The White Moonlight in the Coal Ashes

In a northern mining town in 1976, the coal smoke is so thick it stings the eyes. Su Chuqiao transmigrates into the body of a “sacrifice” locked in an adobe house by her great-uncle. Tomorrow, she is to be sold as a second wife to Wang Baldy, a crippled mine boss. As she flees, she stumbles into a pitch-black mine tunnel and runs into Lin Shubai, the soot-blackened leader of the blasting team. The scar on his palm is still bleeding, and he grips a detonator, his gaze cold as ice. Yet when she grabs his work clothes and begs, “Save me,” he hides her in an abandoned coal storage shed. The gossip in the workers’ cabins stings worse than coal smoke. They call her a “seductress” and say he has “picked up a nuisance.” When Wang Baldy’s wife yanks her hair, he shields her. When gas leaks in the mine, she runs into danger to sound the alarm. To protect him, she takes a blow from an iron club, and blood from her back stains his work clothes red. He is the rough man everyone in the mining town fears, yet he saves the softest steamed bun for her, wipes her tears with his calloused fingers, and gives her the only dry quilt on a stormy night. She is the “nuisance” he picked up, yet when he faces his parents’ memorial portraits, she is the only person he dares tell, “I want to find out the truth.” From their ragged breaths behind a coal pile to a bowl of hot porridge in the workers’ cabins; from a life-or-death standoff in an abandoned mine to a wedding without a bridal gown in the cafeteria, his blasting calculations are never off by more than a centimeter, yet somehow he misjudges his growing feelings for her. Her dancing should have blossomed onstage, but she is willing to stay among the coal cinders and help him see justice, long delayed, finally served. In an age of billowing coal smoke, he is her armor, and she is the only bright moonlight shining amid the coal cinders of his life. In a northern mining town in 1976, the coal smoke is so thick it stings the eyes