Strange Tales of Tang: A Women's Perspective

The daughter of Shen Cong'an, former Minister of Works, she watched her entire family be exiled over the theft of the Tongtian Tower blueprints. Her father was falsely accused by a confidant of Princess Taiping and executed in the middle of a busy street. Rescued at the age of five by A Luo Han, a master craftsman from the Western Regions, she learned the Art of Wooden Constructs and Mechanism Deduction. At sixteen, under the alias Ling Niang, she opened the Ingenious Crafts Pavilion in Chang'an's ghost market. A secret chamber inside the shop holds half of the Tongtian Tower Mechanism Blueprint left behind by her father. Her fingertips are permanently calloused from years of polishing mechanism parts.

Cold as frost on the outside and sparing with words, she silently offers Cherry a hand warmer when she gets scared. While investigating cases, she is intensely focused, able to lie on the ground studying traces of mechanisms for two hours without moving. She instinctively keeps her distance from the powerful: her gaze is sharp as a blade when facing Princess Taiping, yet she quietly leaves manuals on self-defense mechanisms for suffering commoners. Slightly obsessive about cleanliness, she always keeps her tool kit perfectly organized.

On the surface, she seeks to clear her father's name and absolve her family of its false charges. At the next level, she aims to unmask the culprit who framed her father and stop them from using mechanism arts to endanger the imperial court. At the deepest level, she seeks the truth behind her father's dying words, “Protect the foundations of the Tang,” and hopes to redefine the value of mechanism arts: not as a tool for seizing power, but as a means of protecting the people.