A'Zhu and A'Zi

A'Zhu and A'Zi are sisters separated in infancy, their biological identity hidden behind adoption and revealed only through matching marks and keepsakes. Their relationship moves from belated recognition to a brief, urgent exchange of care: as A'Zhu is dying, she asks Xiao Feng to watch over A'Zi, and A'Zi appears in time to hear her sister's appeal. The reunion gives the sisters a name for their shared past, but not the childhood togetherness A'Zhu longs for; her death leaves A'Zi in Xiao Feng's care and makes their kinship an unfinished promise.

Identity and concealed parentage

A'Zhu and A'Zi are the daughters of Duan Zhengchun and Ruan Xingzhu. Their parents did not raise them together: after Ruan Xingzhu and Duan Zhengchun separated, she sent the infant girls to other households. A'Zhu later explains that her mother feared the consequences of the relationship becoming known to her strict maternal grandfather. The sisters therefore grew up apart, without the ordinary knowledge of one another or of their parents, and A'Zhu's adoptive household knew only that her mother's surname was Ruan.

Their separation was accompanied by a deliberate means of recognition. Ruan Xingzhu had a red Duan character tattooed on each daughter's shoulder, hoping they might identify one another in the future. Both girls also received a gold lock from their father. The paired marks and matching locks preserve two sides of their origin: the shoulder inscription points to the Duan family, while the locks carry a shared family history that A'Zhu only comes to understand later. These objects make their kinship legible after years in which neither sister could rely on memory or upbringing to recognize the other.

A'Zhu discovers the truth when she sees the matching mark on A'Zi's shoulder and hears the family history from her parents. The poem on her own lock, which she had taken simply as pleasing words, also contains a clue to her mother's name, Ruan Xingzhu. She understands that the locks were given by her father and distributed by her mother after the girls' births. The discovery transforms what had seemed like an isolated childhood token into evidence of a family bond deliberately preserved across separation.

Two abandoned childhoods

A'Zhu relates her history to Xiao Feng while gravely injured. She had been just over a year old when she was sent to another family, too young to recognize either parent later. She sees a parallel in Xiao Feng's own separation from his birth family: after Zhiguang tells him that Xiao Yuanshan named him Feng'er but that he was raised by Qiao Sanhuai, A'Zhu tells him that they are both miserable children, deprived of their origins while growing up elsewhere. Their shared experience does not make their histories identical, but it gives A'Zhu a language of kinship that reaches beyond her newly discovered sisterhood.

The contrast between the sisters' biological connection and their lived separation remains central. A'Zhu and A'Zi are sisters by descent, yet their bond has had little time to develop through shared daily life. A'Zhu remembers that she and her younger sister have not been together since childhood and worries about the direction A'Zi may take. Her request is therefore not only an expression of affection: it responds to a relationship that has just been recovered and is already threatened by A'Zhu's failing condition.

A final request and interrupted reunion

At the bridge, A'Zhu asks Xiao Feng to keep an eye on A'Zi and expresses concern that her younger sister may go astray. Xiao Feng tries to reassure her that they can find A'Zi after A'Zhu recovers. A'Zhu then imagines the three of them travelling beyond Yanmen Pass together, where she and Xiao Feng would ride, hunt, and tend cattle and sheep, and asks whether A'Zi would be willing to join them. The imagined future brings their family reunion into the couple's own promised life, but it depends on a recovery that does not come.

A'Zi has been hiding in the water beneath the bridge, unseen by Xiao Feng amid the storm and his distress. She emerges in waterproof clothing after overhearing A'Zhu's appeal and objects to being called a sister and Xiao Feng's future sister-in-law, saying she will not go with them. Her teasing resistance does not prevent A'Zhu from addressing her tenderly as her good sister. A'Zhu asks her to look after Xiao Feng as well as accepting his care, making the request reciprocal rather than a simple transfer of responsibility.

A'Zhu then dies in Xiao Feng's arms. He had struck her in the mistaken belief that he was confronting Duan Zhengchun; only afterward does he understand that she had taken the blow meant for her father. A'Zi sees her sister's death and accuses Xiao Feng of killing her. Xiao Feng accepts the blame and offers no defense in that moment, consumed by grief. The sisters' reunion is thus compressed into a scene of discovery, a last appeal, and loss: A'Zi arrives while A'Zhu can still speak to her, but too late for the childhood companionship A'Zhu had wished they might recover.

Kinship, care, and the surviving bond

The sisters' story distinguishes biological descent from the bonds formed through care. Their parents' marks and locks establish who they are, but the relationship between them must be made in the present, through A'Zhu's concern for A'Zi and her plea that Xiao Feng protect her. A'Zhu does not ask her sister simply to follow him; she asks each to care for the other. The appeal carries the force of a family obligation precisely because the sisters have been denied the years in which that obligation might otherwise have grown gradually.

A'Zhu's death leaves the request unresolved as a shared family life, but it gives Xiao Feng a direct responsibility toward A'Zi. What begins as a hoped-for reunion beyond Yanmen Pass cannot occur as A'Zhu imagines it. Instead, A'Zi's presence at the bridge makes her the living witness to her sister's last words, and Xiao Feng's grief and remorse become inseparable from the promise to look after her. The sisters' relationship is therefore defined both by the recovered truth of their origin and by the care A'Zhu entrusts to others before that truth can become a lasting life together.