She cried out in shock, just as a boy in a white shirt grabbed her left hand.
She hung suspended in midair from the cliff.
She was still clutching the fig in her right hand.
She raised her eyes to the boy, who happened to have his back to the light. The sunlight that day was blinding. She couldn’t make out his features at all, only that he was wearing a white shirt.
She wanted him to let go then, but Brother White shook his head, unwilling to let go no matter what. He just kept holding on to her.
Even though his hand was cut by a tree branch and blood stained his white shirt, he didn’t let go.
At the time, she was so young. She simply gave and passed out.
When she woke up again, her grandfather had already carried her home. She handed the fig to him.
She had even asked her grandfather where Brother White Shirt had gone.
Her grandfather had told her then that when he returned, he saw Brother White in white holding on to her unconscious form.
Brother White was about to fall. Fortunately, Brother White’s other hand was holding onto the tree trunk, so the two of them were hanging from the cliff.
Fortunately, her grandfather had returned early. If he had been a few minutes later, she and Brother White would have fallen off the cliff and disappeared without a trace.
Brother White left first because he had something to do. He left her a photo. She kept that photo later and drew a stone wall diagram!
When she woke up, she chased after him with the photo, but she couldn’t find Brother White Shirt. On the back of the photo, she wrote the word “Chuan.”
Later, when she was seven, she met Brother White Shirt again.
She recognized him immediately because he was still wearing his white shirt and because his hands were as long and slender as she remembered.
At the time, she had called him “Brother White Shirt” without hesitation.
However he looked at her in surprise with eyes full of confusion, as if he didn’t understand why she called him that.
As Brother White Shirt was her savior, in order to thank him for saving her life, she asked Brother White Shirt to go home for lunch.
Previously, she had thought that Brother White Shirt might have the word “Chuan” in his name. She had misunderstood.
She wanted to return the photo to Brother White Shirt, but he said no.
Brother White Shirt thought she liked nights in An City, so he taught her to draw. It took her months to complete the painting.
She’d only been seven at the time. Because her paintings had been such a sensation, she hadn’t wanted to be disturbed by these people. So she’d let her grandfather defeat them.
When she was thirteen, she picked up the brush again and re-created the stone wall drawing.
When this stone wall painting appeared, Grandpa helped her sell the painting. That painting caused a sensation in the entire An City.
During this period, she had used that pen name to draw many paintings. However, they were all about the scenery near the village where she lived. She had also sold them for a lot of money. Grandpa had saved most of the money for her.
When she turned eighteen, Qiao Yu came to look for her again and said something especially scary.
“The two of them were fated to be together,” he said.
At that moment, she froze.
Not long after, she heard that Qiao Yu was her biological brother.
After that she never painted again.
She had never expected that Brother White Shirt, who had gently saved her from the cliff, would become a sinister and terrifying Qiao Yu.
So she didn’t want to talk about the past at all, and she wasn’t willing to paint anymore.
The reason why she picked up the paintbrush at that charity auction banquet was purely to draw a full stop to the past. Moreover, she had also thought that even if she were to paint in the future, she would change her pen name.
Before she knew Qiao Yu’s identity, he treated her very well and took good care of her.
However, when she found out that Qiao Yu was hiding his identity, her first realization was that he had lied to her.