Bones Shattered, Blossoms Bloom

When modern forensic scientist Yun Zhixia touched the bloodstained shard of bone china at an archaeological dig, she never expected the sting in her fingertip to tear open a rift in time. When she opened her eyes, she had become a mysterious apprentice at the “White Bone Painting” shop in the Great Yong Dynasty. A pattern of bone spurs that burned to the touch covered the back of her hand. And Xie Jinglan, who always wore moon-white brocade robes and carried the cool scent of plum blossoms on his cuffs, looked at her as if she were a piece of bone china he had lost and found again. The female corpse in the ice cellar had a heart-shaped birthmark on her collarbone, and her bones shared the same origin as Yun Zhixia’s. Forbidden writing in a secret chamber of the Xie residence could display a modern star chart on her phone. The neck of the headless woman on the bronze lamp in the Temple of Heaven’s underground palace bore a break that matched the wound in her dreams. “Your bones carry the bloodline of the Heaven-Mending Pavilion,” Xie Jinglan said, his fingertips tracing the porcelain-like marks on her arm, where a white plum blossom was spreading. “They also hold the key that can either keep me alive or shatter me.” When the bone-china heart cracked in his chest, when the bronze lamp revealed his bloodied face pinned to the ground, when the light gate formed by the resonance of their twin jades began to spin before their eyes… Only then did she understand that “bones shattered into blossoms” had never been a forbidden art. He had nourished a porcelain bead with the blood of his heart and carved “Wait for me” on the other side of the rift in time. She had crossed a thousand years carrying half a jade pendant and grown an everlasting jasmine for him among the piles of shattered bone. “Even if my soul scatters into shards of porcelain, I’ll piece together a set of coordinates that will lead me to you.” Bound by bone and blood across two lifetimes, their story began with a corpse bearing a birthmark and blossomed among a sky full of shattered bone china.