In the third year of Daxia Yong'an, I was the only one left in the Shen family. An imperial edict pointed me to the regent Xie Wuwang. Everyone said that Shen Qianxue, the orphan girl of the Shen family, would not survive more than three months after entering the palace of the God of Death.
In my last life, I drank the medicine that Xie Wuwang brought me, and a few months later I was sent to the enemy camp in Northern Qin. When I died, there was no one to collect the body. He lived half a year longer than me, and ended up with a glass of poisoned wine - we were blind for a lifetime.
When I opened my eyes again, I went back to the third day after the wedding. The bowl of medicine was still steaming, and Xie Wuwang was about to turn it over with his wrist. I picked up the sweet-scented osmanthus cake at hand and smashed it over. The concoction was poured all over his body, and broken porcelain pieces fell to the floor. I expected him to be furious, but he just looked at me and slowly tightened his knuckles on his cuffs. I knew at that moment that he was back too.
He said: "If you had been so clear-headed in your previous life, you wouldn't have been led by someone's nose for half your life." I said, "If you hadn't been blind in your previous life, you wouldn't have been deceived and paved the way for others."
This game has been played for thirty years. Murong Zhao was a chess piece who was lured into a dream and raised, Lin Qingyuan was a lackey who held the whole family's lives in check, and King Rui hid himself for thirty years, living as a "white crane". And we have "awareness" and "qi-watching skills", each of us keeps a trump card that we are unwilling to hand over, and every time the blade comes down, we invariably move half an inch towards the other side.
In this life, it will be us who play chess.
