In 2024, freelance writer Lin Wanxing is fretting over rent when a backward-running calendar and a mysterious brocade box suddenly draw her into storm-tossed Beiping in 1937. The entwined-lotus mark that appears out of nowhere on her wrist becomes the key to crossing time.
This is an age of hidden brilliance and a land on the brink of war, where a single spark awaits to catch fire. Taking on the identity of a Republican-era girl named Lin Wanxing, who looks remarkably like her, she is swept into the vortex of Japanese troops, spies, and patriots. A secret hidden in the underground chamber of a western-style mansion in the west of the city could shake the entire political landscape, and her very existence seems to have been bound to the word “protect” from the start.
Beneath Shen Mingcheng's mask of benevolence lurks the fangs of a traitor. Chuntao's scissors reflect the blood and tears of betrayal. Her older brother Lin Muan, whom she has never met, clings to his convictions with a pen as his weapon. And then there are the strangers who kindle torches in the darkness... As gunfire at Lugou Bridge shatters the night and Shanghai's isolated enclave trembles under bombardment, Lin Wanxing clutches half of a broken jade pendant and struggles between the future reflected in a bronze mirror and the reality before her. Should she return to the safety of her rented room in 2024, or stay in this blood-soaked land and, with eyes from the future, witness a spark of redemption spread like wildfire?
Jade may shatter, but conviction never dies. Her transmigration was never an accident, but a fated bond with the Republican era, an epic song of protection and growth amid a world at war.
