In the autumn of the seventeenth year of the Dayin era of peace, all 312 members of the Shen family were slaughtered at the execution ground. A stone proclaiming them traitors who had colluded with the enemy was driven into the earth of Chang'an, and no one dared speak up for them again.
Shen Weishu, once a favored consort, was stripped of her title and thrown into the Yong Alley. She fell from phoenix crowns and embroidered robes into a moldy pile of straw. Iron chains shackled her ankles, the Empress Dowager's people crushed her fingers, and half a year in darkness reduced her to little more than a skeleton.
Everyone thought she would die in that cell.
Everyone thought the young emperor, Xiao Wuwang, was a docile pawn in Empress Dowager Chu's hand: he had ascended the throne at fourteen, was dutiful to his mother, gentle and respectful, and never defied her.
No one saw how calmly he stopped the death sentence's white silk from being delivered to the Yong Alley. No one saw him sitting in a broken chair with a missing leg, watching her silently bite down on her sleeve as she set her own bones, while something in his eyes cracked. And no one knew that three days before the Shen family fell, Shen Weishu's father had knelt before him and entrusted his daughter's life to an emperor younger than she was. “I can't hold them back. But Weishu is innocent.”
This is the story of an emperor who spends three years enduring in silence, maneuvering across the imperial city like a chessboard, and loving her with a bleeding devotion no one can see, all to atone for 312 lives.
It is also the story of a woman whose bones were crushed, who grips the truth with broken fingers, wears distrust as armor, and climbs inch by inch out of the abyss.
