I See Frost and Snow
"Miss?"
Although Nanny Zhong was an ordinary person, living in the immortal sect for so long had sharpened her senses.
As soon as she smelled the faint scent of herbs drifting into the courtyard, she became suspicious, and upon walking over, she indeed sensed someone in the room.
"Miss, are you still brewing medicine for that boy in the back mountain?"
As she spoke, Nanny Zhong had already gently pushed open the door and squeezed half her body inside, immediately spotting Yingshi sitting in front of a small stove, staring blankly at the bubbling medicinal soup.
The young girl wore a standard aqua-blue disciple uniform, but because she was the daughter of the sect master, the cut and material of her clothes were much better than ordinary ones, even embroidered with dense patterns of spirit branches and immortal cranes.
She looked somewhat out of place in this dusty servant's room.
Sitting there on a small stool with her face cupped in one hand, she looked rather pitiful.
Seeing this, Nanny Zhong couldn't help but complain in a low voice, "What right does he have to drink the medicinal soup you brewed yourself, bowl after bowl!"
Yingshi was in a daze and didn't respond. Nanny Zhong couldn't help but step closer, only to find that Yingshi's expression was filled with melancholy, and her eyes were actually glistening with tears. She immediately cried out, "Oh my! My good Miss, what happened? Why are you so sad?"
Yingshi sluggishly noticed Nanny Zhong's approach. She hastily wiped her eyes and waved her hand, saying, "... The smoke from the medicine just got in my eyes, I'm fine."
Her eyes were red, and she was clearly trying to hide her sorrow, which made Nanny Zhong's heart ache even more. She had been chosen from the mortal realm to the immortal sect specifically to take care of Yingshi.
Having watched her grow up, she understood Yingshi's temperament very well.
If she had been scolded by the sect master or had a conflict with her fellow disciples, she would have definitely complained and poured out her grievances immediately. She would never pretend that everything was fine like she was doing now.
Nanny Zhong had a realization. She guessed that Yingshi's current behavior must be related to that boy in the back mountain. Ever since she returned last night, she had been in low spirits, and even acted distant towards her...
Why bother? A dignified young lady of the immortal sect could probably even pluck the stars from the sky, yet she insisted on suffering for love!
For a moment, Nanny Zhong felt stifled, but mostly she felt pity. She hurriedly said, "I really don't understand cultivation matters, but Miss, if you have any emotional troubles, you can always tell me."
"It's really nothing..." Yingshi said awkwardly.
"Did that boy surnamed Han break your heart again? He's just an outer sect handyman. He has no talent and no ability. Besides that face, what else is good about him?! How is he worth you shedding tears for him..." Nanny Zhong stamped her feet in anxiety.
"Ah, it's really not that! Nanny Zhong, you misunderstood, I wasn't crying!" Seeing that she couldn't explain clearly, Yingshi hastily put the lid on the small medicine pot, put out the fire, and picked up the brewed medicine to slip out. "I have urgent matters, I'll leave first..."
"Miss! You're going to the back mountain again, and you still say it's not for that boy!" Nanny Zhong shouted, frustrated at her failure to meet expectations. "If the sect master and the young master ask where you went today, I won't help you hide it anymore!"
Yingshi trotted all the way. Only when her voice grew distant did she slow down and silently sigh.
It was hard for her to explain clearly to Nanny Zhong why she was sad.
She was homesick.
She missed her mom and dad, her dog, the snacks she hadn't finished, and the TV shows she hadn't caught up on.
She missed hotpot, barbecue, skewers, cola, milk tea, and ice cream.
She missed the technologically advanced modern society!
Thinking of this, her nose couldn't help but sting again.
She didn't belong here. She was sad! She was lost!
But these were all things she couldn't say to Nanny Zhong.
Yingshi had transmigrated into a book. The world she was currently in was based on a male-protagonist progression fantasy novel called "I See Frost and Snow".
If her transmigration experience could be briefly summarized, it would be: "During finals week, I was planning to review at night but accidentally clicked into a novel, got carried away reading until 3 AM, and right at the end, the author aggressively fed the readers garbage. I got so mad I choked on my breath and transmigrated."
To explain in detail, one must carefully mention the book "I See Frost and Snow".
"I See Frost and Snow" was written over a decade ago and was quite popular on the internet for a while. It could be said to be a pioneer of male-protagonist progression fantasy. Unfortunately, the author, Jing Fengliu, dropped it. After writing a voluminous six to seven hundred thousand words, he disappeared, leaving a massive plot hole that was never finished.
