The Bone-Illuminating Mirror: A Twin’s Fate
In the mirror, blossoms face one another, their reflections meeting. Two sisters stake their lives for each other, while a husband and wife go from suspicion to standing side by side.
In the Great Yu dynasty, twin daughters of the prime minister were born on the same day. Three months after older sister Wen Zhao married into the Eastern Palace, she “died suddenly.” Invoking the old “Mirror Rite,” the court ordered younger sister Wen Jing to enter the palace in her place. Unconvinced that her sister could have died without a trace, Wen Jing willingly donned the wedding dress and stepped into the Eastern Palace, a place that devoured those within it. Crown Prince Xiao Che was gloomy and paranoid, the most likely “wife-killer” in the realm. Empress Shen wore a smile to hide her blade, and for twenty years had hunted twin girls in the name of the “Mirror Rite.” Following the secret messages her sister left behind, Wen Jing investigated one clue after another: from a hidden letter beneath a plum tree to a bloodstained garment in the laundry bureau; from the mystery of an empty coffin to the piles of bones at the orphanage. Layer by layer, she uncovered a shocking deception that had endured for a century. When Xiao Che placed a knife in her hand and said, “I knew all along that you weren’t her,” they both realized that Wen Zhao, her sister, had been the crown prince’s final hidden piece on the palace chessboard. At last, during the Longevity Festival, they tore down the man-eating Imperial Ancestral Temple from its very foundations.
