After treating her last patient in the emergency room in 2023, Lin Wei falls unconscious from myocarditis. When she opens her eyes again, her scrubs are stained with the yellow earth outside Xianyang, and the stethoscope in her canvas bag is still ticking. She does not know that she has fallen not only into the Qin dynasty of 221 BCE, but also into a cycle spanning five lifetimes.
In her first life, she was a physician who mended his armor amid the chaos of the Warring States, while he was a hostage prince who had yet to ascend the throne. Beneath the oil lamp in the hostage residence in Handan, they once hid half a wheat cake together. In the end, she died from a stray arrow during the war between Qin and Zhao.
In her second life, she was a noblewoman of Han, and he was the general who conquered Han. She pretended to surrender with a map of Han, but secretly put a slow-acting poison in his wine. In the end, he stabbed her through the heart with his own hand. As she died, she heard him say, “In your next life, don’t look for me again.”
In her third life, she was a princess sent from Yan to marry for peace, and he had become the King of Qin. At a banquet, she held a dagger to his throat, but her hand trembled when he said, “I know it’s you.” They were caught between assassination and suspicion, testing one another even as they fell in love, until she took an assassin’s sword meant for him. He held her corpse and sat motionless in Xianyang Palace for three days.
In her fourth life, he became the First Emperor who unified the six states, while she became a “visitor” from the future.
Ying Zheng recognized her the instant he saw her, not because of the black-bird prophecy, but because she pressed her lips together when she frowned, just as she had when she treated his wounds in their first life. And when she used her stethoscope, her fingertips tapped the table in the very same rhythm as when she had pretended to grind ink in his study during their third life.
