“Love is the blood torn from the heart, poured over the eternal hatred carved into the monument of three lifetimes.” [A Cage of Fate]
Shen Zhaoyue, an orphaned daughter of a military family, watched a raging fire consume her loyal family when she was ten. She survived by swallowing half of a bronze tiger tally.
Xiao Jingheng, a hostage from an enemy state, was born shackled by the burden of restoring the former dynasty. Branded with a slave’s sigil across his collarbones, he was tempered into a blade by bitter wormwood poison.
A game of wits amid a storm of blood drew the two into a doomed romance
She caught the scent of her enemy on his clothes, yet felt compassion for him on the moonlit night when he cut into his own flesh to treat his wounds.
He knew she was the dynasty’s last blood heir, yet still swallowed her poison in their wedding cup.
[A Cycle of Blood]
Murong, the holy maiden of the northern frontier, sat alone in an ancestral temple for twenty years, weaving a death trap across three lifetimes with Buddhist chants as her spell.
She was Xiao Jingheng’s birth mother, Zhaoyue’s aunt by blood, and the mastermind who had personally severed the thread of their marriage.
When she opened the bloody letter in the secret chamber, revealing features exactly like Zhaoyue’s, the truth struck like a blade:
“I want you to make the same choice in every life: kill the one you love, or let the world perish?”
[A Tormented Love Amid War]
In the first life, she was a noblewoman in exile, and he was a fearsome general of an enemy state. At the city gates, she was pierced by ten thousand arrows. The victory report he knelt to receive was soaked in the blood from her chest.
In the second life, she was a princess sent to marry for peace, and he was a traitor who had murdered the emperor. As poisoned wine slid down her throat, he kissed her fingertips with a smile. “In the end, this whole world is worth less than a single tear of yours.”
In the third life, she disfigured herself and leapt from a cliff, while he cut out his heart as a sacrifice. Only when a thousand-year-old coffin of ice was unearthed did the world see the tiger tally clenched in the intertwined skeletons’ hands: bite marks pierced the bronze, and love and hate were etched into the cycle of reincarnation.
