You lie buried beneath the earth, your bones turned to dust; I, on earth, remain with my head covered in snow.

"You lie buried beneath the earth, your bones turned to dust, while I remain in this world, my head covered in snow."

65.

Lan Jian's maternal grandmother was Ke Xiuyun, a former professor in the Department of Botany at the College of Agriculture of the North-South Federal Polytechnic University, and the younger sister of Ke Youcheng, the former chairman of the Northern Party. She also had another little-known identity: the wife of Yan Zhenjun, the commander of the Southern Garrison Battalion.

Fifty years ago, when the war broke out between the North and the South, Yan Zhenjun, a general in the North, bid farewell to his wife who was conducting an experiment on transplanting Vanda orchids in the Orchid Valley at a critical moment. Before parting, his three-year-old daughter was about to start her education, while his ten-year-old son... The son was naughty and, when everyone thought he had gone to play in the mountains, he secretly hid in his father's armored vehicle.

Yan Zhenjun never imagined that his departure would be a permanent farewell to his wife. Amidst the flames of war, he hid his son in an abandoned wooden hut on Wuyue Mountain, entrusting the young child to the care of local villagers. Upon reaching the front lines, he refused to fight against the people of the south and became a rebel. The Northern Party captured his young son, and right there in the blood-soaked Langu Creek, they held his child and threatened him: either watch his son's blood stain Langu Creek, or he would never be allowed to set foot in the north again.

Amidst her young son's cries, Yan Zhenjun chose the latter.

"Yin Qilei, dwells at the foot of Nanshan. Why is he so far away, with nowhere to go? Reverend gentleman, return home! Return home!"

Yan Zhenjun's name is taken from "Yin Qi Lei" in the Book of Songs. However, Ke Xiuyun spent the rest of her life under house arrest by her elder brother in a wooden house in Langu, and never got to see her virtuous husband return.

Their daughter, Ke Xiuyun, took her surname and was named Wan Dai, after the Vanda orchid that Ke Xiuyun studied. Ke Wan Dai was forced to separate from her birth mother at a young age and was raised by her uncle. She believed her mother had abandoned her, unaware that her uncle, whom she considered her father, had used her safety as leverage, leaving her mother to live alone in a valley for twenty years in bitter hardship. It wasn't until the eve of her wedding to Meng Zhihe that she suddenly learned the truth about her parents' separation from the Meng family elders. She then discovered that her biological father was Yan Zhenjun, a rebel in the eyes of the northerners and now a high-ranking official in the south.

Her brother, Yan Jisheng, is the youngest director of the Nuclear Research Institute, which was renamed Nanlu University.

She was separated from her father by the Lan Valley River at the age of three, and for twenty years, she only caught a glimpse of her mother from afar in Lan Valley after she became an adult. Ke Wandai thought the elders of the Meng family were lying, so she ran to the valley to question her mother, whom she hadn't seen for twenty years. Her mother had transformed from the dignified and elegant figure in her hazy memories into a shrewish and shrewish mountain dweller. She lived in a wooden house converted from a Japanese-style old temple, spending her days playing cards and chatting with the villagers, completely devoid of the intellectual and refined temperament of the former professor at the North-South Federal University of Technology.

Ke Xiuyun was not surprised by her daughter's arrival. Since being forced to resign as party chairman after the North-South conflict, Ke Youcheng had been trying to make a comeback for years. Since he himself had no daughter, he wanted to marry his niece into the wealthy Meng family. The old man of the Meng family, however, was a reasonable man. He admired Yan Zhenjun's uprightness and courage in opposing the war and surrendering to the South. After learning that Ke Wandai's birth mother, Ke Xiuyun, had been under house arrest in Langu for many years by Ke Youcheng, he used his children's marriage to exchange for Ke Xiuyun's freedom.

But Ke Xiuyun had no intention of leaving Langu. Every day she would go to the banks of the Langu River to wait for her husband, who would never return, to come home. In Beiluan, she was destined to be the wife of a criminal, never able to leave the border, while her husband, as the commander of the garrison, would never be able to leave the southern foothills.

What she received later was the joyous news of her granddaughter's birth, and the devastating news of her husband's death on the southern slope.

When they were alive, they were separated by Langu Creek and Wuyue Waterfall. After Yan Zhenjun passed away, what separated the two of them was life and death.

That year, the spring snow in Beiluan fell on the Orchid Valley, burying the orchids by the stream under the heavy snow. The biting mountain wind blew down the clusters of orchids, and even the erudite former professor of botany could no longer save them.

"You lie buried beneath the earth, your bones turned to dust, while I remain in this world, my head covered in snow."

Ke Wandai heard that after hearing the news of her father's death, her mother walked along the Langu Creek for three days and three nights, and was found by the mountain people on the verge of death. Ke Xiuyun, whose hair turned white overnight...

Clutching in her hand was a late-blooming Cymbidium goeringii, the only orchid she had found still alive in the snow-covered valley.

So Ke Wandai and Meng Zhihe's daughter, born in that spring snow, was named Lanjian, the old name of Lan Gu Creek, which was also the name of the cold orchid in the creek that gave the heartbroken Ke Xiuyun a sense of hope in the vast white snow.

To keep her mother alive, Ke Wandai often sent Lanjian to the mountains to be raised by Ke Xiuyun. Therefore, for Lanjian, her maternal grandmother was the person who accompanied her for a long time and loved her the most.

...

“Lanjian,” Ming Zijuan sighed, her eyes reddening, after hearing Lanjian’s grandmother’s story, “Your grandmother must have wanted you to be alright, right?”

