In the second winter after his retirement, the retired assassin had a daughter.
The year after his daughter's birth, he and his wife retrieved an abandoned infant boy from the river; perhaps burdened by the many lives he had taken in the first half of his life, he wanted redemption, so he took this infant boy in and adopted him as his son.
The retired assassin named his daughter "Xueer" and the adopted son "Shui Sheng." He had his daughter learn literature and his son train in martial arts.
Time passed in the blink of an eye, and sixteen years later, the girl Xueer grew up to be graceful, stunningly beautiful, and intelligent—she was the epitome of beauty with brains; the boy Shui Sheng, on the other hand, was tall and strong with outstanding martial arts skills, but his mind was... a bit slow, or to put it more bluntly, he was naive to a fault.
