Readers who are sensitive to angst, beware!!!
At her blood-red coming-of-age ceremony, the fiery jade coral reflected the ashes of her loyal family. When the hairpin made from Crown Prince Xiao Che’s severed finger pierced the middle finger of her left hand, Shen Zhiwei knew that from then on, only two things remained in this world: the heart-piercing pain and the hatred that burned her alive.
After going blind in her right eye, she used her hearing to identify the half of a qilin military tally hidden in his sleeve. When the cold poison reached her bones, Rong Heng, seated in his black-iron wheelchair, used his own blood as a catalyst, yet could not stop her from embedding the poisonous needle known as “Lovesick Tears” into her severed finger. When the qilin emblem beneath her younger brother Shen Yan’s ribs grew hot, eight hundred thousand bolts of silk at the Jiangnan maritime market were curling into ash in the flames, while the jeweled circlet on Liu Ruxu’s skull dripped with the false blood of a forged letter claiming she had saved someone’s life.
He severed his own ring finger to atone, and she smiled with her blind right eye as she watched him kneel in the rain for three days. He burned down the trade routes she had spent three years building, so she blinded his one remaining eye with a poisoned needle on the battlefield. On the day they faced each other, both blind, in the underground palace of the imperial mausoleum, as lava flowed past their feet, Xiao Che suddenly pressed his severed finger against hers. “Zhiwei, it turns out we have always been each other’s bones.”
When Granny Wulan’s snake flute sounded, Xie Weilou’s gilded abacus shattered to dust, and Rong Heng’s blood stained the last piece of fiery jade, Shen Zhiwei finally saw clearly: this entanglement, which began with the slaughter of her family, had never been about revenge. It was two broken souls forging a coffin meant for them alone, with their own flesh and blood, amid mountains of blades and seas of fire.
When the imperial mausoleum came crashing down, half a qilin emblem, melted in lava, drifted out among the ashes. People said the former crown prince and the last surviving daughter of the Shen family had died together, unaware that the blizzard overhead concealed the unspoken passion they had written with their ashes.
