She was once a ruthless minister who held the power of life and death, and he regarded her as no more than dust. “The death of a lowly maid is hardly worth mentioning,” he said, watching coldly as she perished in the flames of the prison. Shen Chenbi, a master perfumer from Jiangnan, carried a blood feud. For five years, she gave him her whole heart and risked her life to pave his road to power, only to be repaid with exploitation and suspicion. On the night the flames consumed her, she tore out her heart and severed all affection, burying the name “Jin’er” in the ashes. Three years later, the mysterious perfumer “Bujin” sent the capital into an uproar! Her face veiled in sheer silk, her fingers steeped in heavenly fragrance. Her former enemies met bizarre defeats in the wake of her icy scent. At a palace banquet, a wisp of bone-chilling fragrance pierced Yuwen Chen’s heart and lungs. It was the scent of “Jin’er,” the woman he had burned alive with his own hands! Beside himself, he chased her to the perfumery and met her gaze, cold as a still pool. “Lord Yuwen, would you like to enjoy the spectacle of someone burning alive one more time?” she asked with a smile sharper than ice. From then on, the man who held all under heaven in his grasp stepped onto an altar of burning hearts:
He knelt in wind and snow for three days, only to find the door firmly shut;
He carved blood from his heart to test medicine, yet his pain was nothing beside the agony he had once inflicted on her;
He destroyed his own wings and eliminated his sworn enemies, humbly laying their heads at her feet;
He ground his dignity to dust, willingly becoming a prisoner crawling beneath her skirts to atone.
Shen Chenbi watched him sink without a trace of pity. “Yuwen Chen, what crawled back from the ashes was a vengeful ghost come to claim your life.” When the massacre of the Shen family came to light again with the return of a long-buried, extraordinary fragrance, he finally realized: he had destroyed the woman he loved most with his own hands, and was guilty of a monstrous blood debt! Could this all-consuming inferno forge a new beginning, or would nothing remain but cold ashes?
