Clouds Over Spring Mountain

During the Yonghe era of the Great Sheng dynasty, Shen Jinping, the legitimate daughter of the Marquis of Jing'an, is the most troublesome cloud in all of the capital.

She has a cool, aloof exterior, but inside she sees things more clearly than anyone. Prince Xing Zhu Huan has pursued her relentlessly for a year, yet she can barely be bothered to look his way, even though he is the late emperor's legitimate grandson and the current emperor's cousin, with a peach-blossom face that has charmed every young lady in the capital. Zhu Huan refuses to take no for an answer. The more she ignores him, the more persistent he becomes, climbing walls to deliver flowers and drunkenly smashing down doors. He has shamelessness in his very bones.

That is, until Lu Qingya, a young swordsman of the Diancang Sect, enters the capital on his master's orders to deliver a letter.

The young man carries an old sword on his back and wears a well-worn Taoist robe. Standing beside the bench at the marquis's residence gatehouse, his back is as straight as a stalk of green bamboo. His gaze toward Shen Jinping is impossibly pure, yet when he isn't looking at her, he sometimes sighs in the dead of night.

One is like fire, burning so fiercely that there is nowhere to hide.

The other is like water, rising past your knees before you even notice.

Shen Jinping thinks she can sit forever in her embroidered tower, treating both hearts like crabapple blossoms outside her window: lovely to look at, but not to pick.

But she has forgotten: clouds do not decide their own course.

They drift wherever the wind blows.

As for where they will finally come to rest?

No rush. The play has only just begun.