A triple blow of regret-and-redemption fiction, substitute romance, and the beauty of a double death
Twelve years ago, the Helian Yun tribe was burned in a sea of flames. The orphan Helian Xue survived with a bloodstained silver bell, only to don a wedding dress embroidered with the totem of her clan's destruction twelve years later and become the bride of her enemy, Xiao Jingyan. On their wedding night, flames appear in the lining of her dress: a coded plea for help, written in her mother's blood and bone, each word revealing that the groom himself was the one who slaughtered her clan. The silver bell sounds after drinking blood, and the memories sealed beneath her cinnabar mole tear at her heart like a knife. Amid the agony of having her eyes gouged out, her skin shed, and her heart replaced, she awakens to the truth: the silver bell on her wrist once belonged to Consort Chen, and its clapper is wrapped in her mother's singed hair; Xiao Jingyan killed his birth mother to protect her, yet made a bookmark from her skin and refined her blood into a means of sharing pain. When the Three-Lives Stele reveals the truth of their mutual stabbing in a past life, the baby's heartbeat resonates with the drumbeat of the dead's skulls, and a double rainbow becomes the tongue of the tribe's departed souls. At last, she pierces her lover's heart on the altar, only to see the statue weep and wash away the fatal wound. As the flames consume her, the clapper of the silver bell reveals the tooth that was pulled from her, and the furnace light reflects the grasslands where they first met. It turns out love and hate were carved into their bones and blood long ago. Every embrace is an execution by fate, and every tear rewrites the sins and punishments etched upon the Stone of Three Lives.
