In the autumn of the twenty-eighth year of the Wanli reign, the Imperial Observatory’s armillary sphere revealed ominous signs.
The Big Dipper hung upside down, a comet swept across the moon, and the Purple Star of the Emperor dimmed and shifted from its position.
Deputy Director Shen Moyan saw through the astrological conspiracy, only to witness a colleague die beneath a bronze gnomon. The corpse’s severed arm was embedded with Siamese shark silk used exclusively by the Directorate of Ceremonial, while the bloodstained gears of the armillary sphere fit perfectly with an object left behind by his late father. That night, a masked assassin burst through the window with seven star-shaped bone-piercing nails. What was revealed was not only the bloodstained truth behind a twenty-year-old calendar case, but also a secret of the celestial armillary dating back to the Yongle era, when the Mandate of Heaven was tampered with and the very foundations of the Ming were shaken.
Lu Qingya, a female Embroidered Uniform Guard officer disguised as a man, bears a Big Dipper-shaped scar on her left shoulder from an Eastern Depot torture by fire and clutches in her palm a celestial armillary pendant belonging to a former minister of the Jianwen Emperor. With a single sword stroke, she breaks into the Imperial Observatory’s underground palace, revealing an astrological chamber where magnets have altered the heavens, the mercury-filled dragon veins of the imperial mausoleum, and the Hongwu armillary sphere, powerful enough to make the Forbidden City quake.
The glass-and-gold roof of the Directorate of Ceremonial reflects the ominous star; the Eastern Depot’s soul-locking needles set a corpse formation in motion; and deep underground, the Imperial Jade Seal rumbles faintly as the Purple Star shifts. The countdown has already begun: in ten months, the Crown Prince’s investiture ceremony will coincide with falling stars and splitting earth.
In this covert war, where stars are blades and mechanisms are traps,
the one who reads the heavens may not be a sage,
but the gears turning in blood are what move fate.
