Everyone said Liu Wenyuan was blessed by fortune. He should have been a dashing young man, riding high with ambition, and passing the imperial examinations at twenty should have been his ticket to a brilliant future. But with his own hands, he turned that boundless fortune into a cage that trapped him.
He traded the “limitless glory” everyone saw for an unknown path of “living as though already dead.”
Li Tao knew that the tears he shed where no one could see were hotter than blood.
The cruelest thing in this world isn’t being separated by life and death. It’s watching, clear-eyed, as you take one step after another toward your own destruction.
They didn’t need to explain themselves, because from the very beginning, they had been accomplices.
Every cold glance, every time they drew their swords against each other, was meant to protect that one precarious glimmer of light behind them.
On this chessboard called “the realm” or “the family,” there are no good people and no bad people, only pieces.
“A Tao, if there is another life...”
“Wenyuan, there won’t be another life.”
In this life, they had long since exhausted every bit of luck they had in the flood of fate.
