In the bitter winter of 1988, Su Huaiqing jolts awake from a nightmare in which her father dies in a workplace accident. She has been reborn on the morning her fate first changed. The scar still visible in the web between her left thumb and forefinger, and the miraculous spring hidden in her palm, prove that time has turned back. This time, she will overturn the stigma that she brings death to her family, foil the schemes of her awful relatives, and uncover the national-treasure mystery her husband kept buried in her previous life.
The miraculous spring can reveal the essence of things, while antiques offer glimpses of the past. When a woman worker she saved slips her a Northern Wei jade cicada pendant, and the tattoo of a smuggling gang from her previous life flashes across the wrist of Zhou Shiyu, a doctor of mixed heritage, Su Huaiqing realizes that being reborn is not just a chance to make up for past regrets. It is a battlefield where she must contend with time itself. Her improved tea-egg recipe is framed by the state-run cafeteria; a lucky find on the black market leads her into a pig-butchering scam; and while trading treasury bonds, she discovers that their Hong Kong dollar serial numbers are connected to a national treasure theft thirty years in the future. Every step of her rise cuts along the sharp edge of a changing era.
An oil-paper package beneath the old locust tree conceals secret smuggling records of the Azure Dragon Gang. A padded layer in a pile of surplus cotton at the textile mill reveals an embroidered qipao. A map of a tomb reflected in the miraculous spring points straight to the old well at the Su family home. When Zhou Shiyu’s scalpel presses against her lower back, and the lights of the neighborhood patrol surround her uncle’s hunting party and cut through the night, Su Huaiqing finally sees the truth: in this whirlpool spanning two lifetimes, everyone is both prisoner and accomplice of history. Her father’s left ear, crushed in an accident, is embedded in the golden eye of a thousand-year-old tomb’s golden bird, gazing at the snow falling in 1988.
