The Moon Bracelet Carries Me to Chang’an Together

At 26, Lin Xiaoman is driven to the brink by marriage-pressure calls on a rainy night in Beijing. Her mother points at the cracked bracelet left by her grandmother and calls her “old-fashioned.” Her best friend complains that she’s “love-struck,” and even her food-delivery notes have to say “less sugar, my mom keeps a tight rein on me.” Then, on a night of torrential rain, as she crouches on the balcony to bring in the laundry, the jade bracelet that has been cracked for three years suddenly grows hot. A blue light envelops her, and when she opens her eyes again, she is standing in a reed marsh in Northern Song Dynasty Bianjing.

A young man in a moon-white robe clutches half of a black iron tiger tally. His sword-shaped brows lift slightly. “Miss, are you lost?” The tally at his waist fits her bracelet perfectly, like two halves of a lotus coming together.

From then on, Lin Xiaoman becomes Bianjing’s most “unconventional” young woman. She uses Excel to teach embroiderers how to calculate their wages, turns Lessons for Women into a cautionary tale for her popular stories, and tells tales at the theater district, recasting “Wu Zetian” as a powerful career woman. Pei Yan becomes her staunchest ally. He burns his imperial examination papers, saying, “The woman I want to marry is someone who can share a drink with me in the middle of the night.” He shields her from a corrupt general’s hidden arrows, and during their escape through the rain, he grips her hand and cries, “Don’t be afraid.”

But the cracks in the moon bracelet grow deeper, her mother in the modern world keeps urging her to go on blind dates, and conspiracies in the past are beginning to shed their disguises. When the blue light of her final transmigration appears, Lin Xiaoman looks at Pei Yan on his sickbed and finally understands: love isn’t a choice someone else arranges for you. I crossed a thousand years to find you, and you crossed the bounds of fate to love me.