Shen Yuluo, the youngest cultural relic restorer at the Palace Museum, had never been afraid of anything.
That is, until one late night, when she was restoring a Western Zhou bronze cauldron recovered from Sakura Country and it suddenly began to glow. An ancient voice boomed inside her mind: “Nine jade pendants, nine strands of national destiny. The bloodline of your Shen family is the only key. Three thousand years ago, the Nine Cauldrons shattered into nine jade pendants, which suppressed the dragon veins of the Nine Provinces. Now the pendants are scattered across nine different eras. If they aren’t gathered, the destiny of the Dragon Kingdom will sink into darkness forever.”
Before the voice had even finished, a tremendous force dragged her into a time vortex.
When she opened her eyes again, she had become the newborn third young lady of the Liang dynasty’s prime minister’s household, with a Azure Dragon Pendant in her mouth and a vermilion birthmark between her brows. Her birth mother died in childbirth, the Imperial Preceptor wanted her dead, and the cold-faced general to whom she was betrothed treated her like a pawn. And she was only three months old, unable to walk or talk.
The good news was that the Azure Dragon Pendant gave her the power to “befriend all things.”
Now she could talk to anything: teapots could report wrongdoing, bronze mirrors could serve as surveillance cameras, and an eight-hundred-year-old well remembered every word anyone had ever said. Every object in the courtyard became one of her informants, and every relic in the capital became her weapon.
The bad news was that to survive, return home, and break the curse that had made the Shen family short-lived for generations, she had to gather nine pendants scattered across different eras in just twelve years. From the Liang imperial palace to the tomb of the Northern Abyss King, from the shipwreck of Jianzhen’s voyage east to the camel caravans of the Silk Road, from the moment the ancient Nine Cauldrons were forged to the dark hour when the Yuan dynasty’s national destiny was divided, every journey through time cost her years of life, and behind every pendant lay the blood and tears of an era.
