Book of Retracing the Ages: The Bright Moon Shines on Those Returning Home

On the full-moon night of the twenty-third year of Yonghe, a bloodstained bronze mirror revealed a fate sealed ten years earlier.

The Ninth Prince, Xiao Jingyan, held the ancient forbidden artifact known as the Mirror of Retracing Time. As time flowed backward, he glimpsed a shocking secret: the Crown Princess Shen Qinghuan, who should have perished in the fire that consumed the Eastern Palace’s records, was none other than the old friend from Jiangnan whom he had glimpsed in his youth. After ten reversals of the cycle and a hundred burnings in the flames, he spent every last drop of his imperial blood to pull her from certain death. Yet he discovered that with every rescue, the cinnabar mark on her wrist grew one shade darker.

“Your Highness, do you know what the Mirror of Retracing Time feeds on? The blood of love and hatred.” The prophecy from the Imperial Astronomical Bureau’s tattered scroll appeared in the pouring rain. When Shen Qinghuan shed her plain clothes to reveal a phoenix tattoo, and Xiao Jingyan’s jade crown was stained with the blood of his late brother’s orphan, the palace candles finally illuminated the cruelest truth: the broken jade at her neck concealed an imperial edict from the previous dynasty, while the bloody mark in his palm was a life-and-death curse binding them both.

The tea-picking song from the banks of the Qiantang River still lingered in their ears, while the white jade steps before the Hall of Supreme Harmony were soaked with tears of longing. No meticulous historian’s brush could capture ten years in the inner palace. The cruelest thing was not being unable to have her, but holding her hand through ten lifetimes of repeating the cycle, only to have to send her to the altar with his own hands every time.