So many years had passed. Web novel tropes improved generation after generation, masterpieces emerged endlessly, and values evolved with the times. Logically speaking, no matter how amazing this book was, it should have faded from readers' minds. Moreover, its plot and character designs, which seemed outstanding over a decade ago, would appear mediocre or even cliché from a progressive perspective.
Then why did it make waves again after being abandoned for over ten years?
Because Jing Fengliu came back to fill the hole.
He filled it, but it would have been better if he hadn't. Everything written afterwards was completely out of character!
The character designs collapsed, the plot collapsed, and the author's mental state seemed to have collapsed as well. He even suddenly announced on social media that he was going to lock the entire text.
How could this be acceptable?
Jing Fengliu was, after all, an ancient web novel god. His locking of the text caused a massive uproar, even spawning a trending hashtag for the locked novel.
Yingshi learned about this book precisely from that trending topic.
Thinking about it now, perhaps that was just a malicious marketing stunt?
Maybe the author would unlock it himself in a couple of days?
So why did she have to rush to read it so frantically, as if afraid of missing out on the excitement, only to step on a landmine and blow herself up?!
Yingshi deeply regretted being drawn in by this little internet drama.
She absolutely shouldn't have been foolish enough to search for this book and click into it, nor accidentally get addicted to it during finals week, and still refuse to stop upon discovering a supporting character shared her name.
Actually, when she read up to chapter thirty-something, it coincided with Jing Fengliu locking the chapters online. It was almost to the point where chapters disappeared right after she read them, practically reading-and-burning, making people incredibly anxious.
While downloading chapters in advance, she was practically chased into reading until 3 AM.
The early and middle stages of the novel's story were indeed gripping, otherwise the later collapse wouldn't have been so unbearable.
The male protagonist Han Shuangjian's parents were both super bigshots with maxed-out combat power. One was a divine maiden of an immortal sect, and the other was a netherworld demon lord. Such a rebellious union gave birth to the male lead, a mixed-blood of good and evil. Furthermore, while still in his mother's womb, the male lead passively absorbed a demon king's spiritual core. With all these buffs fully stacked, he should have been a privileged genius who could walk sideways in the cultivation world.
However, as the protagonist of a progression fantasy, he naturally had to have a miserable background and suffer endless bullying at the beginning to fit the logical development of the plot. Therefore, the author set it up so that his birth caused the death of his mother.
The Divine Maiden of the Immortal Sect actually perished during childbirth. The Nether Demon Lord, having his wife taken away by his son, lost his mind (perhaps the righteous path would call this qi deviation, but since he was already a demonic cultivator, it could only be said that inner demons took over his brain). Now everything was ruined. He could not suppress the urge to kill his own flesh and blood, even breeding a malicious desire to drag the whole world down to be buried with his wife.
Before everything completely collapsed, the Demon Lord relied on his last remaining shred of sanity to entrust the male lead to his subordinates. He ordered a pair of servants to disguise themselves as the male lead's parents and take him to the mortal realm to live an ordinary life.
To this end, he personally sealed his son's heaven-defying bloodline talent, completely destroying the male lead's innate aptitude for cultivation. On the surface, he was even worse off than an average person.
However, on the male lead's seventh birthday, which was also the death anniversary of the Divine Maiden of the Immortal Sect, the Demon Lord, influenced by his inner demons, personally rushed to the mortal realm. He slaughtered the male lead's adoptive parents and over a dozen households in the village right in front of him.
Just as he was about to finish off the male lead, the Demon Lord's hand had already gripped the boy's neck, but at the very last moment, he went mad and chopped off his own right hand. He vanished without a trace, leaving the male lead alive but causing him to lose his memories due to the extreme trauma.
Afterward, the male lead wandered around the town as a little beggar. It was not until he was twelve, in order to scrounge for food, that he stepped onto the path of immortality and joined the outer sect of the Cloud Water Sect. Because his talent was so poor, even five years after joining, he was still doing sweeping and chores, barely touching the edges of cultivation, not much different from a normal person.
In this cultivation world where people sucked up to the strong and trampled on the weak, he naturally suffered all kinds of bullying and targeting.
But how could the male lead just let himself be trampled underfoot forever?
His path of counterattack started right from the Cloud Water Sect. From then on, he continuously obtained fortunate encounters, loosened his seals, gradually made a name for himself in the cultivation world, unraveled the mystery of his birth bit by bit, and ultimately killed his biological father with his own hands, restoring an era of peace and prosperity to the cultivation world.
