"Jade Steps to Plum Blossoms" is set in the turbulent times of Chongzhen in the late Ming Dynasty, and is a tragic song of love and hate that begins with a substitute and ends with the era.
Xie Linyuan, a young man from an aristocratic family, lives in the Han Dynasty. Under his gentle mask, he hides his calculation of power and his paranoia about his late friend Shen Yuheng. When Su Heng, the son of the guilty minister, became a servant of the Xie family, the face that looked exactly like Shen Yuheng became the outlet for Xie Linyuan's obsession - he forced Su Heng to recreate his old shadow, but in the process of controlling it, he became sincere about this sharp "shadow".
Su Heng recognized the identity of the stand-in in humiliation, and endured imitation in order to overturn his father's case. However, after witnessing the extravagance of the Xie family and the corruption of the officialdom, he was torn between hatred and Xie Linyuan's occasional tenderness. The bloody party struggle dragged the two into the abyss: Xie Linyuan framed Zhongliang for self-protection and was involved in Shen Yuheng's old case; Su Heng relied on trust to collect evidence, and eventually fell into a "pathological symbiosis."
Troubled times crushed dignity, from fine clothes and fine food to exile and begging, Su Heng awakened himself in the rebel army, while Xie Linyuan struggled on the edge of betraying the imperial court. When the city fell, Su Heng died to protect the people. On his deathbed, he said, "I am not him after all", shattering all Xie Linyuan's pretense.
In front of Mei Lin's solitary grave, Xie Linyuan spent the rest of his life copying Su Heng's handwriting, and the ink was like tears. This entanglement that started with a substitute ended up as snow falling on the ashes of the dynasty - personal love and hate are as light as dust, leaving only the eternal longing for the peaceful world.
