Beyond Yuguan Mountain

After Yan was tricked into drinking medicine that harmed her unborn child, she gave birth to a stillborn baby. She claimed she was going out to pray for the soul of the child who had never seen the world, but when no one was looking, she leapt from a cliff. From then on, she was neither seen alive nor found dead. She had thought she could scrape by for the rest of her life in Yuguan City, but someone still found her. And with that person came a boy of six or seven.

When Bu Ku was seven, Xiao Wang brought him back to Yuguan Mountain. After the boy's apprenticeship ceremony, Xiao Wang turned away all the other children who came seeking to study under him and devoted himself to caring for this poor child whose parents had both died unjustly. Only after watching the mountain's peach blossoms bloom and fall ten times did he realize that the pitiful person who truly needed looking after was himself.

At the end of winter, during the New Year season when Bu Ku was seventeen, Prince Zheng Yuanbai, the Sixth Prince, arrived in the city with a child of six or seven. When he found Yan sitting at a wonton stall, joy and sorrow overwhelmed him, leaving him at a loss for words. He could only keep telling the child beside him to call her "Mother." But Yan and the others never imagined that their once peaceful, quiet life would be interrupted on the twenty-ninth day of the twelfth lunar month that year.