The snow falls harder and harder. Feng Lin slowly walks past each coffin, his fingertips brushing the cold lids as if touching the faces of nine people who were once alive.
Coffin One: A young general with an arrow scar between his brows, still clutching the jade pendant she gave him as he died.
Coffin Two: A refined chancellor, holding the white jade hairpin she gave him on her coming-of-age ceremony. Black blood stains its tip.
Coffin Three: A bewitching demon lord, a smile frozen at the corner of his mouth, with half a pastry she had casually thrown away tucked against his chest.
Coffin Four: A cool and aloof immortal lord, who condensed his life's cultivation into a protective scale before dying and set it into her armor.
Coffin Five: A prince of a foreign tribe, with the faded red cord she braided wrapped around his wrist.
Coffin Six: A dashing master of the qin, buried with his broken-string Jiaowei zither, the character “Feng” carved into its body.
Coffin Seven: A young emperor, clutching the edict deposing the empress that he never managed to deliver.
Coffin Eight: A mysterious assassin, covered in wounds yet shielding her portrait against his heart.
Coffin Nine...
Feng Lin stops before this coffin and stands motionless for a long time.
“I split my soul and reincarnated nine times, appearing beside her in a different identity each time,” he says, gazing at the slender figure in the snow, his eyes alight with three hundred years of obsession and madness. “All so that in every life, she would fall in love with me.”
“And the person in the ninth coffin...”
“Is the real me,” he says softly. “The me she killed with her own hands three hundred years ago.”
