Rain has fallen on Qingzhou City for seven days. Su Yuniang grips her mysterious abacus and slides the last silver bead into the groove marked “Paid in Full.” In the sandalwood box lies a gold-embossed wedding invitation. The vermilion seal of the Pei family's young master, who seeks her hand in marriage, bears a faint fox-tail pattern. The value of his betrothal gifts is exactly enough to cover the forty-eight taels and seven qian of ancestral debt she owes.
Everyone says the marriage is absurd: a merchant's daughter is marrying a sickly man no one has ever seen, and foxes cry every night in the mansion where her bridal sedan chair is carried. But when Su Yuniang touches the dark jade marrow on her husband's wrist, his skin feels three degrees colder than an ordinary person's. When their eldest son is born, golden light swirls in his eyes and frost formed from moonlight clings to his swaddling. And when she finds shed white fox fur in her husband's study, she finally realizes that this marriage was arranged a hundred years ago as a sacrifice.
The nine-tailed foxes of Qingqiu atone for their sins through a blood pact, while the human bride is a medium meant to seal the rift between the two worlds. The money debt in the ledger can be repaid, but the debt of love sunk into one's bones is not so easily erased. Pei Zhaorong's little finger trembles as he paints her brows, for a fox demon who falls in love will lose a thousand years of cultivation. The baby's cries set the earth's ley lines trembling, while a peachwood sword wielded by a cultivator from the Mystic Sect is already pointed at the vermilion gates of the Pei residence. And the white fox that saved her life in the mass grave all those years ago has the exact same vermilion mark between its brows as the man beside her in bed...
Her red wedding finery becomes prisoner's robes, and the threads of love twist into chains. When the mysterious abacus sounds once more, this time it is not money that must be settled, but the pain of having her heart torn out and the fury that would burn the heavens, beneath the blood-red moonlight, with the words, “My wife, Yuniang, I offer you the Three Realms as your betrothal gift.”
