[A Republican-era dream | A stormy mansion | Twin souls torn apart]
In the grass of the Xie family’s back garden, eight-year-old Zhirong would often end up looking like a “little coal ball.” Only Grandpa would laugh as he wiped her face clean and changed her into fresh clothes. But on a rainy night when white lanterns were hung, Grandpa became a wisp of smoke rising from his ancestral tablet, leaving her with one last request: “Rong’er, take good care of this family for me.”
Ten years later, the times are in turmoil. Her mother brings a cool and distant young man before her. “This is Qingfeng, your new playmate.”
She doesn’t know that this “clan leader’s son” is really a lone wolf with a blood feud, who has infiltrated the mansion with a scheme. When disaster strikes the ancestral hall, a corpse floats in the lotus pond, and the account books are stained with blood, she is forced to cast off her innocence and brave the storm of bloodshed alongside him.
He teaches her to spot the hidden barbs beneath the sugar coating; she soothes his countless wounds with a bowl of warm porridge. They embrace in the blood-red dawn, yet in the end, they cannot escape the tides of history. The iron hooves of land reform crush the grand gates of the old estate. He turns toward the smoke of battle in the new world, leaving her alone to guard their crumbling home.
“Grandpa, are the pine-nut candies in heaven sweet?”
“Qingfeng, the mountains and rivers are so cold when we part...”
The old dream fades, leaving only a silent murmur beside the carved window lattice: “My homeland, my old friends, I miss you.”
I really want to see the next one