"He wants the phoenix crown on my head. I want the woman in his heart trapped in the imperial mausoleum forever."
On the night of her wedding, Shen Zhiyi used a silver hairpin for examining corpses to cut open the cinnabar mark on the inner thigh of her elder sister, the Crown Princess.
The gilded liquid released by the crawling gu worms revealed that her childhood friend, the heir to the throne, had murdered his father; that the gentle, jade-like Fifth Prince was turning people into living cocoons; and that even the mute servant she had rescued was the younger sister the National Guardian General had searched for over ten years.
Xie Lin pressed his blade against her back, against the skin marked with soul-summoning talismans. "Miss Shen, when you cut open each corpse, can you hear my entire Xie clan weeping?"
She smiled and draped her poison-stained wedding dress over him. "General, when you kill each of your enemies, can you see who the real culprit sitting on the dragon throne is?"
When the river beast beneath Vermilion Bird Bridge spat out the blood-written imperial edict naming the successor, on the day the new emperor crowned his empress, Shen Zhiyi crushed the pearl on her phoenix crown.
The gilded liquid that spilled out reflected the final sight of Xie Lin falling into the gu pool to protect her.
