Chronicles of the Bronze Reincarnation

When Lin Qiu uses her family’s heirloom copper key to open a camphorwood chest from 1945, a bronze mirror etched with blood-red patterns drags her into a vortex through time. After transmigrating to an antique shop in Republican-era China, she discovers that her grandfather, then a young man, is being hunted. The ancient mirror, which can reveal past and present lives, turns out to be tied to a thousand-year feud between the tomb-raiding Chen clan and the spirit of the Kunlun Mirror. In the neon-lit streets of old Shanghai, Lin Qiu witnesses her own deaths in different eras: a dancer who swallowed gold, a schoolgirl shot by a bullet, an archaeologist who drowned... Each “Lin Qiu” has a bronze dagger plunged into her chest. When the claws of a nine-tailed fox demon tear open a rift in time and space, she learns that she was once the spirit of an artifact guarding the Mirror Tomb. In every reincarnation, she was destined to seal the Demon King, awakened by the secret arts of Xu Fu’s voyage east. Traveling between Qin dynasty underground palaces and futuristic mirror worlds, and unraveling Wu Zetian’s Gilt Edict of Atonement and fragments of The Back-Pushing Chart, Lin Qiu sees on a bronze measuring ruler wielded by a tomb-raiding officer that all her selves across time are repeating the same act: opening a deadly package. When a newborn’s umbilical cord in a delivery room turns into the chains of a seal, she finally understands: only by severing the karmic ties of reincarnation can she end this three-thousand-year struggle between life and death, and escape the fate of the mirror and its keeper devouring each other.