the death of his boyfriend! chengjie died when he was 21 years old (286 now) of a broken heart. i feel like you can sense where i'm going with this. the year was 1759 when chengjie's boyfriend died and chengjie was forced to leave his home and essentially was on the run for half a year to try and not die ... he was very depressed during this time and he eventually crawled into a small, cold place to, quite literally, lay down and let nature take its course ): he died alone of a broken heart and 100 or so years later he woke up as a reanimated corpse/zombie/jiangshi and now he is trying to relearn how to LOVE whilst COPING WITH HIS GRIEF!