The character Yingshi transmigrated into was the daughter of the Cloud Water Sect's Sect Master, and also the first character in the book to have a romantic subplot with the male lead. Her role was the charming little childhood sweetheart. When the male lead was still a piece of trash, she uncontrollably fell in love with him simply because she was a sucker for good looks.
Her admiration was also a crucial part of the male lead slapping the faces of the other minor cannon fodder disciples.
The subsequent plot involved the male lead constantly changing maps to level up, continuously slapping the faces of cannon fodder and villains, and constantly winning the admiration of important big shots and female characters.
He became more and more powerful, his combat strength gradually crushing everyone. His career skyrocketed, and his romantic life was even more colorful. Besides Yingshi, the first love childhood sweetheart, there was also an aloof senior sister, a wicked and charming demoness, an unreasonable princess, a hopelessly adorable spirit pet, a glamorous ghost king, a pure pharmacist, and a bevy of other beauties who secretly or openly gave him their hearts.
Of course, the male lead's character was charmingly written. Unlike some works that completely wrote the male lead as a morally corrupt thug who blinded everyone purely with his protagonist halo, Han Shuangjian was set up as a mentally sound, beautiful, strong, and tragic figure. It made people feel that it was reasonable for a truckload of female characters to fall in love with him.
But the problem was, if he turned around and also fell in love with a truckload of female characters, and engaged in ambiguous push-and-pull with every single one of them, that would be incredibly unreasonable!
One of the reasons the book fell apart in its later stages was precisely this. This was also what angered Yingshi. After getting emotionally invested in the protagonist's fate as a reader, she surprisingly found that he vaguely showed a tendency to build a harem. He was ambiguous with every female supporting character, neither taking the initiative nor taking responsibility, acting entirely like a scumbag, leaving every female character heartbroken over him.
Yingshi could actually feel that after wrapping up the plotline, the author wanted to wrap up the romantic lines too, but he really just wrote a pile of crap!
Readers like her, who had a slight emotional germaphobia, were dissatisfied with these plots. Meanwhile, male readers who enjoyed harem tropes were even more dissatisfied. They thought the male lead was too dawdling; faced with girls throwing themselves at him, he kept pushing them away and stringing them along endlessly. In the end, he did not take a single one into his harem, only scratching the surface without even a slightly intimate scene, making it extremely frustrating to read!
In short, Jing Fengliu was ganged up on by angry readers. They could not accept this half-baked and severely out-of-character continuation, angrily flaming Jing Fengliu, saying it would have been better to leave the novel unfinished like it was a dozen years ago, so they could at least imagine a perfect ending themselves.
What the hell did Jing Fengliu know about "I See Frost and Snow"!
Others might still have had a chance to flame him, but Yingshi had a breath caught in her throat. Not knowing if it was from anger or staying up late, she passed away very suddenly, not even having the time to open the comment section.
So much so that when she left, her mind was still entirely preoccupied with the fact that she had not been able to insult the male lead.
...
Carrying that intense resentment, Yingshi initially did not even realize she had died and transmigrated into a book.
She just thought she was too tired, passed out on the spot, and started dreaming.
Because her daytime thoughts were too intense, she ended up seeing the male lead in her dream.
She knew at first glance that the man lying on the straw bed, heavily injured, with his handsome face covered in a sickly, miserable pallor, was the male lead of "I See Frost and Snow", Han Shuangjian.
She stood rooted to the spot, holding a medicine bowl in her hands. The wind was a bit boisterous, blowing into this dilapidated thatched cottage and rolling up the dry grass on the ground. Everything was unbelievably real.
The memories and emotions belonging to the body surged forth. When Yingshi met the gaze the male lead cast over, she was confused at first, then uncontrollably blushed with a racing heart, but soon she only felt a surge of anger burning from her head down to her toes.
Dreaming was great, beating and scolding the male lead in a dream to vent her anger was great!
This man who did not abide by male virtues, it was a waste that she had even shed a few tears for him while reading the early and middle plotlines!
It turned out he was just an atypical scumbag, and an extremely disgusting one at that!
Yingshi's hands could not help but tremble even more. Suddenly, she violently raised the medicine bowl she was holding, splashing all the liquid right into the male lead's face, and angrily rebuked:
"I hate fickle men like you the most! You still dare to make eyes at me? You think you are some kind of Casanova? You stinking scumbag, get out!!!"
