Chapter I: A young Yu

Yu Ling was a young man in his early adulthood years. He had silky black hair, dark phoenix eyes, fair skin and a tall figure. Yu Ling had been a respectful and respectable young man all of his life with many women from his school and town wanting to marry him to make their mothers proud.He loved history, especially his family's history and always wanted to know more about their past. He always loved details even though they were very small. He was a perfectionist-imperfectionist who always looked for the big picture of every situation. He was an introverted caffeine machine who worked on editing out mistakes from works that are done months in advance of the due date. He was a wreck of a guy working overtime for his stupid education. He knew that life was meaningless and didn't deserve love or affection in the slightest.

Life didn't have any meaning until she started caring about him like no other… his older cousin Yu Ying or the black sheep of the family.

Yu Ying was a troublemaker when she was still in school but was also a great listener. She knew how to make you smile but also could make you cry; either out of sadness or fear. She was an artist and a good one too.

Yu Ling lived with her and somehow wasn't paying rent because Yu Ying and her girlfriend always had him covered with money. They let him stay without paying rent with the exception of him keeping the house clean, doing his fair share of the chores around the house and keeping on with his dreams and expectations.

One Saturday morning Yu Ling lays in bed like every other morning but this time it was different. His only thought that morning was: he will find more of his grandmother's journals. But where does he look, was the question he would continuously ask himself. Does he go to her house and look through her library? Last time he was there one of the journals was just laying there on her bedside table.

He gets up from his bed and goes directly to Yu Ying's room.

He creaks open the door and sees her sleeping with Luó Xiuying's face on her arm.

"Mn…" he sighed. I'll write a note, he thought.

He goes down to the kitchen and pulls out a pen from the jacket on the hanger and rips out a page from one of Yu Ying's sketchbooks placed on the living room table.

He opens the pen's cap and starts writing down:

"Ying,

I'll take your car out for a drive. Don't wait for me.

Love, your little cousin Ling."

He folds up the piece of paper and places it on the kitchen counter so it's visible for her to open and see why her car is missing.

Yu Ling gets back to his room and puts on a turtleneck sweater and jeans to keep him warm from the cold outside. He twists a scarf around his neck as well as a jacket on his back.

He went out just as snow started to fall from atop the skies.

The car was a normal white car with tinted windows and a newly updated license plate. It was nice and cozy if you were to describe it as if it wasn't a car. Overall, he liked driving it, especially since he got his new drivers license.

Grandma Yu lived on a road that was very awkward to drive through because it was very narrow, however, it was possible to walk through.

Grandma Yu had always been more withdrawn and quiet so she lived in a house that matched just that- a house in a reserved area of a forest.

Her house was simple with two floors and only four rooms- a kitchen, a library that took up all of the space of the second floor, a bedroom and a bathroom-. The most beautiful thing about the area was a very slow-stream river with lotus flowers that would appear on the river's waters in the spring that children would cut flowers on them and let them flow wherever the flow and courants would take the flowers.

This time it all felt different though.

The sides of the lake were frozen just like the blood in Yu Ling's veins as the cold wind hit the back of his head with full force.

The house was just as cold but he could bear it as long as he took out all of the journals and got them inside the car he could read them in the comfort of the warm vehicle.

The house was even colder than the outside and made Yu Ling want to pass out.

The library had a special section for her journals that was two long rows.

Multiple about different realms, cultivation, demonic cultivation, daoism and even one about the Shi Sect.

Every book on those shelves were completely finished and had very perfect and lined out data that no one will ever see besides him.

He pulled the scarf from his neck and arranged the journals on top of it and tied the scarf, tightly keeping the thick books lined next to one another.

Yu Ling picked up the little bag he had made with the scarf and quickly got outside, snow hitting the top of his head.

He locked the door and ran the path till his car to see what he could find in the journals that could help him out a little with all of the research he had recently done.

Yu Ling thought that if his grandmother had dedicated all of her life to doing this he might as well do the same as her.

The car was warm just like a sunny summer day or like standing next to a fireplace in cold winters.

He unties the scarf from around the books and looks at what he got out of the library. The first thing he takes out of the many he has in front of him is a very simply titled "Journal yi", yi referring to the number one in Chinese.

"Yi… this must be the first journal ever written by grandma." He slowly said as he opened up the thick covers of the book.

The contents of it looked like handwritten letters by someone who would call themselves as "Wěn" which seemed really narcissistic to Yu Ling. Some of the pages describe so as well -not even Grandma Yu knew who this Wěn person was-. They would recommend books and love novels to someone. The pages saying that the letters seemed very romantic as if sent from one lover to another.

There were other letters too, directed to Wěn. They were from someone called "Mìngyùn" That would talk about how much they loved reading the books that the other would recommend to them.

They were loving but also respectful in a way that Meixiu had never seen before.

Xue Deming was mentioned numerous times in the pages of the journal. Xue… Xue… Xue…

It finally came to him. He needed to find a Xue! But where did he look first was the problem.

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