The water at Zhuohua Pavilion was cold. Huayueyue had spent ten years kneeling beside a wooden tub, washing flower roots. Everyone told her that women’s spiritual roots were filthy by nature, fit only for the hardest labor. She believed them.
Until a drop of blood brought a withered flower back to life, and an unconscious hum coaxed silver light to bloom throughout the room. The elders cast her out, but as she fled, she touched the roots of an ancient tree. Memories from three hundred years ago came crashing back: she was the reincarnation of the first Tree-Speaking Empress, and she had once sealed herself away with her own hands.
The truth was far crueler than the lie. Back then, she had sealed the “Seed of Destruction” inside the ancient tree and bound it tightly to women’s awakening power. Awakening meant disaster: whenever a woman drew near the tree, deadly blue sap would gush forth. She had made herself reincarnate and forget, generation after generation, so women in the future would believe they were “unworthy” and stay away from the ancient tree. For three hundred years, she had oppressed her own kind.
But the awakening had already begun. Huayueyue stood on the altar, golden light in her palm igniting an answering resonance in her sisters, while blue poison spread beneath their feet.
The elder asked her, “Have you made up your mind?” Would she continue sealing everyone away, or sacrifice herself?
She chose a third path: grafting the three-hundred-year curse into her own soul, using her flesh and blood as a vessel to bear its deadly poison alone.
Zhuohua Pavilion transformed from a place where women were forced to wash flower roots into a school that taught girls “how to bloom.” The palms once judged “filthy” shone with light again.
This time, she would seal away no one. Not even herself.
She had once been a slave kneeling in the water, and she had once been an empress standing atop a tree. Three hundred years later, she would turn the ruins into a garden.
