Reunited by Half a Jade, Peace Returns to the Realm

Also known as: A Life-Saving Favor, Repayed with Ten Years of a War God's Mad Waiting

“I once thought home was a place I could never return to.”

“Until you knelt in the snowstorm and said to me, ”

“Your Highness, I have come to take you home.”

As Princess Shen Anning of the Southern Dynasty set out on the road to marry into a foreign kingdom, she hid a poisoned dagger in her sleeve.

She would rather shatter like jade than suffer humiliation in the tent of the tyrannical Khan of the Northern Di.

In a desperate snowstorm, Yelü Hong, the Northern Di’s God of War, descended like a deity.

He rescued her from a pack of wolves, but the moment he saw the half-piece of jade in her arms, he fell to his knees with a crash

The jade fit perfectly with the pendant around his neck.

Ten years ago, on a snowy night in the Cold Palace, a little slave on the verge of freezing to death had tremblingly accepted the other half of that warmth.

“Little mute,” she said, gently brushing the frost from his face. “You’ve grown so tall.”

From then on, the enemy kingdom’s God of War became her sharpest blade.

He protected her amid the flashes of swords in the Northern Di royal court, while she carefully navigated the suspicions and schemes of the tyrant and his favored consort.

When the two pieces of jade were joined, they revealed more than a childhood kindness. They also illuminated a secret powerful enough to overturn the world

Neither of them knew they were living inside a thirty-year conspiracy woven by the Shadow Pavilion.

This transnational organization made its living selling wars, and had long since infiltrated both governments so thoroughly they were riddled with holes.

The palace coup back then, her marriage alliance now, even every step of Yelü Hong’s rise from slave to God of War: someone had been pulling the strings from the shadows.

And the salvation that began on a snowy night ten years ago would finally write an answer about “peace returning to all under Heaven” across this shattered land.