A blood-soaked romance between Yama and a Rakshasa, where love is tempered on the blade and our fated bond is laid bare**
> **“When the white plum petals she coughed up fell upon his blade, the martial world gained a third kind of beauty.”**
Shen Shuangci, daughter of the richest man in Jiangnan, is a sickly beauty whom everyone believes will not live past her youth.
But no one knows that when the water clock strikes the third watch, her bloodied handkerchief becomes a crimson veil, and the famed Ice Soul Sword drinks deep of her enemies' blood.
She is the leader of the Crimson Shadow Pavilion, the sharpest blade in the martial world’s rainy nights.
Xie Jin, the Eastern Depot's Governor, wears half a silver mask to conceal the face of a demon from hell. The puppet strings in his hands have strangled over a hundred court officials.
When he grips the wrist of the hand holding her sword, his prayer beads brush the red plum blossom brand on her shoulder blade.
“Miss Shen's pulse is just like that of the demon I've been hunting.”
She presses a poisoned hairpin to his heart. “The dragon's-breath incense on your collar has thoroughly scented my late father's coffin.”
A blood-red marriage pact traps Yama and the Rakshasa in a deadly game:
- Beneath the red wedding candles, he tears open her flowing robes, his sword-callused fingers tracing old scars. “With wounds like these, Madam could fill half a chronicle of the martial world.”
- When the poison flares, she cuts out her own heart's blood to warm his deadly chill, iron chains winding around her ankles. “Xie Jin, you can chain a Rakshasa, but can you chain a love that brings calamity?”
- Amid the flames of war, she rides a white horse through the enemy lines, her bloodstained skirt sweeping over the ruins. “Today, I'll protect both the land and my Yama!”
When the Blood Lotus Cult massacres the martial world and secrets of the previous dynasty tear away the masks:
A loving father's bones were used to cultivate evil arts, while a half-sister's golden bells unleash a tide of Gu.
Hidden in the divine physician senior brother's bamboo flute is a soul-binding spell prepared for her
