“Seeing that spring will not last, she casts off her old finery and dons a nun’s robes.” This was the fate already written for her.
As both the Rongguo and Ningguo mansions teeter under old debts and new troubles, with everyone living in fear, Xichun spreads out a sheet of raw paper. The green-stamen plum she paints, aloof and proud, unknowingly becomes the first knock at the gates of the Zichen Palace.
This is not a love story.
It is a cold legend about clear-eyed resolve and choice, about how, amid the ruins of vermilion mansions destined to fall, she writes out a new way to live, one word at a time.