Lan Jian nodded vigorously. "Actually, after my grandmother passed away, I didn't feel that she was very far away from me. My mama is a bionic robot expert. In order to make up for the maternal love she missed for many years, she built a personality database of my grandmother in her Bandai robot database. Later, for my sake, she deconstructed and modified it for many years, so that the companion robot I adopted increasingly resembled my grandmother's behavior patterns. However, in terms of thinking, it is still like a giant humanoid search engine. It answers whatever I ask and cannot truly possess the personality of my grandmother, Xiuyun."

"Although modern technology cannot replace a person, being able to preserve the image of someone you miss forever is a kind of luck, isn't it?"

"Yes." Lan Jian concealed the gloom between her brows, gazed into the distance, and pointed to the father and son sitting side by side by the stream not far away. "Mama, have they already tested each other's skills and ended their match?"

Ming Zijuan put her arm around Lan Jian's shoulder, "Why don't we just go up and ask?"

Chongming's back only had a patch of fabric in the middle that was wet with water stains, and it didn't look like he had fallen into the stream and gotten wet; it looked more like traces of sweat.

After carefully examining the two of them, Ms. Ming Zijuan clicked her tongue in amazement, "Are you two waiting for Lan Jian and me to arrive so you can put on an exhibition match for us?"

Lu Jie stood up with a smile, "That's right, we just had a fight. I beat this brat so badly that he retreated all the way back to the shore, so neither of us got wet."

Ming Zijuan didn't believe his nonsense. "Fine, then go and teach him a lesson again, so I can see for myself whether you're really as vigorous as ever!"

"My dear wife!" Lu Jie whispered close to Ming Zijuan's ear. Ming Zijuan glared at him fiercely, but Lu Jie grabbed her wrist and playfully punched her in the chest.

"Why did your father ask for a beating?" Lan Jian asked Chongming in a surprised tone.

"Just being a jerk!" This kind of scene is commonplace in Chongming. "Do you still want to see me compete with my dad?"

Lan Jian's dark pupils darted around halfway, "Why don't you take me and Mama with you?"

How do you play?

"Riding a horse across the river!"

So, in the midday sun, there were two couples, one old and one young, in the Langu Creek. The husbands carried their wives across the creek, wading through the water, heading upstream towards Wuyue Waterfall.

The water level rose higher and higher, already above Chongming's calves and above her knees. Lan Jian raised her calves high, dangling on his back like a small airplane. Major General Lu, due to a misstep, accidentally dropped Ms. Ming onto the shallows, and was already far behind.

Lan Jian wanted to help him up, but Chong Ming grabbed her legs and carried her away. He reminded her that this was a competition, and whoever lost would have to perform a duet with their spouse. Lan Jian's singing voice was mediocre, and she didn't want to embarrass herself in front of her elders. Chong Ming was even more tone-deaf, and Ms. Ming had made the bet precisely because of this.

It seems they'll be going home to be spectators now.

"Chongming, which song do you think they'll perform?"

"What else could it be..." Chongming chuckled softly, "Hiroshima Mon Amour, of course!"

<

Lan Jian's arm, draped over Chongming's chest, trembled slightly with his rising and falling steps. Suddenly, her fingers curled into a loose fist. After a moment of silence, she cleared her throat and began to sing, off-key, a song Chongming had never heard before: "Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me. There lie they, and here lie we. Under the spreading chestnut tree..."

Chongming asked her what song it was, and Lanjian feigned surprise, "Haven't you heard the nursery rhyme 'Under the Flowering Chestnut Tree'?"

How could a nursery rhyme contain lyrics like "I sold you, and you sold me"?

"You misheard me, I sang 'I thought you, and you thought me'... or maybe I remembered it wrong, this is what my little brother Ying taught me to sing!"

"I vaguely remember reading that line in a book—hmm!"

Lan Jian quickly covered Chongming's mouth, saying, "You're ruining my singing pleasure!"

Chongming was speechless for a moment, then patted her hand with one of his own. "Alright, alright, my little darling, I won't say anything more, you can continue singing!"

"I'm not singing anymore!"

"Go ahead and sing!"

"I'm not happy about it!"

Do you want to jump in and swim?

"What, do you still want to see me alluring while wet?"

"...Meng Lanjian, my parents are coming over later."

"You knew that, yet you still wanted to throw me into the swimming pool?"

"Then keep singing."

"You think I'll sing just because you tell me to?"

Chongming takes a deep breath—he hates arguing and bickering with people the most in his life.

"Please sing me another song, my wife."

Lan Jian quietly opened her loosely clenched fist and placed her palm against his heart, somewhat at a loss, unsure of how to respond.

Wuyue Waterfall is just ahead; they have finally reached their destination.

Chongming turned around and saw the little face on his shoulder flushed red, her ears burning as if they were on fire.

Her soft, almost inaudible voice rang in his ears, "There's not enough time to love you properly."

Just this one sentence.

There are no more sentences.

Their philandering should have ended long ago.

But whether he crossed the moral line and ventured into forbidden territory of love back then, Lan Jian still doesn't have the courage to ask for an answer.

1. The song Lan Jian sang, "Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree - 1984" by Allie Kay, is a metaphor that will only be revealed after the two separate.

2. The last line, "Not enough time to love you properly," and the following lines, "Crossing the borders of morality, traversing the forbidden zones of love," are lyrics from the song "Hiroshima Mon Amour." The author hasn't seen the movie, so please be gentle if you interpret the lyrics literally.

3. But he calls her "wife"!

@Xiaoyingge who learned that Meimei actually sang that song for her brother-in-law: Today I also played an unlucky role as a tool.