Red Wedding Robes, Prison’s Chilling Decree

On a winter night in the twenty-third year of Yongchang, Gu Mingshu awoke from a cup of poisoned wine, reborn on the night of her wedding to Shen Yi, the Marquis of Yong’an. In her previous life, she was the marquis’s medicinal human tonic, cutting her wrist for three years to provide him with blood, until Liu Yiyi ended her life with poisoned wine. This time, she overturned the wedding wine and, claiming she had suddenly fallen gravely ill, fled the marquis’s residence that very night. She invoked the name of Wang Zhi, the Director of the Eastern Depot, to force Shen Yi to yield. After escaping the marquis’s residence, she met Shen Lan, a captain of the Night Guard. He took a blade for her and endured torture on her behalf. In the dungeon, all ten of his fingernails were torn out and he was branded thirty-seven times. Three of his ribs were broken, yet he never uttered a sound. He only said, “In this life, you’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to protect forever, my lady.” She brought down Prince Xiang and uncovered the late emperor’s secret edict, clearing the Shen family’s name. But then she discovered that Shen Yi was actually her elder brother. The poisoned wine, the schemes, the debts of her past life: she settled them all, one by one. Over the next six hundred years, the Shen family’s descendants put down deep roots in Jiangnan. An old plum tree grew from the Ming dynasty to the present day; a jade hairpin passed through more than twenty generations; an academy was burned down and rebuilt again and again amid the ravages of war. Each generation found its own way to protect those stories: some taught, some joined the army, some built ships, and some farmed the land. As long as the roots remain, they will never fall. Six hundred years later, Gu Mingshu, a descendant of the Gu family, returned from Beijing to Jiangnan. Standing beneath the old plum tree, she received the jade hairpin that had been passed down for more than twenty generations. She named her daughter Gu Nianmei, after the plum blossoms and the roots. This is a story of protection and return. From a terrifying night in the Marquis of Yong’an’s residence to the sound of students reading aloud in a Jiangnan town, six hundred years of storms, one old plum tree, and a bond that endures through every lifetime, never to be parted.