Farmer Prince

Li Shuqing only recognized three things in his life: a hoe, rice and the face of his creditor. On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, when he was renovating the collapsed stove in his ancestral house, a diamond mirror covered with patina suddenly rolled out from the gap in the blue bricks. When his fingertips brushed against the scratches on the back of the mirror, the patina peeled off, and the mirror suddenly reflected a woman in a red wedding dress - she wore a locust hairpin and a bone ring on the knuckles of her left hand. The arc of the falling teardrops made Li Shuqing's heart throb inexplicably, as if those tears had hit his heart through a hundred years. There was a thunderstorm that night, and the bronze mirror glowed with a strange green light in the lightning. When Li Shuqing opened his eyes again, the coarse linen clothes on his body had turned into a woven gold python robe, and the rainwater on the glazed tiles of the Nine Layers Palace was like blood. What was even more shocking was that Su, the "demon concubine who brought disaster to the country" who had been executed long ago according to historical records, was smiling at him with the same eyebrows and eyes as the paper figurine his mother had cut to ward off evil spirits. When her fingertips brushed across his palm, the burning tingling sensation was exactly the same as the illusion in the day mirror, and what she blurted out was the first sentence of the "Calamity Curse" passed down by the Li family. When the courtiers discovered that the prince was suddenly proficient in farming and cured the plague with earth locust control, seven more portraits quietly appeared in the secret pavilion of the East Palace: six barefoot "princes" in civilian clothes holding six "concubines" as pale as paper figures. The blank space of each painting was inscribed "On the twenty-third day of the Sophora lunar month, the soul returns to the mirror." Concubine Su always burned incense to the dead locust trees when she was a child, and Li Shuqing gradually discovered that her actions that were considered crazy...