Lin Xia, a Palace Museum relic-restoration specialist, accidentally activates a Qianlong-era thumb ring and transmigrates through time, where she comes face-to-face with Yiming, a Prince of the Iron-Cap line tasked with investigating the theft of national treasures. When a Western auction house's sealed letter collides with the sandalwood incense of the Hall of Mental Cultivation, and relic X-ray technology meets the gilding techniques of the Imperial Household Department's workshops, the two join forces in investigating the case of the Twelve Zodiac animal heads smuggled overseas, moving from mutual suspicion to fighting side by side. They bid in the underground black market at Liulichang, crack the mechanisms of the Bronze Sparrow Pavilion in the Old Summer Palace, and use traditional painting-mounting techniques to forge national treasures and swap out the originals... They use modern principles of cultural relic preservation to rewrite the course of history. But at the crucial moment when they try to prevent the burning of the Old Summer Palace, they discover that they are not the only ones who have traveled through time. When the gunshot wound on Yiming's chest resonates across time with the bullet casing in Lin Xia's hand, and a relic dossier from 2035 appears in a hidden compartment in the Hall of Mental Cultivation, this battle to protect the treasures suddenly unveils the shocking secret of parallel timelines.
