Splendor at Her Temples

The year she was burned alive, someone stood outside the door calling out all night.

Shen Zhixu was reborn at sixteen and called off the disastrous marriage that had doomed her in her previous life. Everyone said she had gone mad. No one noticed the two blue-gray marks at the base of her fingernails. They were the sign that the Cold Palace had claimed her, appearing six months earlier this time.

Her mother had once been a life-bound artifact. She had crawled out of the Cold Palace and begged on her knees for three days and three nights to obtain a remedy, then fed it to her daughter herself, severing the weakness that would have left her child barren for life. “I’d rather you be lonely than let anyone have power over you,” her mother said.

Her father cleared away the traces she’d left in the south, then died on the road. Her grandmother had kept vigil in the Buddhist hall for over a decade, waiting for her to say the word. A man in a wheelchair waited for her at the entrance to an alley. He said he had died outside her door in their previous life. A perfumer handed her a pendant carved from a tree root with the character “Repay” on it. He said her mother had once owed him a name, and he was repaying her with a way forward.

The fragments of a path to survival, guarded by four clans for over a century. A “regret” hidden at the very bottom of the Gu family’s ancestral precepts, carved into stone. Gu Heng deleted a sentence: “Those within the gate may leave of their own accord. The gatekeeper must not stop them.”

In this life, Shen Zhixu found the wall her mother had chiseled through and obtained the key. Before pushing open that door, there was only one thing she wanted to know: Who was the person who had cried outside her door all night in her previous life?

[No hidden plotlines. Every mystery will be fully resolved in due course. A happy ending.]

[No hidden plotlines. Every mystery will be fully resolved in due course. A happy ending.]