In the fifteenth year of the Tianbao era of the Tang dynasty, during the mutiny at Mawei Slope, Yang Yuhuan escaped by faking her death and survived by sheer luck. She destroyed her legendary beauty and assumed the name Yang Xue, carrying the former imperial consort’s deepest secrets and pain as she drifted to Luoyang, the eastern capital.
In Luoyang, she struggled to survive among the common people, quietly making a place for herself among embroidery workshops, music houses, and merchants with the extraordinary skills in fragrance blending she had honed in the palace. Yet the empire’s collapse and the shadows of power never let her go. The Retired Emperor Li Longji never gave up his frenzied search, vowing to seek her “to the ends of heaven and earth” until the day he died. His obsession drew in forces from every side: the new emperor Li Heng’s suspicions, attacks by powerful ministers, a mysterious masked figure who exploited and imprisoned her, the former eunuch Gao Lishi’s covert investigations, and the revenge of the great aristocratic clans. Together, they formed a vast web that dragged her again and again into deadly peril.
In exile and captivity, she met Liu Mingyuan, a talented scholar who harbored ideals, and was also forced to navigate the political game of Princess Li Shiyiniang. After enduring the hardships of ordinary life, imprisonment, tangled affections, and secret battles at court, she finally faced the new emperor in the Zichen Hall. In exchange for being confined forever to the “Snow Garden” and having the name “Yang Yuhuan” erased, she secured a complete severance from her past identity.
Meanwhile, the princess revealed Li Longji’s years of anguished searching after Mawei Slope and his profound, unwavering remorse right up to his final moments. After learning the truth, Yang Xue used the skills she had spent her life mastering to create “Returning Soul Incense.” Amid its curling smoke, she said her final farewell to a love that had crossed the boundary between life and death. Though she never gained freedom in the worldly sense, in the depths of despair she was reborn as “Xuanji,” transforming from a favored consort dependent on others into a woman who relied on her own skills and will to protect her inner peace.
