Shang and Shen Burn to Ashes: Eternal Night Reincarnation

I burned away three hundred cycles of rebirth, yet still could not sever the fate that bound us together. Shangguan Yunzhao, daughter of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau in the Great Yu Dynasty, was born a prisoner of the stars.

For a hundred years, her family had wielded tortoise-shell divination, weaving a web of astrological signs around imperial power. They never knew they were puppets of fate themselves.

At the Winter Solstice ceremony, the emperor died suddenly, and three thousand black-armored soldiers trampled a century of Shangguan glory into the dust. In a pool of blood, Yunzhao clutched her ancestral blood jade, only to glimpse a deeper darkness. When the prince Shen Yan, with a vermilion mole at the corner of his eye, lifted her collar with his sword, a golden star chart appeared over his heart, fitting together with the red mark of reincarnation on her wrist as if they were bound by fate.

Every rebirth corrected the angle of her death, and every crack in her memory concealed a staggering lie.

Over three hundred cycles, the poisons of the Imperial Medicine Bureau had changed into twenty different ways to die. The torn pages of a secret letter from a sunken ship in the moat still bore the blood of a past life, while beneath the ancestral hall's ever-burning lamps, three hundred candles were slowly boiling her soul down into lamp oil to prolong someone's life.

The scars on Shen Yan's wrist were the growth rings carved there by her cycles of rebirth.

The cloth stained with the emperor's blood bore the blood from her father's heart.

And every time she was "reborn," it was a sacrifice in which Shen Yan carved into his own bones to borrow a life from Heaven for her.

The gears of fate had long since rusted solid.

She was the sharpest blade of an astrological clan, yet could not cut the golden-threaded gu. He was the perfect piece on the imperial chessboard, yet could not calculate when he would fall in love with the one moving the pieces.

And the truth they won through twenty cycles of killing each other was that the Xu Wei star had shifted three cun and seven fen. The most painful thing was not a blade piercing the heart, but that the hand holding it had long since become entwined with the bloodline of its enemy.

(Ancient-style court intrigue x Fated Reincarnation x Utterly Tragic Ending)

--Three hundred ever-burning lamps lie between you and me.