On the eve of her coming-of-age ceremony, Princess Zhao Ning of the Great Jing Dynasty accidentally falls into the water. When she wakes, she has become an “Illuminator of the Mortal Realm,” appointed by the Underworld. In her left hand, she holds the “Soul-Guiding Lamp,” which reveals people’s obsessions; in her right, the “Memory-Locking Slip,” which can seal away regrets. At midnight on the fifteenth of every month, she must fulfill the uncompleted wishes of the “obsessed spirits” wandering the mortal world, helping them pass on.
At first, she thinks it’s a joke played by the heavens and only wants to be rid of her duty as soon as possible. But with each spirit she guides, she catches glimpses of the many faces of the human heart: a general who died defending his country without ever meeting his infant son; a maid who died in her young mistress’s place without receiving a single word of thanks; a scholar who died after falling out with his beloved over a misunderstanding, never having said, “I forgive you”...
As she guides more spirits, Zhao Ning discovers that her fall into the water was no accident, and is closely tied to the truth behind her mother’s “illness and death” ten years ago. Stranger still, after each spirit has passed on, the Soul-Guiding Lamp shows a fragmentary image of her mother, as though guiding her toward a long-buried secret. When the final soul lamp is lit, she finally sees that the obsession keeping her mother’s soul trapped is connected to her. Her calling as an Illuminator, from the very beginning, has been a journey of mutual salvation.
