Tan was his childhood name.
As a child, Chu Lingtong had sighed over Li Yunzhong's tragically short life. She never imagined that years later she would take a sword from his hand, its edge aimed at the demons, as she stared at her sister, controlled by one of them.
"Give her back to me."
Much later, A Tan told Lingtong that the day he met her was the anniversary of his death. But because he saw her that day, his death anniversary became an auspicious day from then on.
Cultivation and level-up adventure / fictional Han dynasty setting /
The male lead was dug out of a tomb / the male lead hands her a shovel while they raid the tomb /
Women can become marquises too, so this is a couple of marquises /
A tender, fearless, pure-hearted male lead x a bold, knife-wielding heroine who follows her instincts /
After replaying an old cultivation RPG on my hard drive, I was moved to tears. I wanted a meal of a heroine's adventures, growth, and a warm, sweet romance, so I wrote this to satisfy my own craving. Mwah.
Theme: All beings cling to something. Some cling to desire, some to all living things, and for others, what they cling to is always changing. That process of change is growth.
