On the night of the bombing in Chongqing, newspaper translator Shen Zhiwei woke up from the collapsed air-raid shelter with a baby girl of unknown origin in his arms and a dying woman in cheongsam lying next to her. Before she died, the woman handed her half of the bloody account, leaving only one sentence: "Song's house has a green lantern and three sealed messages. One person will die."
Three years ago, Shen Zhiwei's father, Shen Huaiyu, was accused of being a corrupt person and died at the Shanghai dock; three years later, she discovered that her father may have never died, and behind that old case, there were wartime relief, drug transshipment, orphan lists, wealthy families' secret boxes, and a shocking old debt that spanned Shanghai, Chongqing, and Hong Kong.
The baby girl A Zhao is no ordinary orphan. She is the "Twelve White Plum Blossoms" and the key to unlocking the twelfth dowry box. Thirty-seven children, thirty-seven dowry boxes. What is hidden in the box is not gold and silver jewelry, but real accounts that can shut up half the mountain city. Some people swallow medicine in the name of saving the country, some transfer children in the name of charity, some use dead people to sign for living medicine, and some people guard a green lantern in the fog, waiting for the return of the Shen family's daughter.
Shen Zhiwei originally only wanted to clear his father's wrongdoing, but he saw more names erased in the bloody accounts: the wounded soldiers on the front line who did not receive medicine, the children who were numbered in the orphanage, and the ordinary people in the air-raid shelter who did not survive until dawn. She finally understood that the Shen family's grievances could be cleared slowly, but Shanhe's debt could not get worse.
So, she picked up the child, picked up the account book, and walked from the air-raid shelter to the door of Song's house, from the foggy Chongqing to the undercurrent of Xiangjiang. She didn't marry into a wealthy family or seek power. She only used a pen, an abacus, and half a bloody account to hand over the old accounts hidden behind the high wall to Shanhe one by one.
