In the late spring of the twelfth year of the Tianjia era, Huanhuan, granddaughter of a reclusive Grand Tutor, rescues a beggar on the verge of death in a peach grove. She doesn't know that he is Helian Lie, Crown Prince of the Rakshasa Kingdom. A year later, on her way to the capital for her wedding, Huanhuan learns that the entire Zhou family, her future husband's family, has been executed. She, too, is kidnapped and taken to the Rakshasa Kingdom. In the name of "repaying her kindness," Helian Lie keeps her imprisoned by his side. He confines her, forces her to take medicine, and threatens her family, using every wrong method imaginable to try to keep the woman who once saved his life.
Huanhuan endures her pregnancy in silence, then escapes with her daughter on a snowy night in the twelfth lunar month. Five years later, Helian Lie, now a man who has lost both his kingdom and his family, finds them in the snow. He asks the question he has kept in his heart: "That night in the twelfth lunar month, when you told me to drink less, did you mean it?" She says yes, and he smiles before turning to face his death, leaving behind only a scroll of silk on which he has written the truth of his heart.
Twenty years later, Ji Hen, an orphan of the Zhou family who has changed his name and identity, asks to marry Zhaozhao, Helian Lie's daughter, in the Golden Throne Hall, intent on avenging the massacre of his family. He spends three years preparing his revenge, but the light that enters his life melts his resolve. When they lay everything bare in a long conversation beneath the moon, and that foolish girl says through her tears, "I can't bear to hate you," he finally understands that the past cannot be undone, but there can still be a future.
The tangled grudges of two generations and two marriages that take root in hatred yet end in deep love slowly unfold as the peach blossoms bloom and fall. A kindness shown over a single meal sparks thirty years of devotion; one remnant scroll lays bare a lifetime of true feelings. The story asks: When hatred and love are intertwined, how can a person let go? The answer lies in a line passed down through three generations: When you're old, you won't have the strength to hate anymore. But you don't have to wait until you're old. You can let go now.
