“He buried his sins beneath three hundred li of crabapple blossoms, yet drove his sharpest blade into his beloved’s heart.”
[Blood-Soaked Power Struggles]
Jiang Yan, Crown Prince of the Eastern Palace, hides a bloodthirsty, deranged soul beneath his gentle exterior. On every rainy night, he slaughters stand-ins to ward off disaster. Beneath the crabapple grove he planted himself lie piles of finger bones. Pei Xuexiao, a shamanic healer from the southern borders, enters the palace wearing a silver mask. The cinnabar mole between his brows matches the traces of poison from a past life. On the night a twin-life gu worm is planted in their hearts, a black crane cloak tangles with a star map woven from mermaid silk amid the rain of blood. Sharing each other’s pain is both a curse and the frenzied pact behind their twisted love.
[Forbidden Game of Strategy]
“Your Highness, do you know that all the people you’ve killed are your own shadows?”
Pei Xuexiao smiles as he brushes the Soul-Locking Nail bleeding beneath his collarbone. He alters the astrologer’s memories and turns Xie Yun into a living piece on the board. In the sleep-inducing incense he concocts, hallucinogens eat away at the Crown Prince’s reason. When the bronze mirrors at the end of the mirrored corridor reflect six layers of time and space, the secret of the crown prince swap from twenty years ago spills forth along with the shattered jade of a man-eating peacock. [The Endless Cycle]
A white peacock devours a wooden puppet carved with the words “Zhaozhao,” then spits out a broken hairpin belonging to the Crown Princess of a past life. When Xie Yun cuts open her belly to take the child, a blood-red crabapple birthmark blooms in the baby’s palm. Chen Zhou tears apart the tattoo reading “The boat capsizes, the inkstone sinks,” revealing the identity of a surviving heir to the previous dynasty and setting off a coup that mirrors the past. In the empty eye sockets of a statue deep in the palace, black gu worms gnaw at the lies that rewrote people’s memories.
[Violent Aesthetics]
◇ A black crane cloak sweeps past palace walls, its crimson lining like a blood-red sunset
◇ The sound of a pestle crushing butterfly wings joins the mournful cries of torture instruments in a death duet
◇ Bronze mirrors in the corridor reflect rifts in time and space; searchlights from a modern archaeological team illuminate the reader’s horrified face in the mirror
