Blood on Silver: A Forbidden Marriage Pact for a Miao Girl

Mist shrouds the village of Qingfeng on Moon Mountain all year round. Silver bells on the stilt houses sing ancient songs in the wind, but their music cannot drown out the taboo passed down through the village for generations. A Yao is the only Miao girl in the village with snow-white skin. Treated as an outsider since childhood, she finds warmth and shelter only in her grandmother's silversmith's forge and the jingling silver ornaments. Among the Miao, “no silver, no finery.” Forged through thirty-six steps, silver ornaments are a girl's dowry and protection from ancestral spirits, but they are also the shackles of fate A Yao cannot escape. When she turns sixteen, her grandmother suddenly presents the ancestral “Soul-Locking Silver” and announces that A Yao will marry the Gu King deep in Moon Mountain. Legend says the Gu King is a demon who feeds on blood and essence, but the village elder claims he is the guardian who saved the village from a plague a hundred years ago, and that only a marriage to a white-skinned Miao girl can ensure the villagers' safety. Confined for three days, A Yao discovers an ancient hidden message in a secret groove in a silver ornament. At night, she encounters a mysterious shadow and mournful Lusheng music, while the silver bangle on her wrist turns icy cold one moment and burns hot the next. The rhododendron silver hairpin left by her mother conceals an unsolved mystery; her grandmother's hesitant silences hint at something she cannot bring herself to say, and the Gu King's true face remains elusive. What secrets of the tribe lie behind this seemingly inevitable forbidden marriage? When will the blood-weeping silver ornaments' prophecy come true? Covered in silver and carrying her ancestors' secrets, A Yao sets out for Black Bamboo Valley. She must fight her predetermined fate and uncover the truth behind the Gu King and his thousand-year entanglement with the Miao frontier, seeking her own way to survive between taboo and redemption.