[Xianxia romance]+ [tragic love story]+ [reincarnation tragedy]+ [love across lifetimes]+ [forbidden love]
In the Ninth Heaven, Crown Prince Yun Chen’s heart is as still as a dry well. Then he meets Zhi Lan, a flower maid, and the spark of life in his eyes shatters a thousand years of loneliness.
They pledge their love beneath the flowers and stars, but their romance violates the laws of heaven because of the divide between immortals and mortals.
The Jade Emperor flies into a rage and personally places a curse upon them spanning forty-nine lifetimes: Yun Chen loses his immortal bones and is sealed inside a parrot’s body; Zhi Lan’s memories of her immortal life are erased, and she is cast down as a mortal woman.
In every lifetime, he must watch helplessly as she suffers and dies. In every lifetime, she feeds him with her blood and gives her life so he can live.
Forty-nine lifetimes, forty-nine trials. She is a performer in the cold palace, a blind embroiderer, an ugly girl in a ruined temple… In every life, she is as lowly as dust and as wretched as a blade of grass.
Yet before she dies in every lifetime, she smiles and tells the golden-crowned parrot, “Don’t be afraid. Stay alive.”
The moment she dies with a smile in the forty-ninth lifetime, the blood curse is fulfilled.
Yun Chen’s immortal body is restored, and the memories of all forty-nine lives come flooding back.
In a tea town in Jiangnan, she is now Wan Niang, a tea-picking girl who remembers nothing of her past lives.
He quietly watches over her as a mortal, until the heavenly soldiers arrive, until the divine lightning falls, until he puts his own flesh and blood between her and the strike. She breaks through the barrier and embraces him, drenched in blood. The memories of all forty-nine lives return to her at last. “Your Highness… my parrot…”
In the Hall of the Numinous Firmament, she stands before the gods and declares, “He waited for me for forty-nine lifetimes, and I died for him forty-nine times. After all that, am I worthy to stand by his side?”
The Old Lord of the Supreme Pole arrives astride a green ox. “When love runs deep enough, it can reach the Heavenly Dao.”
Above the Azure Sky, their love never wavers; below, in the Yellow Springs, they will never abandon each other for all eternity.
