Phoenix-Blood Sword Song

In the winter of the third year of Yongming, on the night the capital of Southern Chen fell, Princess Xiao Zhuohua pushed her twin sister into a dry well and painted a fire phoenix crest on her swaddling clothes with blood from her own navel. Twelve years later, at a banquet for female officials of the new dynasty, a measure of rouge rice mixed with human bones revealed the map of the former dynasty’s hidden dragon veins in a mural at Qixia Temple.

She runs the Bureau of Fragrance, yet can sniff out the formula for gunpowder in the vomit of a merchant from the Western Regions. He gallops along Zhangtai Road, yet pieces together a secret letter about the Nine Princes’ succession struggle from the accounts of a brothel. When a fragment of the Jade Terrace Strategy emerges from the ice coffin of a salt merchant’s widow, and the twin sisters’ remains are found to have been shockingly switched during a stormy night, this game within a game, played across ten kingdoms, must use a military tally melted by tears shed before the Buddha to burn through the bloodiest truth hidden in the history books.