Spring rain fell over Qinglan Ferry. Clutching the warm jade pendant, Shen Qingci stepped through the mist and onto the island.
For three years, she had searched high and low for the man named Xie Linyuan.
The old ferryman warned her again and again: On the night of the full moon, do not listen to the whales sing, and do not pick the moonflower. Otherwise, your soul will be lost on the lonely island, never to return.
But the whales’ song wound through her bones in the dead of night. In her dreams, a figure in white reached out with a smile, and a moonflower petal somehow fell from his sleeve. When they met again in the flower fields at the heart of the island, his face was just as she remembered. He invited her to Moonlit Bay, promising to take her to a fairyland free of pain and separation.
Then a fisherman's daughter tearfully exposed the truth: “Xie Linyuan died in the whale tide three years ago! That’s a whale spirit. It swallowed his soul and took his form!”
On the night of the full moon, a figure in white rode atop a whale’s back across the waves.
His palm was cool, but his eyes brimmed with the tenderness she knew so well. “Qingci, I was never an illusion.”
Was this reunion beyond life and death a thousand-year prophecy woven by a whale spirit, or a wish he had hidden in the depths of the sea, never speaking it aloud, but holding onto it until death?
In a secret realm of mountains and seas, a tender deception about love and redemption
