**“Time is the clumsiest liar. It always disguises a reunion as a first encounter.”**
The compass of Lin Jiuge, a Daoist exorcist, always points toward the forbidden.
When she pursues a ghoul into a century-old clock tower, the man she encounters is Gu Nangui, a zombie king dressed in a sharp suit.
The black obsidian Taotie at his collar reflects her shattered jade-feather hairpin. Inside his gold pocket watch are images of her in a qipao and him in a bloodstained military uniform.
**“Wounds are buttons on time. They always come undone on rainy nights, opening up old memories.”**
He drinks the elixir of immortality refined from her heart’s blood in a past life, carving the character for “upright” thirty thousand times over eighty years of reincarnation.
She seals away her memories and becomes a judge who hunts the immortal, yet in every demon-slaying formation, she leaves an escape route open for the same figure.
When their Republic-era marriage contract appears at an auction across the boundaries of time, and bullets travel back and forth through church stained-glass windows across eighty springs and autumns,
they finally understand the blood-red hexagram on the bronze compass: the deadliest trial between life and death is, in fact, a trial of love.
**“Being reduced to ashes means nothing. What I fear is forgetting the warmth of your eyes in the cycle of reincarnation.”**
He tears open a rift in time and space to shield her from heavenly lightning, but the words carved into his dragon-spine blade are a spell to make her forget.
She cuts out half her heart to restart the bronze clock, but replaces her demon-slaying blade with a wedding cup.
In this desperate gamble against the laws of causality, the immortal sacrifices his undying body, while the exorcist burns the red thread of fate on her destiny chart,
all to prove:
**“My love for you began before death, and will end long after eternity.”**
