The apricot-grove healer Tangcu Jinli and the Tiance sword god Jian Sao Meishan meet for the first time in Bloodcloaks Tower in Record of Nine Heavens and Dream Clouds, and from that moment, they are destined to burn through the barrier between virtuality and reality. She breaks the shackles of his heartbreak with her medicine pestle, while he cuts through the death trap laid out in her destiny with his greatsword. Over eight years of wandering the martial world, from the forced marriage at the Old Man Under the Moon shrine to the shared fate of the Lotus in the Embers, every red lotus in the torrent of data bears the searing mark of their love.
When the ulnar nerve in his right hand becomes the melody of “Rainbow Skirt” by her ear, and the index of her cancer cells becomes the key to unlocking her fate, this desperate gamble to defy destiny has long since gone beyond the boundaries of the game. AI Xiaoman's jasmine vines, Muyu Xiaoxiang's soul-devouring puppet, and the century-old curse of the Gu ancestral shrine all become trials by fire that temper their love. They use chemotherapy drugs to forge their marriage certificate and the glint of a scalpel to cut through the bridal chamber candles. At the top of the Vermilion Bird Tower, they carve their vow: “I would forsake immortality, but never your peace.”
When the servers for Nine Heavens shut down for good and snow falls over Chang'an in the real-world hospital room, he can finally place a wedding ring engraved with a DNA helix on her finger with his bloodied right hand. Locked inside it are the first meeting amid the yellow sands of Bloodcloaks Tower, the karmic red lotus of the Three-Lives Tree, the new sprout rising from the ashes of the Lotus in the Embers, and AI Xiaoman's final jasmine blessing. Eight years have burned into an epic of Dream Clouds. The human world is more absurd than any instance, but fortunately, they rewrote the code: with devotion as their guide and fate as their paper, they turned three thousand narrow escapes from death into the vermilion inscription at the end of their marriage certificate: A Pair Under the Baleful Star
