I’ll Wait for You in the Cycle of Reincarnation

I’ll Wait for You in the Cycle of Rebirth

At the Hankou docks in 1927, smoke from the war swept over the river mist. Shen Mo, a coroner, uncovered the truth amid the blood and corpses, never imagining that an encounter at the docks would set in motion a fateful entanglement spanning life and death and a hundred years.

He is the Shen family coroner, who lives by the motto “Tell the truth, and never betray your conscience.” With his autopsy needle, he exposes the crimes of the world and seeks justice for the dead. She is Shen Xiu, a woman of vengeance living in the city. Beneath her pale moon-white jacket and skirt lies an unyielding resolve to avenge her brother, and she uses poison-tipped silver needles to settle the grudges of a past life. In the blazing red light of the great Hankou fire, she is buried beneath the rubble, leaving behind only the silent shape of a few words on her lips, a mystery he cannot unravel for the rest of his life.

In 1938, Shen Mo dies beneath the rifle butt of a Japanese soldier. His soul falls into the River of Forgetfulness. To see her once more, he breaks into the underworld and refuses reincarnation, choosing instead to stand by the river with a bowl of Meng Po’s soup, watching the foam drift past as he waits for 269 years.

Across three cycles of rebirth, she sometimes passes him by, sometimes gives her heart to another, and sometimes recognizes him briefly before suddenly forgetting again. He remains where he is, wearing a long gown washed pale with age and clutching a shard of the Three Lives Stone. Bound by the rule that “she must be the first to recognize him when they reunite,” he endures the years and outlasts the cycles of reincarnation.

The cinnabar birthmark is a soul mark left by Meng Po; the recurring dreams are the soul’s longing. The winds of Hankou, the stones by the river, and the plaque from the Shen family’s coroner’s office all become imprints carved into their very bones. From the war-torn world of the Republic of China to the distant banks of the River of Forgetfulness in the underworld, from the sorrow of repeatedly missing one another to the moment their souls finally recognize each other, their love has nothing to do with appearances or time and place. It rests solely on two hearts and a promise to wait, crossing the boundary between life and death and defying the cycle of reincarnation.

“I’ll wait for you.”