Shattered Jade, Questions for the Mountains, and a Quest for Immortality

A jade hairpin shattered into seven pieces, binding together five hundred years of bloodshed across the land.

On a snowy night during the Jiajing era, as the Thief Saint Yan Jiuxiao swallowed a secret pill from the Eastern Depot, a bronze mirror in the ghost market at Liulichang reflected the first white strand at his temple. The golden needle of Qingluan, young mistress of Medicine King Valley, pierced the blood vessel in his wrist. Only then did they learn that so-called immortality was a curse, one that demanded the hearts of those dearest to you.

Amid the whistles of the Huangpu River, Yan Jiugong swirled a glass of whiskey and watched the neon lights of the Paramount Ballroom stain Su Wanqing's water sleeves red. Beneath female forensic doctor Bai Lu's scalpel, a traitor's heart bore the star chart of the Yongling Mausoleum. In the moonlight of the Republic of China, fungal threads grew wildly into an omen from the Jiajing era.

On a stormy night atop Victoria Peak, restorer Shen Nanxing pieced together fragments of a gold-threaded jade burial suit. An X-ray revealed a blueprint of a Mohist mechanism hidden inside. When international police officer Qin Zhao aimed his gun at Yan Jiu's back, the waves of Victoria Harbour reflected both the glazed tiles of the Forbidden City and the glass bottles of the Paramount Ballroom.

From the bronze compass submerged in the black waters of the imperial prison, to the yin-yang ledger hidden in the Bund's clock tower, and then to the quantum key circulating on the dark web, the nemesis who always carved “Let's drink together again in five hundred years” onto coffins turned out to be the same evil tree, grown from the fractures of the land.

The jade shattered three times:

First, at the execution ground where Qingluan swallowed a fake-death pill.

Second, in the church where Bai Lu put on a bloodstained wedding dress.

Third, the year Shen Nanxing saw the features of her past life reflected in a fragment of the jade burial suit.

The land itself demands an answer:

When Yan Jiu gathered the bloodstained blade fragments of the hairpin, a line of vermilion fate-writing appeared on the bronze gate of the underground palace:

“Better to shatter like jade in a calamity that sunders the land than borrow immortality from time.”