Jia Mengyu, a leading scholar of Dream of the Red Chamber, is unexpectedly reborn as Jia Baoyu, the novel’s protagonist. Armed with his previous life’s insight into the original story’s tragedy, he vows to defy fate and change the characters’ destinies with their own hands. Under the pretense of receiving “visions from an immortal,” he uses the rules of the feudal world to quietly push for reform: during Yuan Chun’s visit home, he hides advice on managing the household in her poems; when Qin Keqing is critically ill, he copies out an ancient medical formula to prolong her life; and before the Grand View Garden is searched, he swaps the evidence to protect everyone. Before Jin Chuan throws herself into a well, she receives a forged “letter of refuge from Zhuangzi.” When Qing Wen is cast out, a “list of ancestral rewards” turns up in her defense. As You Erjie is about to swallow gold, a midwife bursts in with a secret remedy to protect her pregnancy.
Jia Mengyu turns the original story’s foreshadowing into a blade, rewoven the threads of fate: he alters the verdicts in the Illusory Land of Great Void to save Qin Zhong, rewrites “The Burial of Flowers” to reverse Daiyu’s fate, and secretly uses the Old Lady Jia’s Buddhist scriptures to create a “fate blessed by a joyous wedding,” breaking the destined union of the Golden and Jade Tokens. He lays out a web of classical intrigue: he turns Granny Ma’s witchcraft back on Aunt Zhao, uses the Essential Techniques for the Welfare of the People to improve the land registers and help Tanchun’s reforms, and, when the Embroidered Uniform Guard raids the Jia household, produces evidence of its crimes that he has secretly gathered over ten years, laying out the merits and faults of all twelve branches. In the end, the Grand View Garden becomes a school for women, Daiyu takes charge of poetry lessons, Tanchun opens up maritime trade, and Granny Liu becomes an agricultural adviser. The inscription “A Cavern of a Thousand Beauties” on the sentient jade becomes “Ten Thousand Beauties, Spring Together.”
This 120-chapter novel stays true to the original’s structure, using the rules of the feudal world to break free of its constraints: a slight adjustment to the Cold Fragrance Pills extends Baochai’s life, the Elegy for the Hibiscus Flower conceals a document of pardon, and a petition filed three days before Xue Pan’s murder case overturns the verdict. When the bridal sedan chair for Jia Lian’s secret wedding mistakenly enters the Shuntian Prefecture yamen, and a hundred letters to change fate rewrite the verdict book of the Illusory Land of Great Void, an intellectual battle waged in the style of Dream of the Red Chamber breaks the novel’s fatalistic spell and sets a brand-new romantic tale among its vermilion mansions and embroidered chambers.
