Rain is a familiar visitor to Jiangnan. The year she left Shanghai, the cold rain fell like needles, piercing the bluestone streets and the heart of ten-year-old Shen Shuyao.
The old monk’s prophecy read: “Jade bones and icy skin, yet doomed to suffer a tribulation of love.”
Her father crushed the sheet of rice paper bearing the words “tribulation of love” and cast it into a muddy corner.
Ten years later, the rain returned.
Wrapped in a dark, elegant qipao, she came back through the rain, her bearing as cool as ever. In the great family estate, her stepmother wore a mask of benevolence, her young half-brother was arrogant, and beneath the turbulent surface of the merchants’ guild lay bloodstained weapons and lifelines at sea. Her father handed her the cold “Shanhai Order.” “The rot must be torn out by the roots.”
Adjutant Zhang Zhengqing’s gaze followed her, and also followed the charred scrap he had secretly picked up from the mud years ago. The words “tribulation of love” on it had burned into his heart like a brand.
He watched her slap a viper, watched her set off the deadly plot beneath the Huangpu River, watched blood blossom on her shoulder, and watched the searing lava crack through the ice in the depths of her eyes.
When the patriarch’s game of chess produced a marriage contract, and a gun barrel pressed against his forehead for “insubordination,” Zhang Zhengqing spoke. “If she is my tribulation, then I willingly face eternal ruin.”
She crashed into his bloodstained embrace, their lips and teeth branded with blood and resolve. A shard of broken jade cut into her palm. She pressed the bloodied fragment into his flesh. “Zhang Zhengqing, this tribulation… is yours now.”
The rain had not stopped, and the ashes of the tribulation still smoldered.
She leaned over and brought a spoonful of medicine to his cracked lips.
“Why?”
“I don’t believe in Buddha. I only believe in myself.”
