An Era with a Mission

In his novel The Plague, Camus poses a proposition: to transfer the heat of the plague into an earthquake. The novel's protagonist, Yilin, is an earthquake orphan who cannot escape the torment of psychological pain brought by the earthquake and keeps looking for a way to relieve it. After losing her family in the earthquake, she is adopted by Abbess Xujing of a nunnery; the abbess hopes her adoptive daughter will stay at the nunnery as abbess after graduating from university, so that she will have someone to rely on in her old age. Yilin, however, wants to go out into the colorful wider world to forget the disaster and pain she once suffered, so upon graduation she goes to work at a company in Haicheng, where she meets the company's boss, Qin Taixu; the two are drawn to each other and appreciate each other. In her search for relief from pain, Yilin meets with all kinds of misunderstandings and is even regarded by some as the "witch" from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The male lead, Qin Taixu, comes from a powerful family, yet is himself an idealist; he is very interested in the "door" in Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence and keeps wondering what exactly the "door" Strickland is looking for is. At work, Yilin and Qin Taixu go about their daily tasks while quietly exploring their own paths in life and probing the mysteries of their own hearts, full of intense curiosity and a sense of discovery about life, existence, and the universe. However, a sudden turn of events brings Qin Taixu to misfortune; Yilin can do nothing about it and has to leave the company and return to the nunnery, accepting Abbess Xujing's arrangement to study at a Buddhist academy for two years, because becoming the nunnery's abbess requires a diploma from a Buddhist academy. So Yilin studies at the Buddhist academy while pondering the "door" Qin Taixu was looking for.