The Herb Gatherer in the Deep Mountains

"Big brother, she's not breathing."

"Ah! A ghost!"

Yan Zhichun woke up in a ruined temple. The moment she opened her eyes, she saw several ragged, wild monks staring at her as if she were a ghost.

Only after asking around did she learn that the senior monk from the temple had found her, the original owner of this body, after she fell down a mountain while he was out hunting. But she had stopped breathing by the time he brought her back.

That's right, Yan Zhichun had transmigrated. To keep the monks from getting suspicious, she dragged her half-dead body along and had them take her down the mountain and back home. But things were a disaster from the start there, too: her father was dead, her mother was ill, and she had two young sisters.

Yan Zhichun lay on a crude wooden bed, staring blankly as a frail woman wept over her cruel husband, her poor daughters, and her own miserable fate.

When the woman had cried enough, she told Yan Zhichun she was forbidden from going into the mountains again and would be sent to apprentice under a female doctor.

Apprentices got no pay, just room and board. Yan Zhichun thought that if she went, the two children at home would starve. She refused outright. She was still going to be a herb gatherer.

In her previous life, she had been a mountaineering and adventure enthusiast, while the original owner of this body had a thorough knowledge of medicinal herbs. Put the two together, and no one could be better suited to gather herbs than her.

*

Shen Shan was a wild monk who had fled into the mountains and taken holy orders after killing his enemy with his own hands. He kept several wild monks, former bandits, in line as they cleared land, farmed, hunted, and gathered in the mountains. They managed to get by, more or less.

One day, he rescued a herb gatherer who had fallen down a mountain. He had seen her stop breathing with his own eyes, yet after she died, she sat up full of life. It was the strangest thing he had witnessed in his twenty-one years.

Even stranger, two years later, the herb gatherer bought the mountain where the ruined temple stood, and this wild monk was brought back by her as her live-in son-in-law.

Theme: Where there's a will, there's a way